Connecting
with the World
In the past few
weeks we’ve studied about the necessity of nurturing connections in our lives. First,
we looked at the foundational connection we each need with God. Then, we built
on that with the importance of our connections to others. Last week, we
explored the need for a strong connection to our church. This week, we’ll build
on that church connection as we let our light shine outside the church, making
connections that affect every aspect of the world around us.
Matthew 5:14-16
14 “You
are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden.15 Neither
do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its
stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16 In
the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your
good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.
How are we to bring
light to the world?
Published on Apr 13, 2015
David Brooks is a political and cultural Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. In "The Road to Character," Brooks argues we have made a wrong turn when it comes to personal morality and that our society is becoming more shallow and self-centered. But he believes some of the world’s great leaders and thinkers show us how to get back on track. Brooks joins “CBS This Morning” to weigh in on some of the 2016 presidential candidates and his book.
See what you think...
David Brooks - "The Road to Character"
Click Here to Watch
This article below was written by Brooks, and is a news feed phenomena on several social media sites. He makes some interesting analogies with résumé and eulogy virtues. But he speaks to this "inner light" that we are called to let shine!
The Moral Bucket List
By David Brooks
ABOUT once a
month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These people can be in
any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They make you feel
funny and valued. You often catch them looking after other people and as they
do so their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude. They
are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They are not
thinking about themselves at all.
When I meet
such a person it brightens my whole day. But I confess I often have a sadder
thought: It occurs to me that I’ve achieved a decent level of career success,
but I have not achieved that. I have not achieved that generosity of spirit, or
that depth of character.
A few years ago
I realized that I wanted to be a bit more like those people. I realized that if
I wanted to do that I was going to have to work harder to save my own soul. I
was going to have to have the sort of moral adventures that produce that kind
of goodness. I was going to have to be better at balancing my life.
It occurred to
me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy
virtues. The résumé virtues are the
skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are
talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or
faithful. Were you capable of deep love?
We all know
that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our
culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and
strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate
that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external
career than on how to build inner character.
But if you live
for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored
and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a
self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You
figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like
you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from
the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a
humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between
you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.
So a few years
ago I set out to discover how those deeply good people got that way. I didn’t
know if I could follow their road to character (I’m a pundit, more or less paid
to appear smarter and better than I really am). But I at least wanted to know
what the road looked like.
I came to the
conclusion that wonderful people are made, not born — that the people I admired
had achieved an unfakeable inner virtue, built slowly from specific moral and
spiritual accomplishments.
If we wanted to
be gimmicky, we could say these accomplishments amounted to a moral bucket
list, the experiences one should have on the way toward the richest possible
inner life. Here, quickly, are some of them:
I. THE HUMILITY
SHIFT
We live in the
culture of the Big Me. The meritocracy wants you to promote yourself. Social
media wants you to broadcast a highlight reel of your life. Your parents and
teachers were always telling you how wonderful you were.
But all the
people I’ve ever deeply admired are profoundly honest about their own
weaknesses. They have identified their core sin, whether it is selfishness, the
desperate need for approval, cowardice, hardheartedness or whatever. They have
traced how that core sin leads to the behavior that makes them feel ashamed.
They have achieved a profound humility, which has best been defined as an
intense self-awareness from a position of other-centeredness.
II. SELF-DEFEAT
External success is achieved through
competition with others. But character is built during the confrontation with
your own weakness. Dwight Eisenhower, for example, realized early on that his
core sin was his temper. He developed a moderate, cheerful exterior because he
knew he needed to project optimism and confidence to lead. He did silly things
to tame his anger. He took the names of the people he hated, wrote them down on
slips of paper and tore them up and threw them in the garbage. Over a lifetime
of self-confrontation, he developed a mature temperament. He made himself strong
in his weakest places.
III. THE
DEPENDENCY LEAP
Many
people give away the book “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” as a graduation gift.
This book suggests that life is an autonomous journey. We master certain skills
and experience adventures and certain challenges on our way to individual
success. This individualist worldview suggests that character is this little
iron figure of willpower inside. But people on the road to character understand
that no person can achieve self-mastery on his or her own. Individual will, reason
and compassion are not strong enough to consistently defeat selfishness, pride
and self-deception. We all need redemptive assistance from outside.
People on this
road see life as a process of commitment making. Character is defined by how
deeply rooted you are. Have you developed deep connections that hold you up in
times of challenge and push you toward the good? In the realm of the intellect,
a person of character has achieved a settled philosophy about fundamental
things. In the realm of emotion, she is embedded in a web of unconditional
loves. In the realm of action, she is committed to tasks that can’t be
completed in a single lifetime.
IV. ENERGIZING
LOVE
Dorothy Day led a
disorganized life when she was young: drinking, carousing, a suicide attempt or
two, following her desires, unable to find direction. But the birth of her
daughter changed her. She wrote of that birth, “If I had written the greatest
book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or
carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator
than I did when they placed my child in my arms.”
That kind of
love decenters the self. It reminds you that your true riches are in another.
Most of all, this love electrifies. It puts you in a state of need and makes it
delightful to serve what you love. Day’s love for her daughter spilled outward
and upward. As she wrote, “No human creature could receive or contain so vast a
flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this
came the need to worship, to adore.”
She made
unshakable commitments in all directions. She became a Catholic, started a
radical newspaper, opened settlement houses for the poor and lived among the
poor, embracing shared poverty as a way to build community, to not only do
good, but be good. This gift of love overcame, sometimes, the natural
self-centeredness all of us feel.
V. THE CALL
WITHIN THE CALL
We all go
into professions for many reasons: money, status, security. But some people
have experiences that turn a career into a calling. These experiences quiet the
self. All that matters is living up to the standard of excellence inherent in
their craft.
Frances Perkins
was a young woman who was an activist for progressive causes at the start of
the 20th century. She was polite and a bit genteel. But one day she stumbled
across the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, and watched dozens of garment
workers hurl themselves to their deaths rather than be burned alive. That
experience shamed her moral sense and purified her ambition. It was her call
within a call.
After that, she
turned herself into an instrument for the cause of workers’ rights. She was
willing to work with anybody, compromise with anybody, push through hesitation.
She even changed her appearance so she could become a more effective instrument
for the movement. She became the first woman in a United States cabinet, under
Franklin D. Roosevelt, and emerged as one of the great civic figures of the
20th century.
VI. THE
CONSCIENCE LEAP
In most
lives there’s a moment when people strip away all the branding and status
symbols, all the prestige that goes with having gone to a certain school or
been born into a certain family. They leap out beyond the utilitarian logic and
crash through the barriers of their fears.
The novelist
George Eliot (her real name was Mary Ann Evans) was a mess as a young woman,
emotionally needy, falling for every man she met and being rejected. Finally,
in her mid-30s she met a guy named George Lewes. Lewes was estranged from his
wife, but legally he was married. If Eliot went with Lewes she would be labeled
an adulterer by society. She’d lose her friends, be cut off by her family. It
took her a week to decide, but she went with Lewes. “Light and easily broken
ties are what I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically.
Women who are satisfied with such ties do not act as I have done,” she wrote.
She chose well.
Her character stabilized. Her capacity for empathetic understanding expanded.
She lived in a state of steady, devoted love with Lewes, the kind of second
love that comes after a person is older, scarred a bit and enmeshed in
responsibilities. He served her and helped her become one of the greatest
novelists of any age. Together they turned neediness into constancy.
Commencement speakers are always telling young people to follow their passions. Be true to yourself. This is a vision of life that begins with self and ends with self. But people on the road to inner light do not find their vocations by asking, what do I want from life? They ask, what is life asking of me? How can I match my intrinsic talent with one of the world’s deep needs?
Their lives
often follow a pattern of defeat, recognition, redemption. They have moments of
pain and suffering. But they turn those moments into occasions of radical
self-understanding — by keeping a journal or making art. As Paul Tillich put
it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the
person you thought you were.
The people on
this road see the moments of suffering as pieces of a larger narrative. They
are not really living for happiness, as it is conventionally defined. They see
life as a moral drama and feel fulfilled only when they are enmeshed in a
struggle on behalf of some ideal.
This is a
philosophy for stumblers. The stumbler scuffs through life, a little off
balance. But the stumbler faces her imperfect nature with unvarnished honesty,
with the opposite of squeamishness. Recognizing her limitations, the stumbler
at least has a serious foe to overcome and transcend. The stumbler has an
outstretched arm, ready to receive and offer assistance. Her friends are there
for deep conversation, comfort and advice.
External
ambitions are never satisfied because there’s always something more to achieve.
But the stumblers occasionally experience moments of joy. There’s joy in freely
chosen obedience to organizations, ideas and people. There’s joy in mutual
stumbling. There’s an aesthetic joy we feel when we see morally good action,
when we run across someone who is quiet and humble and good, when we see that
however old we are, there’s lots to do ahead.
The stumbler
doesn’t build her life by being better than others, but by being better than
she used to be. Unexpectedly, there are transcendent moments of deep tranquility.
For most of their lives their inner and outer ambitions are strong and in
balance. But eventually, at moments of rare joy, career ambitions pause, the
ego rests, the stumbler looks out at a picnic or dinner or a valley and is
overwhelmed by a feeling of limitless gratitude, and an acceptance of the fact
that life has treated her much better than she deserves.
Those are the
people we want to be.
.................................................................
Well, does David Brooks have the answer? Is the moral bucket list what we need to find and let our inner light shine to the world?
One respondent writer, Jill Duffield writes, "All of this is
well and good. I read the article and found it well written and worthy of
attention. But what really struck me was this: David Brooks didn’t come up with
any of this. Jesus did! Humility, recognition of our weakness and sin,
dependency on others, energizing love, call, knowing what’s ultimate… all of
that is biblical. So, why was this so revelatory to so many? Why was my mother,
a ruling elder – who like many, many (did I say many?) boomers has not so much left
the church but stopped going – so charged by this concept that human beings are
not the sum of their worldly accomplishments?"
Luke 12 sprang
to mind with the rich fool and his barns followed by the lilies of the field
and the need to have our treasure in heaven. What about first will be last and
last will be first? That pivotal foot washing scene and the command to love one
another? The bit about the Pharisee and the tax collector and which one went
home justified? I seem to recall a few passages about call… you know, like:
Feed my sheep and Go therefore and you will be my witnesses. Need a moral
bucket list? I think I know where you can find it.
Why isn’t Jesus
all over my news feed and in my inbox and being exclaimed about by my mother?
(No offense, Mom.) Why isn’t the Good News going viral?
Well, as my
ruling elder friend in the communications field liked to say at session
meetings, “You have a PR problem!” Indeed, I think the church and, dare I say,
Christians have a PR problem. You know it, you’ve heard it. You’ve even seen
the statistics to prove it. You can likely recite the perceptions with me: the
church is hypocritical, judgmental, irrelevant, obsessed with infighting.
Meanwhile, David Brooks and a New York Times article are spreading like kudzu.
We have a PR
problem. Even worse, I think we’ve internalized our bad press and have started
to believe that the perceptions are true. Certainly some of them are some of
the time. Perhaps we should start there and confess it. Yes, we are
hypocritical. (There’s that self-defeat category, that recognition of sin.
Geez, if nothing else we ought to have a corner on that market!) Yes, we
are judgmental, but we acknowledge that we are called to judge not lest we be
judged. Yes, we are out of touch, but we are seeking to discern the new thing
God is doing, badly sometimes, but sincerely. Yes, we too often fight with each
other to the exclusion of looking up and out and around at the mission to which
God has called us. (Called, we are called, people!)
Yes, but… that’s
not all. We have Good News to share. Powerful, transformative,
better-than-a-moral-bucket-list news to share and show and live. You don’t have
to “work harder on saving your own soul” as David Brooks suggests. Jesus has
saved it already, so you are free to live without that burden, in joy and
gratitude and generosity in response.
I am so tired
of the church, of congregations, of pastors, playing small, preaching small,
proclaiming small, and living small. I want euphoric, “ah-ha” calls about the
gospel, not about the New York Times. The world is hungry for abundant life and
we know where it can be found. We need to fix our PR problem by risking
everything for the sake of the gospel so that the Good News will go viral.
Grace and
peace,
Jill
...........................................................
What do you think?
"A brave act of kindness can change a life."
Click Here to Watch
Video: This Thai ad is a
stirring, cinematic spot in which the daughter of a charity worker visits a
Thai woman who helped her father when he was a prisoner of war in World War II.
Connecting
with the World
In the past few
weeks we’ve studied about the necessity of nurturing connections in our lives. First,
we looked at the foundational connection we each need with God. Then, we built
on that with the importance of our connections to others. Last week, we
explored the need for a strong connection to our church. This week, we’ll build
on that church connection as we let our light shine outside the church, making
connections that affect every aspect of the world around us.
Matthew 5:14-16
14 “You
are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden.15 Neither
do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its
stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16 In
the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your
good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.
Jesus describes what we are in this passage - the light of the world, not the light of the church. That means we have to get beyond the church walls and take the light out to where it is dark.
How are we to bring light to the world?
Use Your Influence
- My influence and visibility is a result of who lives in me, not because of what I do. It is God who puts me in a place of influence and visibility.
- I am merely a steward of my influence and visibility, so it is important I get out of the way and let Jesus work through me.
- Only God can measure the significance of my influence and visibility. I may influence one person who will then influence the world. My focus is on following Jesus where ever He leads.
Hope to see you this Sunday!
In His Love,
David & Susan
