Why We Don’t Get Along
Opening Words
There is no human being who does not carry
a treasure in the soul,
a moment of insight,
a memory of life,
a dream of excellence,
a call to worship.
Hymn
No. 360 “Here We Have Gathered”
from Singing the Living Tradition
Children’s Story
“Hosea Ballou: What Are You Thinking?”
By Denise D. Tracy, from “Living in the Wind”
Hosea’s father was a Baptist who believed that everyone was born with a stain of sin upon them. Even the tiniest babies had evil in their hearts and minds. Hosea was not sure what he believed. He wanted to believe as father did, but how could he be sure?
One day Hosea was leaning against a tree, thinking. His forehead was creased in thought. “What are you thinking?” asked his father. Hosea replied, “Suppose I could create a being which I knew would suffer forever. Should I create such a creature, and would it be good if I did?” Hosea waited for a reply. His father shook his head and did not respond. (Sometimes children surprise their parents with questions that they cannot answer.)
But Hosea thought a lot. He and his father talked about beliefs and ideas, and sometimes they argued, because their love was strong enough to allow for differences. Hosea had heard about Universal ism and it appealed to him. His father disagreed.
One day Hosea was sitting on a woodpile reading a book. His father asked him, ‘What book are you reading?”
“A Universalist book,” answered Hosea.
Later the father saw that Hosea had gone on to other things, leaving his Universalist book on the woodpile. Curious to see what this book was and wondering what his son was thinking, the father raised the volume and smiled. The book was none other than the Bible.
Hosea became a Universalist minister, and he and his father never agreed on theology. But their love was stronger than their differences. And they always tried to find out “What are you thinking?”
Reading
from All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
by Robert Fulghum, Villand Books, 1988
This is kind of personal. It may get a little syrupy, so watch out. It started as a note to my wife. And then I thought that since some of you might have husbands or wives and might feel the same way, I’d pass it along. I don’t own this story, anyway. Charles Boyer does. Remember Charles Boyer? Suave, dapper, handsome, graceful. Lover of the most famous and beautiful ladies of the silver screen. That was on camera and in the fan magazines. In real life it was different.
There was only one woman. For forty-four years. His wife, Patricia. Friends said it was a lifelong love affair. They were no less lovers and friends and companions after forty-four years than after the first year.
Then Patricia developed cancer of the liver. And though the doctors told Charles, he could not bear to tell her. And so he sat by her bedside to provide hope and cheer. Day and night for six months. He could not change the inevitable. Nobody could. And Patricia died in his arms. Two days later Charles Boyer was also dead. By his own hand. He said he did not want to live without her. He said, “Her love was life to me.”
This was no movie. As I said, it’s the real story – Charles Boyer’s story .
It’s not for me to pass judgment on how he handled his grief. But it is for me to say that I am touched and comforted in a strange way. Touched by the depth of love behind the apparent sham of Hollywood love life. Comforted to know that [two people] can love each other that much that long.
I don’t know how I would handle my grief in similar circumstances. I pray I shall never have to stand in his shoes. (Here comes the personal part – no apologies.) But there are moments when I look across the room – amid the daily ordinariness of life – and see the person I call my wife and friend and companion. And I understand why Charles Boyer did what he did. It really is possible to love someone that much. I know. I’m certain of it.
Sermon
by the Rev. Jane Rzepka
“Love is the spirit of this church, and service its law.
This is our great covenant:
To dwell together in peace,
To seek the truth in love,
And to help one another.”
Some of you who grew up in our religious tradition may have recited these words as children. The words sound wonderful – how comforting it is to know that a group of people, somewhere, believe in love and care and peace.
The affirmation so many churches have repeated is a comfort because we would so much like people to be loving and caring and peaceful. And we are not. We can covenant together to live in peace and love ’till we’re blue in the face, and no matter how much we try (and, indeed, we must try), – no matter how much we try, we will get furious on occasion, or we will feel terribly hurt, we will misunderstand or offend or forget or misjudge or disappoint, we will feel cranky or resentful, we’ll be too silent or talk too much, or stomp around and yell or sulk, and we will be acutely aware of the fact that our great covenant to dwell together in peace and love and help is more dream than reality.
I feel sure that ever since people became people, we’ve had difficulty getting along with one another. A lot of very smart folks have lived and died, and no one yet has figured out how to ensure that human relationships will run smoothly. Nonetheless, every few years, somebody develops a theory that is supposed to answer once and for all the questions, “Why can’t we get along?” I am always cynical about these pop psychological theories, as you probably know, mostly because they are so often presented with zeal as the “one true path,” and anyone who has a question or two is labeled as a defensive “denier,” I do have questions about every theory I’m going to mention this morning – it’s frustrating that there isn’t time in a sermon to critique these theories – I hope you will come to see me after the service when we can talk in more depth. But all my reservations notwithstanding, I still think that these artificial psychological overlays are useful for shaking up our molecules – for helping us view our everyday relationships with new eyes.
We are easing, or shall I say we’re being propelled into, the holiday season, Many of us will be interacting with our families and extended families and friends at a level of intensity reserved only for November and December, So I’ve chosen four psychological dynamics, all of which are newly recognized and popular – you’re probably familiar with them – and I’m going to blatantly over-simplify and present them to you, in hopes that they will remind us that we can think about our relationships in new ways.
The first is “triangulation.” Triangulation. Let’s say, for instance, that the holidays are coming up, Joan gets the annual phone call from her mother that asks, “What time will Steve be bringing you over for Christmas this year? You know, all year I look forward to having you for Christmas dinner – just count the days.” Joan says, “Gee, I don’t know, let me talk to Steve.” Joan feels tense, already. She says to Steve, “So Steve, are we going to my mother’s for Christmas again or what?” “I can’t stand it over there, you know that. They do Christmas wrong – they string gaudy colored lights all over, they invite every relative over – even little kids – they kid around, they sing loud songs, they say what they think, they hug, they have pasta with their turkey and later all those little Italian cookies. I can’t take it another year. I mean, whatever happened to Christmas morning in church, a quiet glass of egg nog, and Handel? Call your mother back and tell her we won’t be coming.” Joan’s. feeling a lot of stress by now!
This is triangulation. The relationships between Joan, Steve, and her mother form a triangle. In family systems theory, the family is the unit to be looked at, not the individual. So we are not to view the situation as “Joan with a problem,” but rather as three people who have difficulty relating to each other as a group. Nor are we to view the situation as a problem about Christmas. In family therapy, one looks at the dynamic, not the content. The problem is not a person or an event, but the emotional patterns and processes of interacting.
In this Joan-mother-and-Steve mess, Joan is the one feeling stressed, anxious, and upset, even though actually, she couldn’t care less what they do about Christmas. Mom’s doing fine, Steve’s doing fine. Of course they are, because instead of dealing directly with one another, they have turned to Joan, made a triangle, and they both talk to her! That’s what happens in these triangles, a third party comes in and takes on all the stress. You know what has to happen – Steve and Joan’s mother have to resolve this conflict directly. They have to “detriangle.”
I think family systems theory, the idea of triangulation in particular, alerts us to two common pitfalls in human relationships: first, when we are feeling upset, we must always ask ourselves whose problem the problem really is. Your co-worker is upset with your boss and tells you every detail, your daughter has a problem with a teacher, your housemate had a run-in with your neighbor, your golf buddies each complain to you about the other, your sister tells you about your brother – they all try to draw you in, or worse, you insert yourself into their problem. That’s triangulation, and each of us will want to excuse ourselves from that dynamic as quickly and as firmly as we can.
The other thing this triangle concept makes us ask ourselves is, “Am I treating my own problems directly, or am I inviting a friend, a spouse, a relative, or a co-worker into my problem? Am I creating a triangle?”
So. Joan steps out of the triangle, Steve calls her mother, her mother would be just as happy to have them over on New Year’s Day, and they all live happily ever after. That’s how detriangulation works.
Another conception, this time out of the psychoanalytic model, but strongly identified with feminist psychology and theology , is “connection.” Traditionally, therapists are trained to gauge a person’s ability to separate and individuate. A person has been thought to be healthy and mature when he or she is independent and autonomous. Twelve years ago, our denomination’s press, the Beacon Press, published Jean Baker Miller’s book, Toward a New Psychology of Women, which argued that many women were not especially interested in modeling themselves after the lone ranger. Healthy women, according to this theory, thrive not on autonomy, but on connection. Women experience strong relationships as empowering.
My husband plays the trumpet in Thursday night jam sessions. He was telling me how much fun it is for each of them to perform and try to improve. They don’t really know each other very well, but they each have a strong interest in musical excellence, and Chuck says the emphasis on improving motivates them each to strive for new heights. The conversation put me in mind of my grandmothers, who used to play the violin and piano with a group of women. I remember vividly stories of them glorying in the company of one another and their harmony. It was the playing together, and the tea and conversation after the music, that my grandmothers loved.
What has happened of late in the fields of psychology and theology is that the value of interconnectedness is being recognized. No longer would the psychotherapuetic community say that only the members of those jazz sessions are healthy and mature, whereas my grandmothers were just frittering away their time. Now we would view the attention paid to human connection as being just as important as individual achievement. Close, deep human relationship is now seen as essential to our well-being, and interdependence is no longer a sign of weakness. Any person who can empathize, listen well, express feelings fluently, and maintain a closeness is to be admired in this new world of psychology. A balance of independence and connection is the new model. A balance of independence and connection.
The third concept I’d like to mention this morning is the genogram. The genogram is the notion that patterns and problems and mythologies get passed down from one generation of a group or a family to the next. We inherit our notions of what’s normal, of “how we ought to do things.” I heard our minister in Wellesley Hills, John Nichols, use the Red Sox as an example: As soon as this last season officially opened, the Red Sox experienced a team slump. “Think for a minute about what a team slump means. It means that every one of the teams’ hitters stops hitting. Boggs doesn’t hit, Evans doesn’t hit. Greenwell doesn’t hit. Barrett doesn’t hit. Players who were doing quite well suddenly stop doing well.” “A. Bartlett Giamatti, former president of Yale and now commissioner of the National League put it this way, ‘The Sox have always had that kind of elegant melancholy… There’s an almost Calvinistic sense of guilt at success, that we must reenact the Garden of Eden again and again. There’s a sense that things will turn out poorly no matter how hard we work. Somehow the Sox fulfill the notion that we live in an imperfect world. It’s as though they’re here to provide us with more pain.”
The Red Sox had a team mythology of hopelessness that they passed on down the line. Families do this kind of thing too – for generations the pattern in the home might be stern, reserved, and achievement-oriented, or boisterous, emotional and hopeful. If you have ever lived with someone who grew up with a very different set of family expectations, you know the power it holds. Maybe a family develops a pattern of alcohol abuse and passes that on down. Or maybe it’s a “silent strong husband/hysterical wife” routine that gets passed along, or an equal partnership model, or a tradition of single parenting. We inherit a “family culture,” for better or for worse, that moves from generation to generation – we live amidst a web of historical family systems.
The Red Sox’s club owners fired the manager, promoted one of the coaches to manager, and the team won 19 out of the next 20 games. What happened? Family therapists would say that the dysfunctional system got disturbed. By getting a new manager, the whole structure changed, and the group pattern and mythology of hopelessness was broken.
In my family, the women have their first baby at about age 26. This is unspoken, and probably unconscious, but a reliable family pattern. In my family, when you get old, you get rid of your belongings and move yourself into a nursing home. In my family, even when you don’t have any money, you find a way to travel to unusual places. (I fully expect that my grandchildren will one day find themselves in Iceland or Tasmania and will wonder what drove them there.)
Family patterns can be easily broken, but only if they’re recognized. A nursing home may not be the best choice for me when I get older, but unless I work at it, I can’t imagine anything else. It may be that I really don’t enjoy crossing the Baltic, but I don’t even ask myself the question unless I stop and try to understand why I’m there in the first place. We must each ask ourselves what parts of our family system we would like to perpetuate, and which patterns we should end. That’s what the concept of genograms is for.
The last dynamic I might mention is co-dependence. This one is sweeping the nation. The concept of co-dependence arises out of the field of alcoholism – it was used to describe the spouse (or even a child) of an alcoholic who had coped by trying to take care of everything, to control everything, so that life wouldn’t fall apart, and of course as a side-effect, the alcoholic could continue to drink. The idea of co-dependence has expanded now to include anybody who, above all, tries to (1) please people to win approval, (2) take care of others in what turns out to be an attempt to control them, and (3) expect perfection from themselves.
Barbara Merritt, one of our ministers in Worcester, tells a story. “This summer,” she says, “my husband taught a friend how to skip rocks on the Bay of Fundy. After this co-dependent had, for the first time, successfully skipped a rock 7 times, she looked around, and in anguish discovered that no one had been watching. What she then said could be understood as the co-dependent’s creed. She cried, ‘No one saw my rock skipping (my success) so it doesn’t count!’
“Not only does it not count, co-dependents believe that nothing we do has any reality unless there is an audience, a reaction, and approval. In order to get that approval, we will do just about anything. We become ‘people-pleasers,’ we feel we don’t have it all together, so we put up a good front. We will say yes (when what we want to say is no). We will say we are fine (when in fact we are in enormous pain). We will sacrifice our own legitimate wants, needs and desires …”
There is a story in the Christian Scriptures (Luke 9:59-62) that I have never understood. “And Jesus said to a man, ‘Follow me.’ But the man said, ‘Lord, let me first go and bury my father.’
“But Jesus said to him, ‘Leave the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’
“Another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.’
“Jesus said to him, ‘No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
If we look at this episode from the point of view of best-selling pop psychology , Jesus is talking to a couple of co-dependents. He’s saying, “Don’t do what everybody else wants and expects you to do, do what you know in your own heart is most important! Follow your heart, not society’s expectations.”
It seems to me that the key to getting out of co-dependency (if you buy the concept in the first place), is recognizing that each of us, just by being living breathing human beings, is worthy. Almost all of us are competent, basically good, and deserving of love. We don’t have to please everybody. We don’t have to control anybody else’s life. We don’t have to be perfect. That’s what co-dependency is all about.
So that’s the 1988 answer to “why people don’t get along”: triangulation, a need for connection, dysfunctional genograms, and co- dependence. All four of these paradigms are well worth pondering. But if we, in the end, go back to more traditional models for trying to live gently with one another, our hearts and spirits will still be changed. If we believe, as Chris wrote in her meditation, that “each day is a new beginning,” and we try to “remember the peace of the morning,” our hearts and spirits will still be changed. If we only look across the room on an ordinary day and are startled by our love, our hearts and spirits will still be changed. If we covenant to “dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in love, and to help one another,” if we want simply to believe that “love is the spirit of this church,” our hearts and spirits will still be changed. So may it be with us. Amen.
Just a few references:
Triangles:
“Chronic Anxiety and Defining a Self,” The Atlantic, September
1988, p. 35.
Family Therapy Techniques, Salvador Minuchin, H. Charles
Fishman.
Connections:
Toward a New Psychology of Women, Jean Baker Miller
In A Different Voice, Carol Gilligan
Genograms:
Generation to Generation, Edwin Friedman
Intimate Partners, Maggie Scarf
Co- Dependence:
Co- Dependence, Anne Wilson Schaef
Co-Dependent No More, Melody Beattie
Meditation
by the Rev. Bruce Southworth, adapted from Hymns of the Spirit
We turn aside from an unquiet world, seeking rest for our spirits
and light for our thoughts.
We bring our wounds to be healed,
our hopes to be renewed, and
our better selves to be quickened.
From the world of many things and many doings,
We come to seek the unity of a constantly loving spirit.
We are divided within ourselves by many cares, by many pleasures,
by diverse and selfish aims.
The majesty of the world bewilders our minds;
Temptations and perplexities break us asunder;
Tragedies small and great tempt our faith.
Yet in all the universe, there is no wholly severed thing,
For all things are part and substance of the other .
Nor can anyone of us find alone a separate good, bound as we are
one to another .
We gather this hour, here, together, to restore the soul’s freshness
and vision.
We seek to leave behind the broken parts, the hurts, the pains, to find new strength that leads to a trusting spirit and a grateful heart.
With faith in one another,
With faith in the infinite possibilities for love,
With gratitude for all blessings known and unknown, remembered
and forgotten,
We give thanks for this amazing thing;
We live, we laugh, we cry , we love.
Amen
Hymn
No. 354 “We Laugh, We Cry”
from Singing the Living Tradition
Benediction
In the days ahead,
May you have:
Enough happiness to keep you sweet,
Enough trials to keep you strong,
Enough sorrow to keep you human
Enough hope to keep you happy,
Enough failure to keep you eager,
Enough friends to give you comfort,
Enough wealth to meet your needs,
Enough enthusiasm to look forward,
Enough faith to banish depression,
Enough determination to make each day
Better than yesterday.
Questions for Discussion
- The first psychological theory discussed in the sermon is triangulation. The example given is happily resolved. However, what
do you think would have happened to Joan if both her mother and
her husband had insisted on having their own way and resisted any
compromise? If you were in Joan’s position, what would you do? - In what aspect of your life is independence especially important
to you? In what aspect of your life is connection especially important to you? Does it seem as if the need for independence and the need for connection are well balanced in your life? - Jane Rzepka mentions several examples of family patterns that
persist across the generations. Are you aware of any such patterns
in your family? If so, which of these patterns would you like to
change? What would it take to change them? - Do you see co-dependence as being a destructive characteristic, or
does it seem to you that living up to the expectations of others is to
be valued? If you had been one of the people to whom Jesus spoke,
how would you have reacted to his telling you not to tend to your
father’s burial, or not to take leave of your family? Does your
response indicate your valuing of independence or connection? - As you reflect on the four psychological theories presented in this
sermon, which of them seems most useful to you in terms of
helping people get along? Is there an entirely different approach
that you would advocate?
- Our Religion - July 1, 2015
- Do you believe in God? - December 1, 2014
- The Glove in the Subway - May 1, 2014
