Sunday, September 20, 2009

The Anatomy of an Emotion

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector
St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas
September 20, 2009; 16 Pentecost; Proper 20, Year B
Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(James 3:13-4:3, 7-8) – Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.

Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.
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Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? (James 4:1)

In Gerald May's seminal study Will and Spirit one of his chapters explores the anatomy of an emotion. Where does the energy and content of an emotion come from? What is the nature of these "cravings that are at war within you"?

May tells about a nun who was mature enough in contemplative matters to be able to observe her own emotional processes all the way back to a place of origin. She was going on retreat, but her mind was "filled with busy-ness," she said. "I was depressed and angry about some of my relationships at work, and I was even more distressed by some sexual feelings which had begun to stir within me in relation to a man I had to work closely with." (Now, that might not fit your caricature of a nun, but monastics are just as human as the rest of us.) She said her prayer time had been distracted by "thoughts about work and images of this man." She had lost touch with "the quiet center" which was such a home for her. So she went on retreat.

Now listen to how she processed and observed her interior life, those cravings that were at war within her. She said during the beginning hours of her retreat, she experienced only turbulent, mental noise. But she sat with that long enough, until things began to quiet down.

As the bombardment of thoughts and images began to disappear, she noticed another layer of turbulence beneath them. This was emotional turbulence. Again, she didn't do anything with it. She just watched it.

She said, "Watching this (emotional turbulence) very quietly, I experienced the whole gamut of emotions coming through my mind one after another as if on parade. Sadness, anger, frustration, sexual desire, guilt, fear, hope, and now and then some peace, lightness, and humor. First I recognized all of these as feelings. ...They seemed to originate very deeply, and for a while I became fascinated with seeing how they came into being." (Now that fascinates me. How do our emotions come into being?)

She said that as she "moved more intimately toward that point of origin" for her feelings, "it seemed as if there was a level at which a kind of diffuse dynamic 'percolation' was taking place." What she described was like a boiling cauldron of stuff that percolated, bubbled up with spurts of activity, like the firing of energy from the bottom of a cooking pot.

Then, she said, this diffuse, percolating energy became "attached to certain mental concepts or words or memories or images. When this attachment took place," she said, "I could immediately identify that 'spurt' or 'spark' as a feeling; an emotion. And with just a little more discrimination I could label the feeling as anger or sadness or whatever." She had observed the origin of an emotion.

What she described is similar to the experience of contemplatives from many traditions, East and West. They tell us that emotions begin as energy deep within us – diffuse energy without content. Then we attach to that energy some content – mental concepts or words or memories or images. At that moment, the energy sparks into a simple emotion – anger, fear, sadness, whatever. If we just watch the emotion, not adding anything to it, not reacting or doing anything about it, it just goes off – like a hot bubble coming up from the bottom of a deep pot of sauce, which comes to the top and pops. A burst of emotional energy bubbles up from within us, spends its energy, and leaves. The nun described how it was possible for her to watch all of this deep emotional activity with a present awareness, "totally unruffled, watching it all with complete serenity. There is something deeply reassuring about that," she said. (1)

But most of the time we don't just watch our emotions, do we? Most of the time we add energy to them. A lot of energy.

Here's the anatomy of an emotion. First, simple, undifferentiated energy percolates out of our depths. A simple emotion attaches to the energy, say anger. Then we add to that simple emotion of anger, the image of a person who has angered us. He tried to embarrass me, we think. He hurt me, we remember. Then we begin to add energy to the simple emotion. We begin to play our old emotional tapes of all of the times that person embarrassed or hurt us. The neurological pathways in our memory know this stuff. We've built neurological pathways as wide as interstate highways for these afflictive memories and emotions. We've thought about that person regularly, with passion; we've relived all of the times he's embarrassed or hurt us, over and over. There's an internal four-lane highway that has practiced saving and transporting all of that emotional content, which barrels down the acceleration lane, and dumps into the emotional system, pouring a truckload of energy into what had been originally a simple emotion. Old tapes of the former hurts begin to play. We remember in technicolor and full-volume stereo, and all of the old emotions of the past churn more and more chemicals into our system. Before long, we've created what my grandmother called a hissy-fit. Our cravings are at war within us. Instead of a little soup bubble of emotion, we've got a massive fireworks display.

Yet, even at that, there is still a part of us that can watch the fireworks. Feelings, emotions, compulsions, memories, passions explode within us. We can watch that, serenely unruffled, from another place in our psyche. "Wow! My chemicals sure are putting on a good fireworks show today!"

Our emotions are important. They are the background music that set the tone for our life.

The other day Kaye Bernard told the Servant Leadership II class on Compassion about a video called Atmosphere. It begins with movie images of busy New York streets. Crowds are hustling back and forth, jostling and hurrying – pedestrians, cabs and cars. Crowds emerge from the subway tunnels, steam from under the sidewalks. The music soundtrack underneath the images is driving urban rap music. After watching for a few minutes, it is over, and the convener asks what you felt as you watched. Rushed anxiety and tension. Steeled energy necessary for fighting your way through the pushes and bumps of the driven crowd; even a touch of angry defensiveness.

Then the video is shown again, but now with a different soundtrack. The background music is Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, one of the most lush, beautiful, poignant pieces of classical music. The experience is strikingly different. Now the crowd movement looks like a dance, each person moving in concert with the whole, interconnected in the vibrant creativity of life's energy. Beauty, wonder, transcendence. Same video. Different music. Completely different experience.

For most of us, the emotional background music that interprets our life was composed in childhood. If we were loved and life was generally good, the underlying emotional music tends to play in an upbeat, hopeful key. But if we were threatened, hurt, unloved, that music is more likely to be in a minor key, filled with dread and foreboding.

Part of what religion offers is a new composition – a new soundtrack. It is the music of a love song. It sings, God loves me. Life is good. All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. It is the hopeful music that emerges out of all of the darkness and tragedy of Christ's crucifixion and death. Out of darkness, comes life. The Holy Trinity sings, "Let there be light!" And we are invited into the dance. With feeling. So we dance. And feel.

At some level, feelings just are. They percolate deep within us. Emotions happen. There is a place from which we can observe our emotions, like watching fireworks go off within. Chemical fireworks of energy transformed into feelings. From a place of inner observation we can watch, unruffled and serene, as powerful emotions explode within us. Wow! My chemicals are putting on quite a show.

We don't have to add to the show. We don't have to start the old tapes, replay the emotional memories, add fuel to the fire. Instead of releasing our reservoir of indignation, we can change the soundtrack that provides the emotional background to our experience. We can embrace the music of the heavens.

The music of the universe is a love song. Music that sings, "You are safe. You are loved. You are the beloved, infinite child of God. Look! God is moving in all things everywhere. God is bringing everything to newness. Resurrection is what God does: Life out of death; light out of darkness. Relax. Breathe. Watch. Live. Life is good. All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. You are alive. Be free. Listen to the music. Dance. Enjoy. Love it all. It's all love."

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(1) Gerald May, Will and Spirit. p. 175f

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The Mission of St. Paul's Episcopal Church is to explore and celebrate
God's infinite grace, acceptance and love.

For information about St. Paul's Episcopal Church and it's life and mission, please contact us at
P.O. Box 1190, Fayetteville, AR 72702, or call 479/442-7373
More sermons are posted on our web site: www.stpaulsfay.org
Visit our web partners at www.explorefaith.org

Saturday, September 05, 2009

The "Other" is also the Same

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector
St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas
September 6, 2009; 14 Pentecost; Proper 18, Year B
Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Mark 7:24-37) – Jesus set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." But she answered him, "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Then he said to her, "For saying that, you may go-- the demon has left your daughter." So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, "Ephphatha," that is, "Be opened." And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. They were astounded beyond measure, saying, "He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak."
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You all remember The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a great American novel, set in 1839. Huck Finn is a boy who has run away from an abusive father and from the civilizing efforts of the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson. While camping out, Huck meets Miss Watson's slave, Jim. Jim is running away too, from Miss Watson's intention to sell him into the harsh servitude downriver. Huck believes what he has been taught, that it is wrong for Jim to escape. Jim is the property of Miss Watson.

Author Mark Twain uses the journey of this unlikely pair as a foil for his own satire social commentary and satire about the foolishness and wickedness of human beings.

When their raft is swamped by a passing steamship, Huck finds refuge with an established family and becomes friends with a boy his age, Buck Grangerford. The Grangerfords are in a thirty-year blood feud with the Shepherdsons, both good, church-going clans who bring their guns to church as they listen to the preacher's sermon on brotherly love. When Buck's sister elopes with one of the Grangerfords, there is a gunfight, and all of the Shepherdson males are killed. Huck narrowly escapes to rejoin Jim on the raft.

In one of their adventures, a grifter who poses as the lost descendant of Louis XVI and the rightful heir to the throne of France, "captures" Jim and turns him in, copping his interest in the reward money. Huck is outraged. But his conscience tells him that Jim is Miss Watson's property, and for Huck to continue to help Jim escape, would be tantamount to stealing. By now, though, Jim has become a real person, a friend to Huck. Huck lets friendship overcome his moral teaching and resolves to help Jim's escape, willing to face what he believes will be eternal consequences for a thief, saying to himself, "All right then, I'll go to hell."

In a complicated twist of plot, Tom Sawyer arrives and assists in the escape, but gets shot in the leg. Rather than making his way to freedom, Jim stops to help Tom, and for the first time in his life, makes a demand of a white person. He tells Huck to go get a doctor. Huck explains this complete reversal of his world-view the only way he can, "I knowed he was white on the inside... so it was all right now." Eventually, everything does turn out all right.

There are so many stories – novels, plays, movies, operas, T.V. shows, even animations – about one person discovering a common human bond with someone they believed to be "other" – different, unrelated, even sometimes the enemy. In those stories, something happens to allow them to recognize that the other is also the same. Out of that recognition comes relationship, reconciliation, even love.

From Mark's Gospel today, we heard one of those stories, about a Gentile woman, a Syrophoenician, who begged Jesus to cast the demon out of her daughter. "He said to her, 'Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.'" In Jesus' neighborhood, Gentiles were called "dogs." He had heard that language from childhood. It was Biblical language for those who were unclean. Outsiders. Those "Others." We all grow up with some form of cultural conditioning. It is part of our humanity, and the church has always insisted that Jesus was fully human.

"Let the children be fed first," he told the Syrophoenecian woman. Jesus understood his calling to be for the renewal of his people Israel. Maybe that is why he did not want to be known as he journeyed into the region of Tyre. He traveled anonymously; this wasn't his territory. No, he was sent to the lost sheep of Israel.

But this woman crossed his boundary, and would not take "no" for an answer. "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." The church says that Jesus is fully human; the church also says that Jesus is fully divine. This woman's answer is divine. It speaks of love. Love for her child. It is a word of humble humanity, and God's ears are always tuned to the needs of humble humanity. Instantly Jesus sheds his human cultural conditioning, and sees this woman as a fellow child of God. Instantly, he heals her daughter.

From that moment onward in Mark's Gospel, Jesus changed his mission. He treated the Gentiles with the same compassion as his own people. From that moment onward, Jesus performed the same miracles of healing and feeding among the Gentiles as he did among the Jews. We read today that he went out of his way, past the Jewish region west of Galilee, into the Decapolis on the far side of the lake and on the other side of the River Jordan. The Decapolis was a Greek region, populated mostly by non-Jewish Hellenists. That is where Jesus touched and healed a man who was deaf and mute. In the next story in Mark's Gospel, Jesus feeds a multitude of 4,000 in this same location. It was the same miracle of feeding that Mark reported two chapters earlier about Jesus' feeding of the multitudes in his home of Israel.

We who are Christian cheapen our faith and betray Jesus' generous spirit when we treat those from other faiths and nations any differently than we treat our own kin. We are to love our neighbor as ourselves, and the answer to the question, "Who is my neighbor?" is the story of the Good Samaritan. A Samaritan was an outsider, a heretic, an enemy. That's another one of those stories about recognizing a relationship between those who were thought to be "Other."

I think our relationship to the "Other" is universally expansive.

We have a group in our church called the Friends of Animals. They celebrate the relationship we share with others in the animal kingdom. They promote an ancient tradition. The biblical kosher laws witness to the life that is in our brothers the animals, and how that life belongs to God and deserves human respect. So many of Jesus' illustrations are observations from the animal world – the birds of the air, the sheep and the goats, the net full of fish – all told by one born among the animals in the manger. The animals are our neighbors.

We have another group in our church called the Gaia Guild. They celebrate our relationship with the whole natural order. They also promote an ancient tradition. The earth is God's and all that is in it. (Ps. 24:10; 1 Cor. 10:26) God speaks, and the stars and the planets, the earth and sky and sea, and everything that is comes into being. The earth is alive, and God's entrusts her stewardship to us. We are God's gardeners, called to love and care for the health of the planet and all of its life. The biblical story begins and ends in a garden. All earthly life is our neighbor.

In our lifetime the ancient story of other-connectedness has even transcended human boundaries. You remember the movie E.T. A little boy befriends a stranded Extra-Terrestrial and saves him from the army of scientists. The little boy, Elliott, and alien E.T. find themselves bonded by a love that glows in their hearts.

Scientists tell us that the atoms and molecules that have bound together to create the earth and all that is in it, including us, human beings, come from the remains of great collisions and explosions of stars billions of years ago. We are literally stardust.

As God breathes our life into being, we are in an intimate relationship with the entire cosmos. What God has joined together, we should not separate. All humanity is our neighbor: Jew and Gentile, slave and free, Grangerford and Shepherdson, rich and poor, and every other division of race, religion, nationality, tribe, teaching, power, wealth, or condition of life – we are all one within God's eternal embrace. The "Other" is also the same.

We are even in an intimate relationship with the animate and the inanimate worlds, from the microscopic plankton that feeds the whales to the mysterious invisible dark matter that balances the universe. We are all in this together, and God calls us to honor respectfully all that God has made.

The old stories tell us to open our eyes and our hearts so that we can recognize our selves in the "Other." Those stories are simply narrative versions of Jesus' summary of all wisdom: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength, and love your neighbor as your self." The "Other" is our neighbor. The boundary of "neighbor" is universal.

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The Mission of St. Paul's Episcopal Church is to explore and celebrate
God's infinite grace, acceptance and love.

For information about St. Paul's Episcopal Church and it's life and mission, please contact us at
P.O. Box 1190, Fayetteville, AR 72702, or call 479/442-7373
More sermons are posted on our web site: www.stpaulsfay.org
Also, see the sermon archive on this blogsite
Visit our web partners at www.explorefaith.org