In my last reflection I commented on David Brooks’ recent review (5/14) of Josua Wolf Shenk’s essay “What Makes Us Happy,” found in the current issue (June 2009) of the Atlantic.  Brooks says that the researcher, George Vaillant, discovered through his longitudinal study of the lives of Harvard men that “the only thing that really matters in life are (sic) your relationships to other people.”  Brooks muses about Vaillant’s life, a life lacking in warm relationship and intimacy, and concludes, “Even when we know something, it is hard to make it so.”

I just read Shenk’s article and found it fascinating.  It was one of those on which I used a magic marker copiously.  Shenk gives summaries of various case studies throughout the article, and he also from time to time reports interesting conclusions which Vaillant came to during his intensive study.  A few of these are the following:

“. . . a glimpse of any one moment in a life can be deeply misleading.  A man at 20 who appears the model of altruism may turn out to be a kind of emotional prodigy–or he may be ducking . . . <a> kind of engagement with reality. . . ; on the other extreme, a man at 20 who appears impossibly wounded may turn out to be gestating toward maturity.”

“. . . mature adaptations are a real-life alchemy, a way of turning the dross of emotional crises, pain, and deprivation into the gold of human connection, accomplishment, and creativity.”

He sites the seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically: employing mature adaptations, education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight.

But at no place was Vaillant more powerful and articulate, says Shenk, than when he describes the significance of love and intimacy in our lives.  Vaillant was asked in an interview in March 2008, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?”  Vaillant responded: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

Perhaps Vaillant was so keenly aware of the importance of relationship because his life has always been fraught with such difficulty in that arena.  So how is it that someone can know so much and yet find it so difficult to put into practice what he clearly understands?  Vaillant answers this question in a profound and moving statement in his book Adaptation to Life. Speaking of his male subjects not from a scientific, but more from a philosophical or even theological perspective, he writes: “Their lives were too human for science, too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals.”

So yes, the process of learning to be fully human, the process of learning to love openly and deeply, is in the final analysis, a mystery.  We don’t understand why we do what we do, or why we fail sometimes to become what we most earnestly desire to become. 

However, in my last reflection I did promise you an answer, and an answer I will give.  Love is the most powerful force that exists, and love can be taught.  It is best taught in the first 18 months of a child’s life, and if a child is separated from mother during those years for any reason, or if a child is abused, or if a child is with parents who cannot for whatever reason nurture the child, then learning love later in life will prove difficult.  But except in the most profound cases of deprivation, it will not prove impossible. 

People who need to learn about love can do so by being with people who know how to love, in community and in intimate places in their lives.  Often helpers are needed–skilled psychotherapists for sure, spiritual advisors, massage therapists, yoga teachers, etc., etc.  A loving community is essential.  In the best of all worlds, the love-deprived person will be able at some point to enter into a long-term, intimate relationship with someone who is good at loving and who will love the person exactly as he or she is. 

Is there any guarantee?  In this world, there never is.  We just don’t know.  But we can do our best to increase the odds.  We can love, and we can reach out for love.  In the end, we’ll find that Vaillant is right–it’s all that matters. 

I was fascinated by David Brooks’ editorial (NYTimes 5/12, A23) on an article entitled “What Makes Us Happy?” by Joshua Wolf Shenk, to be published in this next issue of the Atlantic.  In short, the article (now available on line) describes a longitudinal study done by one George Vaillant over a 42-year period on a group of 268 of the most promising young men of the Harvard class of 1942.  Among them were John F. Kennedy and Ben Bradlee. 

These young men were the creme de la creme: they were intelligent, sophisticated, advantaged in every way.  They had been selected from the rest of the entering class because they were considered the most well adjusted.  Since they were college sophomores, they have been visited by researchers regularly and studied in every aspect of their living.  The results are known as the Grant Study, and they are summarized in Shenk’s article, which I have not as yet had a chance to read–but eagerly await.

Judging from their privileged beginnings, one might expect that these men would grow into highly successful, happy individuals.  The life stories, however, show quite a different outcome.  Brooks points out that one third of the men ended up suffering at least one bout of mental illness.  Many would be plagued with alcoholism.  A few, understandably, could never admit that they were gay, until they were of an advanced age. Brooks is struck, he says, by “the baffling variety of their lives.”  What causes us to make certain decisions, to follow life-giving as opposed to destuctive paths?  And a man who seems to do well in one phase of his life might just fall apart in the next phase.  Why?

The study apparently produced some correlations.  Correlations don’t prove, but they do suggest.  The men by and large did better as they aged.  Those who suffered from depression were much more likely to be dead by their early 60′s.  But it’s George Valliant’s final conclusion that is the most profound and the most instructive to us all.  In a video he says, “Happiness is love.  Full Stop.”

Ironically enough, love always seemed to elude Valliant himself, Brooks reports.  When he was 10, his father, who seemed successful and content, shot himself beside the family pool.  The mother removed the children from the house, and Valliant never saw the house again.  There was no memorial service.  Valliant married three times, returning then to his second wife.  For long periods he was estranged from his children.

Brooks concludes, poignantly, “Even when we know something, it is hard to make it so.”

Yes, this is true.  But I have a response to this statement.  Stay tuned for my next reflection.

During Archbishop TuTu’s recent visit to Portland, some of us were asked to participate in panel discussions on several related topics.  I was asked to be on a panel entitled “Religion as a Bridge to Reconciliation.”  The following is part of what I said in my introductory remarks:

The word religion comes from the prefix re, meaning back and the Latin ligare, which means “to bind” or “to bind back” or “to reconnect.”  One might say that the function of religion is to repair the illusion of our separation.  Religion should play a natural, a logical role in reconciliation–to bind us together in common values of love, compassion, justice, and forgiveness.

Unfortunately, religion–and I can speak with real authority only of the Christian religion, which is my own–religion most often seems to do the opposite: it serves to separate and to divide.  Christianity has such a bad reputation that the very use of the word in the common vernacular connotes “one who is rigid in belief,” and people who are not religious are wary of those who are, for these unconverted individuals–those unwashed in the blood, so to speak–too often have been targets for conversion and have not been respected as the persons, theological and otherwise, that they are.

Of course, all religious people are not Fundamentalists by any means, but even so, when any group of people begin to say, “My way is the way, my path is the only path,” the result is division and acrimony.

In fact, religion then becomes no different in this way from any other ideology, whethers an idealogy of communism or capitalism or racism or deconstructionist thinking.  One who becomes an ideologist, or a true believer, begins to exist in a closed system.  Whatever fits into this chosen system is labeled “true” and whatever does not is labeled “false.”  The curiosity, spontaneity, and growth of such an individual become limited.

Because each of us is troubled by a multitude of interior forces we do not and will not ever totally understand, it is our nature to look for a system which explains our angst and which makes us feel safe within the walls of that system.  We do not see that system as arbitrary, as created by humans who are terrified of our own inevitable demise, and so we reify those structures–that is, we come to believe that there is a concrete reality there.  Therefore, we cling to these beliefs as to life itself, and whatever threatens them must be challenged–or perhaps stemped out, eliminated.

Given this very human and very pervasive problem with religion, one can see why religion often fails to be a sturdy instrument of reconciliation.  At the same time, we know that there have been instances when it has been.  I’m thinking of enlightened leaders who have internalized the radical way of being that seems to be at the heart of all major religions–the radical way of love, compassion, peace.  Violence and retribution have no part to play.  I’m thinking, for example, for Martin Luther King, Jr., who taught non-violence in the Civil Rights movement; or Gandhi, who practiced satyagraha, or passive resistance, to free his people from British rule; or a more recent example, the Amish, who forgave the man who gunned down their children in a Pennsylvania schoolhouse a few years ago, because these gentle people could do no other: forgiveness is their way of being.

So if we mean by religion, a spiritual commitment to love and compassion and non-violence–if we mean by religion, a radical change of being in which the individual or community understands that we are all one and that love and forgiveness are central to their being, then yes, religion is the essence of reconciliation and a path to that difficult state.

But if we mean by religion–which we generally do–an institutionalized set of beliefs, then, no, just the opposite.  For religion in that sense divides people into the righteous and the unrighteous, the saved and the unsaved, the good and the evil.  And of course if we have made “the other” evil, then the righteous must have control over the evil ones.  We righteous ones can then project all of our shadow side onto these evil ones, and then Christians can smile as we say things to gays and lesbians like, “I hate the sin, but love the sinner,” or say to those of another faith tradition, “If you haven’t accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior, you’re going to hell.”  Not to mention the generations of wars between believers of various faiths throughout the world, throughout all time.  Make the people of a different tribe or race or religion “other,” and they are much easier to kill.

So is religion a path to reconciliation?  Not until its practititioners mature as religious beings.  Not until its institutions become more devoted to the heart-lessons of their prophets than to the divisive theology of their true believers.

Let us be clear: the Bible does not say that money is the root of all evil–it says that the love of money is the root of all evil.  Money is merely a means of exchange.  I give my time and energy to some pursuit, and I am given money in return, so that I can exchange it for what I need to sustain myself and others.  It’s a mere convenience.  Without money, we would be spending much of our time trading and bartering. 

As societies grew more sophisticated, more complex economic systems evolved.  These systems are based on conceptual models, and they espouse certain values.  This country’s system of capitalism assumes that (1) competition is good and yields the best products at the lowest price for the consumer; and (2) when it becomes out of balance in one way or another, the system will “right” itself by market forces.  It is self-regulating, and ultimately serves the greater good. 

All this sounds dandy–except that it just doesn’t work quite that way.  The system doesn’t take into account (1) the endless and impossible demand for “growth” and “products” (as in GNP), which overtaxes our natural resources; (2) the cost of production to the earth and to living creatures (these costs are dismissed as “externalities”); (3) the needs of those people who fall through the cracks when the market doesn’t need them any more; (4) and finally, what this system does to the character and integrity of people and their relationships in a given culture.  It is perhaps this number four that is the least mentioned, but that is perhaps the most pervasive and the most dangerous, for it infects almost every element of our living.

Consider the following:

1.  Drug companies spend more money on gifts and stipends to doctors than they spend on research or consumer advertising.  They give free drug samples, free food, free medical refresher courses, and they pay doctors handsome stipends for marketing lectures.

2.  The popular culture offers very little of value, and yet billions upon billions are spent on producing artistically degraded films, derivative music, and escape literature.  Meantime, serious poets and independent filmmakers, artists and musicians who have much to offer, languish without support.

3.  We are inundated with advertising of all kinds, all day every day.  Billboards ruin our cityscapes and countrysides; radio and television ads can hardly be avoided.  There is no escape.

4.  News shows are really entertainment now, with very little hard news or enlightening analysis–”if it bleeds, it leads.”  Their job is not to thrive, but simply to survive.  So how are citizens truly informed in what is supposed to be a democracy?

5. We have been told since the ’50′s that we need more (of everything from  beautiful hair to bigger houses), and we can’t get off the cycle of getting and spending.  There is never enough.

6.  Our best and brightest students, we are told, have been majoring in “finance” for years and years now, and their goal is to get a lot of money–quickly.

I could go on . . . and so could you, but we both get the picture.  How did we get stuck with a system that seems to bring out the worst in so many of our people, that sets people apart instead of bringing them together, that is laying waste to the earth? 

You tell me–I don’t know.  But I do know this: the first step in change is awareness.  We have accepted the assumptions of this economic system far too long, and we are sick of heart and sick of character.  We need to stop.  (Well, maybe the economic downturn pushed us to this step.)  We need to re-imagine how we want to live together and how we might more equitably share the resources of the earth. 

As President Obama said today in his press conference, “These changes won’t be done in the first 100 days, or in the first year.  But one day we will look back, and we will say, yes, this is when we started, this was when the great change began.”

How do you want to live?  Begin to imagine it.  Then begin to go there, as fully as you are able.  We don’t have a moment to waste. 

This morning David Kellerman, 41, Acting CFO of mortgage giant Freddie Mac, was found dead, an apparent suicide.  Freddie Mac has been harshly criticized for financing risky loans that are now defaulting.  The company was also under fire for planning to pay more than $210,000,000 in bonuses to their executives, to give them incentives to stay.  Kellerman, who had taken over when the former CEO had been relieved of his duties, was responsible for 500 employees and was working on the current financial report at the time of his death.  He leaves behind a wife and a five-year-old daughter, Grace.

Why did Kellerman kill himself?  Was it the many points of pressure?  Was in shame, for being involved in what he knew were slight-of-hand loan deals?  Was it some illegal act that is yet to be uncovered?  There will be an investigation.  There will be follow-up articles.  But we may never know the truth.  He himself may not have fully understood the demons which pushed him to take his life.

But the question before us is: what’s worth dying for?  Making a mistake–even a big one–is not worth dying for.  Doing something that you are ashamed of–that’s not worth dying for, either.  Trying to live up to others’ expectations and failing–that’s not worth dying for, either.

What is worth dying for?  To save the life of another, perhaps.  To make justice.  To go against the powers that be, when the powers are corrupt and evil.  These are things worth dying for.  We remember those who have done so: the firemen of 9/11; soldiers who lay down their lives for their comrades or for their country; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Archbishop Romero; journalists who are murdered for writing the truth about crooked political leaders.

But suicide?  No.  It is always, always, always possible to start over when you make a mistake, or when you do wrong.  Forgiveness is always an option.  If it were not, which one of us could keep going, with our more or less constantly besmirched lives?  We all “fall short of the glory of God,” as my saintly grandmother used to say.  We can say, “I was wrong.  I’m sorry.”  And we can start over.  Every day, in fact.

The one who commits suicide just “wants out,” because the pain is so great, and that person cannot see an end to the suffering.  Many of us feel that intensity of pain at one time or another.  But depression can be cured, pain will end, and life turns round.  Dear reader, if you’re ever considering suicide, remember that. 

It is sad beyond words when a little five-year-old is left without a father–and answerless questions that will last a lifetime.  Suicide colors so many lives, and for so long: a wife left alone; fellow workers asking, “Why?”; friends blaming themselves and saying, “I should have called . . . .” 

 Sometimes it takes courage just to keep going, just to get up every morning and face the day.  But there is no honorable alternative, for it’s not just your own life–you belong to all of us.  We are all diminished when any one person takes his life.

We are irrevocably connected, the one with the other.  Stay with us, brother.  Hang in there, sister.  Together, we can find a way through anything.