My Business -

For three months I have been asking friends and acquaintances how familiar they were with the greatest blueprint for a happy life that was ever drawn. Of course they had all heard of this famous code of human relations. But not one of 70 persons questioned---most of them church goers---could quote a line of it.

The document they failed to remember was the Sermon on the Mount---the Magna Carta of Christian faith. Three months ago, I should have assumed that most persons knew something of what Jesus said in his most notable utterance. Now I am sure comparitively few people have any clear memory of either the words or their meaning.

Yet, as recorded in St. Matthew, Chapters V to VII, the Sermon teaches not only the deepest spiritual truthes but also practical techniques by which anyone may find health, success and tranquility; peace of mind and peace of soul.

Now these are keys most sought after. The best-seller books have largely to do with man and his frustrations. Increasing armies of nuerotic, discouraged people attest a spreading emptiness in modern life.

Yet the anxieties of average people are generally out of proportion to their problems. Most of our difficulties are fairly simple: the job, the people we work with, the children; our need to be loved, to feel important, to be a part of things.

Why, then, are so many people leading lives of what Thoreau called 'quiet desparation'? May it not be because they have wandered from some great foundation of faith, which should be to us as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a wearly land?

The remedy for the desperate life, the prescription for heartache and all the thousand shocks that flesh is heir to, lies ready at hand, simple and sure, in one great neglected utterancemmmthe Sermon's unsurpassed Golden Rule for human relations:

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.

The Sermon is studded throughout with sound advice on personal conduct in everyday affairs. The human tendency to criticize others with no blame to ourselves, is thus denounced:

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

Not only must we refrain from condemning; we must forgive. For many of us that is the hardest teaching of all. But physicians and psychologiests today agree that it is also, by far, the most necessary:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.

This is me, Cathy, interupting T. E. Murphy here. We'll continue with his essay in a minute but I want to take exception to a bit of what is being said here.

Murphy states that the human tendancy is to blame others for bad things and not ourselves. That is certainly true of some people, often with disastrous results to them and those around them. But there are also people who pin blame on themselves without considering outside influences and that can bring about disastrous results as well---depression, anxiety, self-destructive behavior to name a few.

To address the self-blamers, some people turn the saying on its head, "Treat yourself as you would treat others." But that doesn't make sense to use as advice to other-blamers.

Does forgiving others mean that we have to stay in destructive situations. Say, for example, continuing to live with an abusive spouse or work for an abusive boss?

When is it OK to, if not blame, then at least recognize the responsibility of others in a bad situation, and remove oneself from them?

How do we, stuck as we are in our own minds and bodies, determine if we are irrationally blaming others or irrationally blaming ourselves and then determine a rationale future response?

On the flip side, is it possible to hold a mirror to someone else and show them that they are irrationally blaming others or themselves?

I know a few people on both sides of the issue that I would like to smack up side the head and tell them one or the other but my past experience tells me that's not going to work.

May 22, 2012

Blueprint, part 2

After the quote from The Sermon, Murphy continues…

“You may think that the teaching is unworkable, asking too much of human nature. Yet every mother, every father, must constantly turn the other cheek; forgiving while correcting children—forgiving and going right on loving, trying to help.

“In the same spirit of love and helpfulness, the Sermon urges us to try to understand, try to forgive, try to love everybody. In the struggle of self-conquest, the Sermon gives us a solemn compact—that the Father is to forgive us our trespasses only as we forgive those who trespass against us.

“Once this apparently unrealistic doctrine of life is tried, its practicality appears. Mrs. Jones moved into a tightly knit New England town. Soon she learned that her neighbor Mrs. Smith, noted for a sharp tongue, had been making unkind remarks about her. She restrained an impulse to rush next door and demand a showdown.

“A few days later she met a close friend of her detractor. She introduced herself. The other woman shrank back as though well briefed in Mrs. Jones’s defects.

” ‘I live next door to Mrs. Smith,’ Mrs. Jones said brightly, ‘and I just can’t resist telling you what a fine neighbor she is. I feel lucky to be near her.’

“A few days later Mrs. Smith appeared at Mrs. Jones’s door and said rather shamefacedly, ‘I really would like to be a good neighbor. Maybe I haven’t been as good as you think I’ve been.’

“No mention of the gossip was ever made and they became fast friends.”

Me again. There is only one time in my life that I have restrained an impulse for a showdown. I haven’t thought about it in a long time…

It was 1980 and I was studying engineering at the University of Illinois in Urbana. I chose engineering as a major because my parents told me I had to move out when I graduated high school. They would help pay for college or I could get a job but either way I had to get out. There was no talk of marriage because I had a sum total of seven dates with two boys to my credit at that point.

I took some aptitude tests and the results came back “engineering.” I was told I could get a job straight out of college with an engineering degree. That sounded good. Although neither of my parents, one a marriage counselor and the other a psychologist, or I had any idea of what an engineer was, the promise of a good job convinced me. Plus the ceramic engineering department was giving away $300 scholarships to join their department and dad thought that was a good idea.

I say all of this to point out that I didn’t pick engineering because I wanted to be an engineer or because I liked math and science. That’s important to understand in this story because I was scared to death the entire four years I was going to flunk out. Fear drove me to study seven days a week from 7 am until 10 pm. OK, some Sundays I slept in a couple of hours but that was about it.

On to the story…

I was living in an apartment with three roommates who were not engineers. Maybe they were smarter than me or maybe their courses were easier but at any rate they didn’t spend 15 hours a day studying. They went for buckets of beer on Wednesdays and partied all weekend.

As the fall semester of our junior year came to a close and I was studying for finals, my roommates and their boyfriends decided to have a Christmas party in our apartment. It was 10 pm, I had just come home from the library, and my head was swimming with phase diagrams and the formula for cordierite. I desperately needed sleep.

I fell into bed and was trying to go to sleep but I was getting really pissed off by the singing and laughing—Note that this is not the point where I resist the urge for confrontation—I stormed out of my room, through the hall, and into the living room, yelling “Shut the f*** up. I’m trying to sleep in here” and stormed back to my room.

My roommate, let’s call her Sue because that was her name, followed me back and stuck her nose right in my face. She said, “Cathy, everyone hates you. I bet your mom even hates you. You should just kill yourself and get out of our way.”

Fortunately, her boyfriend, let’s call him Steve because I can’t remember his name, followed her and said, “Let’s just go to my place and party there.”

And they did.

It was like someone had shot me in the chest. I fell back into my room and collapsed. I left before anyone was up the next morning and came back in the evening after everyone else was in bed. I managed to avoid all of them the entire week of finals. I spent Christmas in Chicago with my boyfriend.

Somehow I hatched a plan to be so sweet to everyone that Steve and the rest of them would take my side instead of Sue’s. When I got back I smiled cheerfully and chatted with everyone. I was so sweet I was afraid I was going to get cavities.

Those of you who know me will understand how difficult this was for me; I’m usually quite a curmudgeon. I doubt Sue is the only one who has ever wished I would just go away.

Anyway my plan worked. A few weeks later, when Sue snapped at me, Steve and the gang turned to her and said, “Come on Sue, give her a break.”

Victory.

I don’t think I was quite as pure in my intent as Mrs. Jones, but it did work.I should probably try the honey instead of vinegar approach more often.

Have you ever tried killing someone with kindness? Did it work for you?

Do you make it a practice to forgive and turn the other cheek? Does it make you happy?

“Forgiveness, release from grudges, as taught in the Sermon, is important also in physical health. In the past 20 years physicians have come to a realization that worry, fear, anger and hatred are poisons that can cripple and destroy the body as well as the mind; grudges can bring arthritis, rage can bring about the need for surgery. A man’s thoughts are the theater of his soul.”

I think most of us still believe that our mental and emotional condition affects our physical health but I’m not so sure about the grudges leading to arthritis.

The causal link between mind and body is also unclear to me. We like to think that if we can redirect our thoughts we can make ourselves healthy. Ostensibly that puts us in control of our own health and control is something that 21st Century Americans crave. But it also smacks of blaming the victim.

It’s easy for a happy, healthy person to say to me, “If you would think and act like me, then you would be happy and healthy. Your bad attitude is causing your chronic pain and fatigue.”

Or maybe the causality is actually the other way around. Maybe something unhealthy in my body causes my unhappiness and my tiny frontal lobe can’t do a darn thing about it.

Then again, one of the happiest people I’ve ever known, my boss at Motorola, died of cancer at 55.

And my grandmother, one of the grouchiest people I’ve ever known, lived to be two weeks short of 100.

Or maybe there are as many unique situations as there are unique people and we should quit trying to generalize and get on with other approaches to happiness.

Tomorrow we will read another essay: In a Chinese Garden, by Dr. Frederick Loomis, MD.

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