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Focusing On the Positive The Reverend Roger Fritts January 2, 2005 Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church Bethesda, Maryland When I chose this title, back in mid-December, I thought it would be an appropriate subject for a sermon given on New Year’s weekend. Traditionally, this is a time when we make resolutions to improve our lives in the coming year. However, the enormous tragedy in Southeast Asia over the past seven days makes it difficult to focus on the positive. For millions of people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and other countries, now is a time of enormous grief, combined with a struggle to survive. Our own Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, has projects in India. I will give a contribution to them and they will send it on to help in the reconstruction. I have also sent an e-mail to President Bush encouraging him to increase emergency aid from the United States. Martin Seligman, in his book Authentic Happiness, wrote that the students in one of his classes wondered if happiness comes more from the exercise of kindness than it does from having fun. Each student undertook an assignment for the next class to engage in one pleasurable activity and one charitable activity, and write about them both. It turned out that the afterglow of the pleasurable activity, such as hanging out with friends, or watching a movie, or eating a hot fudge sundae, paled in comparison to the effects of acts of kindness. The students found that when their charitable acts called on their personal strengths, their whole day went better. One student told about how her nephew asked for help with his third grade arithmetic. After an hour of tutoring, she was astonished to discover that for the rest of the day, she could listen better, she was mellower, and people liked her much more than usual. A business student said that he came to the university to learn how to make a lot of money in order to be happy, but that he discovered that he liked helping other people more than spending his money shopping. One tourist interviewed this past week at an airport as he was arriving home from a flooded area in Southern Asia talked about how terrible the experience had been for him and his family. Then he said how enormously grateful he was to the people of the country he was visiting. In the hours after the flood, he said, strangers, people with very little of their own, had reached out to help him and his family, by taking them into their homes, giving them water and food, caring for them. He had never before seen such unselfish love and generosity. In the midst of this horrible tragedy, at least one man could focus on the positive. This week I read the book Authentic Happiness. Martin Seligman is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, the director of the positive psychology network, and former president of the American Psychological Association. He has taken to studying happiness over the last few years, and has convinced other distinguished researchers to do the same. Since September 11, 2001, he has pondered the relevance of positive psychology. In times of trouble, is the study of suffering more important than the study of happiness? Seligman answers his own question saying that impoverished, depressed people care about much more than just the relief of their suffering. These persons care—sometimes desperately—about virtue, purpose, integrity, and meaning. Experiences, Seligman writes, that induce positive emotions caused negative emotions to dissipate rapidly. He might say that one response to the tragic earthquake and flood of the past week is to define ways for people to have positive emotional experiences that will dissipate negative emotions. Dr. Seligman argues that one key to happiness is discovering our strengths and focusing our energy to use those strengths effectively. Seligman loves questionnaires, and he has a questionnaire at his internet web site intended to help people identify what their strengths are. Here are a couple of the questions.
The goal in taking a test like this is not to find out what is wrong with us, but to find out what our strengths are. A key to happiness, according to Seligman, is to put our time and energy into doing things we are good at instead of feeling frustrated because we are trying to do things that are beyond our abilities or strengths. In search of a New Year’s resolution for myself, on December 31, I took what Dr. Seligman’s “Strengths Survey.” According to the survey, my top strength is “curiosity and interest in the world.” I read that my curiosity about the world means that I am open to new experiences, and flexible about matters that do not fit our preconceptions. I read that ambiguity intrigues me and that my curiosity is an active engagement in life. Couch potatoes clicking their television remotes do not qualify as strongly curious people. For curiosity to be a strength a person needs to be more actively engaged in life. The opposite end of the dimension of curiosity is being easily bored. I wondered how I might use my top strength of “curiosity and interest in the world” to form a New Year’s resolution. Dr. Seligman writes that every year, he, his wife and three children make New Year’s resolutions. Each year at the end of June they hold a midsummer review to check on how they have done. Most years they found that they manage to make progress on about half the January resolutions. However, when Seligman began to focus his work on positive psychology, he noticed something about his family New Year’s resolutions. He found that they were resolutions about correcting shortcomings. They were about what family members should not do in the coming year.
• For example, one child resolved: I will not be so irritable with my brother and sister; • Seligman resolved: I will listen more carefully when my wife talks. • His wife resolved: I will limit myself to two tablespoons of sugar in each cup of coffee, • Another child resolved: I will stop whining. As Dr. Seligman studied more about positive psychology, he came to the conclusion that these thou-shalt-nots New Year resolutions are a drag. Waking up in the morning and running through the list of all the things you should not do—no sugar, no whining, no being irritable—these are not conducive to getting out on the positive side of the bed. New Year’s resolutions about fixing weaknesses are not helpful to starting the year off cheerfully. So, he convinced his family to make resolutions about positive accomplishments that build on their strengths. For example:
• One of his children resolved that she will learn to play the piano this year. • His wife resolved that she would learn the physics of string theory and teach it to the children. • Another child resolved that she would practice hard and win a ballet scholarship. • Their son resolved that he would write and submit a short story to a magazine. • Dr. Seligman resolved that he would write a book about positive psychology and have the best year of his life doing it. Following this doctor’s advice, I should make a positive New Year’s resolution to strive to achieve a positive accomplishment that builds on my top strength of “curiosity and interest in the world.” One resolution is to continue to use my curiosity and interest in the world to be the best minister, the best husband and the best father that I can be. I work on that each day, as I do my best to fulfill my normal responsibilities. However, as I think about “curiosity and interest in the world” as a personal strength, my mind goes back to a writing project that I was working on last July. I was exploring the possibility of writing a liberal religious response to a conservative Christian book called The Purpose Driven Life. Writing such a response is a goal that fits with my “curiosity and interest in the world” and I resolve to work on it in the next year. While The Purpose Driven Life, which has sold more than sixteen million copies, says that the purpose of our life is to convert everyone in the world to Christianity, my curiosity and interest in the world have led me to believe that the purpose of human life is to increase knowledge. I would attempt to convince readers that all useful human activity supports our effort to increase knowledge, and that the growth of human knowledge (whether it is a cure for cancer, or an exploration of the planets, or the invention of devices that can warn us about tsunami waves, or the theory in physics of additional dimensions) is an exciting and joyful enterprise. I find it disturbing that a best-selling book by a minister presents such a limited view of the purpose of human life and I long to present a convincing alternative. As stated in my reading this morning, Dr. Seligman has suggested that negative, pessimistic thinking attracts some American intellectuals. One of his students, a young woman blind since birth, crisscrossed the United States in her senior year at the University of Pennsylvania doing her senior thesis. She visited one congregation after another, measuring the relation between optimism and religious faith. To do this, she gave questionnaires to hundreds of church members, recording and analyzing dozens of weekend sermons, and scrutinizing the liturgy and the stories told the children of eleven prominent American religions. She concluded that the more fundamentalist the religion, the more optimistic are its believers. Orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Christians and Moslems are more optimistic than Reform Jews and Unitarians. She concluded that, on average, Reform Jews and Unitarians are more depressed. This suggests that among Unitarian Universalists, spreading the gospel of optimism is especially important. I think it is good to focus on the positive, to be optimistic, to celebrate our strengths. Last fall in the days after a liberal candidate for President lost to a conservative, I said that in spite of this defeat, over time of human history the values of liberal religion have become more a part of human culture. The long term history of social change over the centuries is one of progress. This advancement is, of course, not like an unstoppable high speed jet plane. It is like a cantankerous mule. Sometimes, when we try our hardest to pull it forward. it backs up. However, in the long run the direction of history is toward the progressive, liberal religious values that Unitarian Universalists promote. Today, a week after a natural disaster, the amount of human suffering is terrible, but I also see hope an optimism in the outpouring of help coming from people all over the world. I see hope and optimism in the kindness ordinary people have shown for each other in the midst of this awful event. I choose to focus on the positive, rather than the negative. Of course, life is a mixture of struggle and success, of achievement and failure. Our negative emotions, fear, sadness, and anger have evolved in us as has our first lines of defense against external threats. Fear is a signal that danger is lurking, sadness is a signal that loss is impending, and anger is a signal that someone is trespassing against us. However, evolution has also given us positive emotions to help us survive. In Seligman’s words, positive emotions broaden our ability to see resources to respond to a threat. They give us the energy to keep going in the face of great difficulties. A positive mood raises people up into a way of thinking that is creative, tolerant, constructive, generous, and non defensive. Positive thinking aims at discovering not what is wrong but what is right. It does not go out of its way to discover weakness and failure but focuses instead on strengths and possibilities. Personally, when it comes to resolutions, I have found that focusing on new day resolutions, instead of New Years’ resolutions is better for me. I have found that things can change an awful lot in one year and long-range planning can be difficult. The one day at a time approach works better for me. So my new day resolution today is to use my curiosity and interest in the world to be the best, most optimistic minister, the best, most positive husband and the best, most hopeful father I can be. I want to finish my response to a conservative religious book, so I resolve to write my response a few pages each week. These are my New Year’s messages:
• First, people who help others are happier than people who seek out entertainment.
• Second, it is a good idea for each of us to focus on our strengths rather than to dwell on our weaknesses. This means we need to discover what our strengths are, and then set goals that are directly related to our strengths.
• Third, if you find, as I do, that a resolution for an entire year is overwhelming, make a positive resolution for the next month or the next week or for today—and focus on your strengths not you weaknesses. Follow my advice and I promise that you will be happier— happier than even an Orthodox Jew or a Christian fundamentalist! Source Seligman, Martin, Authentic Happiness, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2002. |
Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist
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