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Religion and Flow May 1, 2005 The Reverend Roger Fritts Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church Bethesda, Maryland Human beings are content when we are in a state of flow. We feel a sense of satisfaction when we are completely involved in an activity for its own sake. In a state of flow we stop thinking about our appearance. We stop worrying about other people’s opinions of us. We loose track of time. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one. Our whole being is involved and we are using our skills to the maximum. This is the conclusion of Dr. Ciskszentmihalyi (pronounced Chick-sent-me-high-ee) a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago who has devoted his life’s work to the study of what makes people truly satisfied and fulfilled. Dr. Ciskszentmihalyi is famous as the discoverer of the notion of flow. Under his direction, starting about 35 years ago, a research team at the university of Chicago interviewed thousands of people around the world. They found that the flow experience is reported in essentially the same words by old women in Korea, adults in Thailand and India, by teenagers in Tokyo, by Navajo shepherds, by farmers in the Italian Alps and by workers on the assembly line in Chicago. All of us sometimes enter a flow state when we are fully absorbed in activity during which we lose our sense of time and have feelings of great satisfaction. In addition to the interviews, the researchers asked people to carry an electronic pager for a week and write down how they were feeling and what they were doing when the pager signaled. The pager went off about eight times a day at random intervals. Over a hundred thousand such reports were collected from different parts of the world. From these studies the researchers eventually developed a simple diagram to show what every flow activity had in common. Imagine that the diagram on the cover of the order of service represents a specific activity—for example, singing a hymn during a worship service. Each of us has some skill in singing and this is represented by the bottom line of the diagram. At the same time different hymns represent different degrees of challenges to us. When the challenge is too great for us we feel anxiety, represented by the upper triangle. When our skill is high and the challenge is low we feel bored, represented by the lower triangle. Satisfaction is found in the middle, in the flow channel, where our skills and our challenges are in balance. I should note that flow experiences do not provide a guide to ethical or moral behavior. The researchers found, for example, that an accomplished bank robber could experience flow while robbing a bank. Dr. Ciskszentmihalyi argues that we need a religion, a faith, to guide us ethically. I find it interesting to think about Unitarian Universalist worship in the context of this flow diagram. If I were teaching a group of seminary students about worship, I would show them this chart as a way of illustrating the difficulty of meeting the needs of everyone in a congregation on any particular Sunday. Take for example, hymn #15 in our hymnal “The Lone, Wild Bird.” As someone with very little training in music, learning to sing this would place me in the lower left corner of the flow channel. It would be an appropriate challenge for my limited skills. On the other hand, I have heard a professional church musician refer to this despairingly as “The Lone, Wild Chicken” hymn. She has become sick of this hymn as she has taught it to countless amateur church choirs in small churches. She would place it in the boredom triangle. This is the challenge facing every church music director and every minister; to design a worship experience that most people will experience in the flow channel, knowing that in any congregation, some people will be feeling anxious and some will be felling bored. One example of flow that Dr. Ciskszentmihalyi gives is that of a rock climber. One rock climber said: you are so involved in what you are doing that you aren’t thinking of yourself as separate from the immediate activity . . . you don’t see yourself as separate from what you are doing . . . the mystique of rock climbing is climbing; you get to the top of a rock glad it’s over but really wishing it would go on forever. The justification of climbing is climbing, . . . you don’t conquer anything except things in your self . . . Climbing is . . . recognizing that you are a flow. The purpose of the flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow. It is not a moving up but a continuous flowing, you move up to keep the flow going. There is no possible reason for climbing except the climbing itself; it is a self communication. It has been over thirty years since I went rock climbing as a college student. Still, I do remember the intense feelings I had climbing up granite formations. It was very exciting, and scary. It was physically and intellectually challenging to try to discover where I could place my feet and where I could put my hands to pull myself up the cliff. And there was the pleasure of being with good friends, who held my life in their hands as they held onto the rope to which I was attached. The flow I felt on such days was the flow adrenaline acting as a powerful stimulant in times of fear and stress. Adrenaline, that surging burst of energy we feel when stressed, happens as a defense mechanism when our brains sense we are under attack. It increases our blood pressure, cardiovascular function, and the amount of energy sent to our brains. Adrenaline even thickens our blood so we can bleed more slowly if wounded. After the danger of climbing the rock passed, I sat on the summit and looked out over the splendor of nature. A calmness flowed over me. When I think about flow and religion it occurs to me some worship services do create this adrenaline flow. In the last chapter of Mark it says “they shall take up snakes.” A day’s drive southwest of here near the Cumberland Gap there are still snake handling worship services. Handling rattlesnakes and copperheads can certainly get the adrenaline flowing as effectively as rock climbing. If I could come to feel skilled at snake handling, if I could come to feel that I can hold the snakes without being bitten, I might feel as though I am in the flow channel, with just the right mixture of skill and challenge. The adrenaline might cause me to feel energized and alive. Personally, I will never be ready for snake handling in worship services. However, there are other ways that religious services create a feeling of flow. Any preaching based on fear of an enemy can create such a feeling. A ritual is taught as a way of protecting against an enemy. So for example, a preacher might say that we will roast in hell if we do not accept Jesus as our lord and savior. That can get your adrenaline flowing. Or a preacher might say that our nation will be punished by god if we allow homosexuals to marry. We do less of this in liberal religious congregations, but still, I can stir up your fight or flight response by dramatic preaching about the threats to civil liberties, or the dangers of global warming. If I give you something to do, some way to use your skills to overcome these enemies, some of you will feel that you are in the flow, that you are experiencing in worship just the right amount of challenging your skills. I remember attending a Roman Catholic mass packed with farm workers. Caesar Chavez and CorettaScott King were there. We were united together against the common enemy of the corporate farm bosses who were refusing to negociate with the workers. I felt the flow of adrenaline in that worship service (as we had a communion of tortilla chips). The kind of flow that comes with adrenaline, is not, however, the only kind of flow experience. A dancer describes how flow feels when a performance is going well. He writes:
Your concentration is very complete. Your mind isn’t wondering, you are not thinking of something else; you are totally involved in what you are doing . . . your energy is going very smoothly. You feel relaxed, comfortable, and energetic. A mother felt flow spending time with her small daughter. She writes:
Her reading is the one thing that she’s really into, and we read together. She reads to me, and I read to her, and that’s a time when I sort of lose touch with the rest of the world, I’m totally absorbed in what I’m doing. A chess player says:
. . . the concentration is like breathing—you never think of it. The roof could fall in and, if it missed you, you would be unaware of it. Here in this church I have seen this in the Bridge groups that play here on Tuesday afternoons. They gather in groups of four and concentrate intensely on the game, focused on the cards.
However, playing games like Bridge, while enjoyable, are not the central purpose of our religion. I wonder how I can encourage the experience of flow while I pursue the values that are central to Unitarian Universalism. This can happen in a worship service that does not include a focus of an enemy, but it is not easy because a congregation includes many different skill levels. When it comes to music, a hymn that I find challenging and raises my anxiety, may fall in the boredom triangle for others. And when it comes to the sermon, it is safe to say that whatever the topic, an expert may be found in our congregation. For example; there may be a few people thinking they read about this flow idea years ago. On the other hand, there are those in the congregation who are feeling anxious because this talk about flow is a new idea, and they are not at all sure what I am getting at. They may be thinking, as I do sometimes when I hear a sermon, “am I stupid, or is the speaker unclear?” It does not help a Unitarian Universalist worship service, that we are more likely to feel in the channel of flow when we are active participants than when we are passive listeners. Our tradition of European protestant worship is for the congregation not to verbally participate in the sermon except by laughing, and laughing is only a recent addition. When I preach to a Unitarian Christian congregation in Transylvania, no one laughs. I want to try a radical experiment in flow this morning, just to see how it feels for the congregation to be more vocal. I want to see if we can create more of a flow experience here in our worship service. I am going to make a few short statements about flow. After each of them, I invite all of you to shout an affirmative thought back to me. Do not think about how you may look to other people. Flow is the experience of enjoying yourself without worrying about how you look or what others are thinking about you. Lets practice. Can everyone shout amen? Great! We will shake up the folks in Spring “B”. Let’s practice another one. Can everyone shout PREACH IT BROTHER! Great. Now I am going to make a few declarative statements and I want you to all respond.
• We Affirm the Worth and Dignity of Every Person!
• We promote Justice, equity and compassion in human relations!
• We affirm the Acceptance of one another!
• We encourage spiritual growth!
• We promote a free and responsible search for truth!
• We encourage the use of democratic process!
• We affirm the goal of peace, liberty, and justice for all!
• We encourage respect for the interdependent web of all existence! Thank you sisters and brothers! I hope you feel the flow. Of course, we do not spend all of our time rock climbing or shouting amen at worship services. People also find flow in the regular, mundane activities of life. The researchers found that we cannot make all bad things feel good. Still we can find ways to make many of life’s experiences a flow. We can widen the flow channel so that we feel less anxiety and less boredom. As I have gotten too out of shape for rock climbing, I have become fond of quoting from this pulpit the words of the Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh. He calls flow mindfulness. He says: While washing the dishes I should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes I should be completely aware of the fact that I am washing the dishes. At first glance, that might seem a little silly: why put so much stress on a simple thing? But that’s precisely the point. The fact that I’m standing there and washing bowls is a wondrous reality. I’m being completely myself, following my breathing, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions. I am in the flow channel while doing a routine activity. So there are shouting ways to experience the flow in religion. There are quiet ways to be in the flow while doing everyday activities like washing dishes. Our British American heritage has led us towards tends more to the quiet flow experience, which is much like that quiet mindfulness of the Buddhist. When I go for a walk I think of words by Thich Nhat Hanh. He wrote:
I like to walk alone on country paths, rice plants and wild grasses on both sides, putting each foot down on the earth in mindfulness, knowing that I walk on the wondrous earth. In such moments, existence is a miraculous and mysterious reality. People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on the earth. Every day we are engaged in miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is miracle. Optimal happiness lies in that space between boredom and anxiety, in the channel of flow where our skills and our challengers meet. We can make that channel of flow wider by learning to enjoy the miracles of life. Feeling the joy of a breeze on a spring day, seeing a cloud against a blue sky, listening to the sound of children playing, smelling a flower, tasting a glass of fresh water, feeling not bored nor anxious, feeling that we are a joyful part of the flow of life. Sources: Ciskszentmihalyi, Mihaly, Flow, the Psychology of Optimal Experience, Harper & Row, 1990. Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness, Beacon Press, 1975. |
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