I’m going to begin by reading a poem that I wrote in April of 1977. Fraud. It’s a fraud. Ivy does not set out new leaves, repair winter’s devastation, frost burns, storm mold, with blemishless growth. It’s a trick of elves or witches, green paint applied at midnight, because if I could believe in spring leaves, I could hold on to love renewing itself, sending out shoots and glossy buds at the ends of festering branches. Yesterday afternoon was achingly glorious. Glorious because it was one of those Atlanta dogwood in extravagant bloom days that rivals spring anywhere.
Aching because in the midst of so much beauty, so much promise of new shoots and new leaves and new life, was the reality of senseless violence and the fear of a society spun out of control. The words of T.S. Eliot from his poem, The Wasteland, haunted me as we walked the pastoral path near the lake in Piedmont Park.
He wrote, April is the cruelest month, breeding, lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring, dull roots with spring rain. Whether T.S. Eliot researched the relative cruelty of the month of April, I do not know, but George Henson, a blogger from Southern Methodist University, did following the massacre April 2007 on the Virginia Tech campus when a disturbed student shot and killed 32 people and then killed himself in the largest mass shooting in modern American history.
April, it turns out, Henson wrote, truly has been the cruelest month for this nation. The beginning of the Civil War, he wrote, was in April, a war that killed over 600,000 Americans.
Four years and two days later, April 14, 1865, President Lincoln was assassinated in Ford’s Theater. On April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a motel balcony. On April 19, 1995, the federal building in Oklahoma City was bombed, killing 168 men, women, and children. On April 20, 1999, two teenagers slaughtered 12 students and one teacher and wounded 24 others at Columbine High School in a Denver suburb. And then Friday afternoon, Giverly Wong, a 42-year-old Vietnamese immigrant, drove up to the American Civic Association building in Binghamton, New York, barricaded the back door with a borrowed car, took out two pistols and a satchel of ammunition, and fired on a group of fellow immigrants who were taking citizenship classes. As of yesterday, there were 14 dead, including the gunmen, and four critically wounded. The shooter was described by neighbors as an angry loner who loved his guns.
And now two members of our own congregation, Godfrey and Marianne Oakley, have suffered their own unfathomably cruelest April when news of the violent deaths of their son Robert and his ex-wife Kaitlin in Boulder, Colorado, reached them this past Wednesday evening, April 1. The couple leaves behind two young sons, ages three and six.
What touches one or more of us touches us all, and I know that I have been deeply shocked and saddened by this tragedy. As one writer observed on another such occasion, there are moments that are so horrifying that the heart stops, the throat catches, the mind numbs, and there is nothing, nothing that you can say. But we can come together in community as we are this morning.
We can listen to each other. We can hold this family in our hearts, and if you choose, sign one of the cards that will be available at a table outside in the atrium following the service. There also are pastoral carolé ministers here today, to help offer comfort and support. The police reports are still sketchy, but the facts that we know are these.
There was a frantic call home from Robert to his father, who then called the Boulder police, who had responded by then to a 911 call, during which no one ever spoke. When they arrived at the house, a man and a woman were found dead from gunfire. A 9mm pistol and a 12-gauge shotgun were at the scene. It has been described as a domestic-related crime.
There had been a contentious divorce last year. Almost immediately, there was an outpouring of sympathy for the children and the other family members, from members of this congregation, from neighbors who spoke to the press in Colorado, and who even emailed Reverend David to convey their condolences to the Oakleys, and then to others posting on what are called the community comment pages of both the local Daily Camera paper in Boulder and the Denver Post.
Some of the posts have been from people who knew one or the other, or both of them. Others, in fact most of them, have been complete strangers. The earliest responses echoed those from this congregation, posts like, How tragic for the children. My thoughts and my prayers are with them today. Or, very sad. Peace to these children.
And I wish them a happy home. As the days have gone on on the newspaper websites, the expressed thoughts of sympathy, of compassion, of hopes for healing have been overshadowed at times by other thoughts, sometimes helpful, and sometimes mean-spirited speculations about what happened and why. What was he thinking, they ask.
What was she thinking? The thought that even at the point of ultimate violence, thoughts matter, that intention precedes our actions, that somehow this is the place to start. This indeed was the assumption that guided the spiritual teachings of those men and women who in the Christian tradition are called the early desert fathers and mothers of the third to fifth centuries, who observed and who believed that thoughts and the awareness of thoughts were the key to insight into the body and the mind and the soul. Their wisdom and their well-developed spiritual disciplines have been preserved and brought to contemporary life by prominent theologians, such as the much-published Trappist monk and Buddhist practitioner Thomas Merton, by the poet and novelist Kathleen Norris, and one of her mentors, Mary Margaret Funk, a formal Benedictine nun whose book Thought Matters provides much of the context for my exploration today. It seemed fitting in this week before Easter to look at these very early Christian teachings as a way of bridging the Indian folk tale that we heard so beautifully expressed this morning, one of the moral tales we are using to teach our children essential Unitarian Universalist principles and then this month’s discussion of the book The Happiness Hypothesis,
Finding Modern Truth and Ancient Wisdom by moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, this chapter on the Felicity of Virtue. Now first, a little background about the desert tradition of early Christianity. These Ammas and Abbas, mothers and fathers, lived either as hermits, in fact some of them lived up in trees, or in small communities in Egypt in what has been called the Golden Era in essential Christian life, lasting only around 200 years, from 250 to about 450 common era. The original hermits and monks fled the chaos and the persecution of the Roman Empire during what has been called the Crisis of the Third Century, a period of civil war and invasions and plagues and economic depression and runaway inflation.
Does that sound familiar to us today? There were many cruelest months for people living through these times, perhaps especially the Christians, who reportedly were often scapegoated during these periods of unrest. They found relative refuge in refugee communities far enough away from population centers to be safe from constant imperial scrutiny.
Even after Constantine made Christianity legal in the entire empire, including Egypt, a trickle of individuals remained living in these marginal areas, attracted by the solitude of these places, where they could follow what they saw as the self-discipline exemplified by Jesus’ fasting in the desert for 40 days and then his cousin John the Baptist, himself a desert hermit. In the teachings of Jesus, they found messages about another more significant form of abstinence than not eating, than fasting, and that was identifying and then abstaining from what the desert monks came to call the Eight Bad Thoughts, the Eight Bad Thoughts, of which anger, pride, and what they called acedia or spiritual apathy were considered the most harmful.
Kathleen Norris points to the seventh chapter of the Gospel of Mark as one of the lens through which we can trace the beliefs and practices of these Christians. It is not what goes into a person that defiles, as he taught in one of his parables. It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is within, he wrote and said, from the human heart that evil intentions come.
As Kathleen Norris tells us, we contain a myriad of thoughts that rise out of our hearts like blips on a radar screen. It is those idle thoughts, she tells us, like, gee, I hate that guy. Or, if she wasn’t married, I could have her. Or even, I’ve been fantasizing all morning about that cake, I’m going to eat the whole thing now.
These seemingly little devils can annihilate what is good in us, what is godly, and do real damage in the world. The desert monks required of themselves was more than just not acting on these clusters of bad thoughts about food, about sex, about things, about dejection and anger and apathy and vain glory and pride, or just compensating for them.
They grappled, they spent years trying to denounce these completely. For spiritual teachers like John Kasian, a four-century Christian teacher, he invited his readers to seek God by knowing and then stabilizing their thoughts. In order to follow a spiritual path, the serious seeker must undergo training to redirect the mind.
The main obstacle to salvation or righteousness for these desert fathers and mothers living into the image of God was not sin. That wasn’t what they were concerned about. Sin for them, you see, was the end stage of wrong thoughts and desires and passions. We are told by these teachers that thoughts rise in the mind, that they come in sequence, a train of thoughts, that they come and they go.
Thoughts that are not responded to pass quickly. It is the thoughts that are thought about that become desires. Desires that are thought about become passions. Bad thoughts become bad desires. Bad passions or habits of actions are what they called sins. The passions are acted upon us when we consent. Then the passions move from passive to active engagement.
First thoughts beget second thoughts which become intentions. Attention to our thoughts reveal our intentions. Right deeds must be accompanied by right reason. Discernment is the ability to do the right deed with the right intention or motivation. Seeking silence and stillness, going back to the thought, noticing the thought, redirecting the thought, relinquishing the thought can control our mind. And out of this seemingly complex process, which is actually simpler than what it sounds like, the desert monks believed comes a pure heart. And a pure heart is simply a clear mind without distorting or distracting thoughts. This active discipline of controlling the mind of seeking a pure heart was the crucial step that preceded both cultivating virtue, as we are invited to do in the happiness hypothesis, and living a truly content with life. In other words, you couldn’t just go into acting out good things. And you couldn’t just go into a contemptible state. The first thing you had to do was stop your mind from thinking thoughts that gets in the way of living a pure life. Not surprisingly, while this process of discernment, of seeking a clear mind, applied to all thoughts, anger was considered the most devastating of these thoughts because we are taught it leads so quickly and absolutely to total blindness. As Mary Margaret Funk writes, If I am angry, my heart shifts from a discerning heart to a fuming heart. I can only think of my hurts and how I can get even with a perpetrator, and then I lose the capacity to think, to sort, to contemplate, to hold a dialogue with another for the purpose of gaining insight. It is anger above all thought that must be recognized and must be eliminated. As our children will be learning this morning from the words of Gandhi, after hearing the story in which a boy holds the fate of a bird in his hands, they will be talking about the importance of making choices that bring peace and do not harm others. They will be encouraged to talk about the ways they each use to calm down and keep their tempers in control, how they are beginning the spiritual practice of stilling the mind, first the thought we will teach them, and then the choice of action. For the early Christians I have been talking about, their spiritual practice included focusing on both the negative form of the active religious life, controlling the influence of these eight classic bad thoughts, and the positive form, which was to practice the virtues. The Desert Mothers and Fathers grounded their virtues, the aspects of character that let us know that we are living good lives, in intentional interior work, cultivating discernment, finding times and places of silence and solitude, the work we are beginning and encouraging in our children, and which continues throughout our lives. In the Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haight, who practices what he calls positive psychology, has taken from studies of world wisdom traditions, from holy books of major religions to the Boy Scout oath, trustworthy, loyal, helpful, and friendly, virtues that were common across all of the lists, although no specific virtue made every list, six broad virtues, or families of virtues, appeared on nearly all the lists, and they were wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. The value in these is not that they are prescriptive, but that they serve as an organizing framework for more specific strengths of character, different ways of displaying and practicing and cultivating the virtues. Two psychologists have taken the list of six virtues and suggested that there are 24 principal character strengths, and I do refer you to the book. In fact, you can take a test, so don’t have to take notes. You can actually take a test and figure out which ones apply to you, each leading to one of the higher level virtues.
In the spirit of positive psychology, we can work on our strengths in these, not our weaknesses. So in other words, you don’t have to be good at all 24 categories in all six virtues. Got it? For example, using myself, under the virtue of wisdom, I found curiosity. I’m curious. Under courage, I found integrity. Under humanity, I found kindness. Under justice, leadership. And under temperance, and that was really the hardest one for me, I found prudence. Under transcendence, and this won’t surprise you, I found humor. Virtue may not always be its own reward, but the alternative is anomie, which is normlessness, a society in which there are no clear rules, norms, or standards of values. Jonathan Haidt believes that in a normlessness society, people can think and people can do as they please, but without any clear standards or respected social institutions to enforce these standards, it is harder for people to find things that they really want to do. This breeds feelings of rootlessness and anxiety and leads, he says, to an increase in amoral and antisocial behavior. He tells us that modern psychological research indicates that one of the best predictors of the health of an American neighborhood is the degree to which adults respond to the misdeeds of other people’s children. When there are community standards, values, virtues, and they are enforced, there’s constraint and cooperation. And when everyone minds his or her own business and looks the other way, there is freedom and isolation.
Just as identifying and controlling our thoughts towards the goal of a pure heart sounds like very hard work, virtue sounds like hard work, we are told, and often it is. But focusing on our character strengths is often intrinsically rewarding because it engages us fully, and it allows us to lose self-consciousness and immerse ourselves in what we are doing.
The contemporary word for it, nothing the desert amas and abas would say, is that it is being in the flow. Simply put, the world needs people who are willing to take personal responsibility for their thoughts and for their values and the deeds that come from these. Let this be the generation and start here. May it be so.