Wholeness and Holiness

I recently read Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 by Frederic Morton.  I was fascinated by the confluence of the decrepit Habsburg monarchy, the entrenched aristocracy, the socialist and communist revolutionaries, and the psychoanalytic establishment all within the confines of prewar Vienna (the book concludes with Austria and the other European powers going to war in August, 1914).  In a passage I found thought-provoking, Morton describes Viennese political writer Karl Kraus’ analysis of the assassination of Austrian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand by Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip.  The assassination, thought Kraus, was not the work of a single man, of a subversive organization, or even a nation, for: “No less a force than progress stands behind this deed—progress and education unmoored from God. . .”  

Morton thinks that the progress that Kraus was alluding to was the progress of modernization and industrialization.  Princip’s ancestors had lived for centuries in a zadruga, a Bosnian farming community.  His father, displaced from the land, had earned his living as a postman.  Thus, the family was dislocated not only from farm and community but from the spirituality of nature.  The next generation was even more estranged.  As Morton puts it:

 “His son Gavrilo, more educated than his father, more sensitive, more starved for the wholeness that is holiness and thus more resentful of the ruins all about him, had to seek another garden.  He sought something that would satisfy his disorientation and his anger; something which, as his readings of Nietzsche suggested, would restore the valor of the vital principle that his race had lost.” (p. 319)

 Princip found as his guiding principle hatred of the Austrians who occupied Bosnia.  He sought to drive out the Austrians and reclaim Bosnia as a Slavic land.  Even if this enterprise had proved successful, though, it could never have restored his grandparents’ Eden, for that had been lost to modernity.

 I was particularly struck by Morton’s diagnosis of Princip’s plight: he was “starved for the wholeness that is holiness.”  What is the connection between holiness and wholeness, and how does modernity deprive of that wholeness?  Kraus seems to have believed that God is experienced via the natural world, and the mechanization and industrialization of modern societies exclude God and thereby the holy from our lives, leaving us fragmented.  Were he to see our lives today, I imagine that he would think that the alienation of the spirit that was already proceeding rapidly in 1914 has not slacked its pace since then. 

 My thoughts about the modern diminishment of both holiness and wholeness were given additional impetus by a posting on a listserv for therapists to which I subscribe.  Dr. Mark Stern, the author of the post, expressed concern that modern technology has changed psychotherapy, intruding on the “sacred Sabbath of the psychotherapy hour.”  He described the resulting loss in exactly the same language of wholeness and holiness that Morton uses:

 “I’m not at all sure the ways in which the paradox of wholeness/holiness has become distanced from these times. Personally, I fear that the robotization of what is still referred to as therapy (though, in reality, behavioral manipulation), has placed some closure on the sacredness of the individual. In place of depth affirmation of inner life; of embodied vision and of the practice of delving into the richness of latent knowledge, the standards of manualized techniques have moved away from the mysteries.”

 The therapist’s office no longer serves as a sanctuary from the ruin wrought by the machine; it has largely been mechanized itself, so that the refugees seeking solace there are simply subjected to one more technology.

 We live in unholy times—times when the sacred is given short shrift.  Many still have a yearning for holiness and wholeness, as evidenced by the popularity of seeker-friendly churches, religious ritual, and new-age spirituality.  Like Humpty-Dumpty, though, we aren’t put together again very readily.  I hope to reflect in a later post on what is conducive to the wholeness that stems from holiness.

 

Travel, Meaning, and Happiness

In his blog The Quest for a Good Life, psychologist Andy Tix recently wrote about his reasons for taking a teaching sabbatical this semester in Scotland.  In brief, he and his wife want to jointly experience the sort of growth that can come about living in an unfamiliar place and interacting with people different from those they usually encounter.  He notes that resettling his family in Edinburg for the duration has been fraught with challenges.  In this regard, he cites Rob Bell’s most recent book Drops Like Stars.  He indicates that Bell suggests “discomfort and suffering often lead to raw experiences that often make life most meaningful and which often bond people together.”  Andy reflects that many people yearn for new and challenging experiences, but shy away from actually taking on challenges because they anticipate hardship and uncertainty. 

I admit that I’m much more prone to daydream about seeking out new challenges than in taking them on.   I do seek out some adventures, but admittedly they are fairly tame.  Andy is spending time in a different cultural setting than he is used to; I like to travel as well, but so far have made only brief trips mostly to destinations where the cultural heritage is not entirely dissimilar to mine.  I notice that even my timid venturing forth is more than some people do.  Last summer, I went on my first cruise, sailing to Italy, Greece, and Turkey with my son, who had been a cruise line employee the previous two summers, thereby making us eligible for a hugely discounted fare. I was struck by how many of the passengers avoided cultural dissonance, seeking out only the picture-postcard sort of experiences that they could assimilate into their already-existing cultural frame.   Riding into Athens inside a well-appointed, air-conditioned coach and getting out at the Acropolis to click a few pictures of the Parthenon may have been travel in the physical sense, but psychically the cruisers weren’t traveling at all, at least not if travel entails leaving the familiar behind  and venturing into the unknown.    To Piaget’s terms, journeys always put the traveler in a place where it’s impossible to assimilate the people and places being experienced into preexisting schemas.  The traveler is forced to accommodate—to create new categories or modify existing ones. 

In describing how his sojourn in Scotland has been affecting him, Andy cited Daniel Kahneman’s distinction between happiness in the moment and the general perception that one has a happy life.  His day-to-day experience of Scotland hasn’t produced many happy moments; in fact, the adjustment had been rather difficult.  However, he has been living in such a way that his conception of the world is changing—the vessels into which his days in Scotland have been poured aren’t adequate to the task, and as a result are being replaced by new, more capacious containers.  New wine has a way of demanding new wineskins.  Does this constitute happiness in the larger sense?  I think it fits best with the Aristotelian concept of happiness as eudiamonia (a life well-lived and suitable to our natural function).  At least in my case, there is more of a sense that I’m living well and wisely when new experiences are trampling on my preconceptions than when I am just pacing within the narrow parameters of the quotidian.

 

Loneliness

Recently I wrote a post on Dorothy Day’s quasi-autobiography The Long Loneliness.  A few days later, I ran across this Newsweek article on loneliness in American society.  The news on the loneliness front is bad:  we’re getting more lonely all the time.  For example, over a twenty-year period, there was a three-fold increase in the number of people who said there was no one with whom they discussed important matters. 

Loneliness is not the same thing as being alone.   The definition of loneliness given by the article is the same one used in most psychological research on the subject, namely that it is “an aversive emotional response to a perceived discrepancy between a person’s desired levels of social interaction and the contact they’re actually receiving.”  I have thought about whether the definition fit me.   I live alone and spend quite a bit of time by myself but am seldom lonely.  I actually would like somewhat more social interaction than I have, but not with the people readily available for that interaction.  (What I would like is to have more contact with people who live some distance away.)   It never made much sense to me to lament not having more interaction with others, and I do manage to fill much of my time alone with things that I either enjoy or think are useful.  My experience suggests that it is possible to have the discrepancy that the definition refers to without also having the “aversive emotional response.” 

The Newsweek article makes a number of fairly obvious points about loneliness persisting for many in our society despite increased electronic connections with others.  Facebook and MySpace provide only a thin sense of community.  Looking at Facebook can be the occasion for comparing one’s pathetic social involvement to the great relationships that everyone else seems immersed in, thereby evoking increased loneliness.  Sure, we know that Facebook Walls just present the most superficial of facades—they really do serve as walls that hide more than they reveal—but the stories they tell at least contain actors and scenes that seem much better than anything going on in our lives. 

On the other hand, perhaps the problem isn’t so much that social network sites are the relational equivalent of junk food as that, in both online and face-to-face interactions, we aren’t looking for what is most sustaining–a genuine encounter with another human being.  What Dorothy Day did much better than I or most people I know was to get outside the confines of self and take interest in others.  Her descriptions of the people that flowed through the hospitality houses, farms, and factories she frequented are the richest chapters of her memoir.  Exploring and cherishing the uniqueness of each person was an effective salve for her loneliness.  It’s a prescription that perhaps could benefit many in our age of isolation.

 

Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day

A few years ago I picked up a copy of The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day’s autobiography.  For those who don’t know of her, Day was a Catholic social activist and writer during the Great Depression and in the years afterwards.  She and Peter Maurin were the guiding forces behind the Catholic Worker, a newspaper that described the mistreatment of the poor and advocated for social change to benefit them.  I read the book earlier this summer, and wanted to say a few things about it.

I said that the book is an autobiography, but Day didn’t regard it as such.  As she put it: “I have never intended to write an autobiography.  I have always wanted instead to tell of things that brought me to God and that reminded me of God.”   She saw her problems as simply a manifestation of what concerned all humanity, the “needs of sustenance and love.”  The “long loneliness” of the title describes our inability to satisfy such needs fully.  At times, the loneliness was severe, as when she moved to New York in 1916 at age 19: “In all that great city of seven millions, I found no friends; I had no work; I was separated from my fellows.  Silence in the midst of city noises oppressed me. . . . I wanted to weep my loneliness away.”  At times the loneliness almost lifted, as when a few years later she entered into a common-law marriage with Forester, an English anarchist, and lived in a beach house on Staten Island.  She obviously delighted in the rich stew of people living at the beach, just as she later delighted in the myriad people who came through the hospitality houses sponsored by the Catholic Worker.  She wrote of having been at peace during the years at the beach, but not having been entirely content:

“I was happy but my very happiness made me know that there was a greater happiness to be obtained from life than any I had ever known.  I began to think, to weigh things, and it was at this time that I began consciously to pray more.”

Her spiritual movement culminated in her eventual conversion to Catholicism, to which Forester responded by leaving, just as Dorothy expected he would.  She lamented, “I had known enough of love to know that a good healthy family life was as near to heaven as one could get in this life.”  Dreading being alone, she had delayed her formal conversion.  She only acted under the impetus of joy: the joy of having a daughter, combined with the desire to have the child baptized.  We tend to think that unhappiness is a strong motivator for change, but often it only immobilizes.  As with Day, joy rather than misery is often what propels us to take action. 

Day initially felt dissonance over being a member of a church that sided with the powerful, hoarded wealth, and ignored social injustices.  A few years later, though, she met Peter Maurin, a prophetic figure who had a vision of a transformed society in which workers could together produce enough so that everyone’s needs were met.  Together, they founded the Catholic Worker movement, beginning with the newspaper but adding houses of hospitality and a number of farms.   The book describes their struggles for just working conditions and fair wages, but Day’s primary interest appears to have been in people–those who were a part of the movement and those whom they helped.  She was a pacifist in a time of nationalism and militarism; the fruitless struggle to change the country’s direction contributed to her loneliness.

Day was not an activist who shunned the contemplative life; she had a deep experience of God, and saw the primary purpose in life as growing in love for him.  I was struck by her statement that this life is crucial for developing our relationship with God:  “If we do not learn to enjoy God now we never will.  If we do not learn to praise Him and thank Him and rejoice in Him now, we never will.”   Even more than her relationship with God, though, sharing the journey with like-minded people was what sustained her.  She put it this way:

“The only answer in this life, to the loneliness we are all bound to feel, is community.  The living together, working together, sharing together, loving God and loving our brother, and living close to him in community so we can show our love for Him.”

Day reminds me of  Christ’s parable of the treasure hidden in a field.   Fnding a treasure, Day sold all she had—sold her happiness with Forester—to purchase that field.  She knew when making the transaction the value that the Catholic faith would have for her, but didn’t realize until later that also located on the property would be the tremendous consolation of community.  Her book gives no hint that she ever regretted the choice she made.

 

Watch what you write!

The New York Times recently had an article on a new methodology for measuring the nation’s emotional well being.  Rather than ask people whether they are happy or sad, the researchers cull cultural products for evidence of our collective mood.  Specifically, the researchers gathered the lyrics of hundreds of thousands of songs and millions of blog entries, then subjected these documents to a content analysis, rating the positive or negative valance of a sample of the words each item contained.  The cumulative result is taken as a measure of our collective satisfaction uncontaminated by self-report biases.  During the period covered by the study, well-being was at its lowest ebb on September 11, 2001, and crested the day that President Obama was elected.

One interesting analysis was of blog entries by age of blogger.  Not surprisingly, the glummest blogs were written by teens.  Entries were progressively more positive with increasing age, peaking with us marvelously content bloggers in our 50s and 60s.  Older than that, though, the average rating declined some, presumably because entries contained more words like “wrinkled,” “arthritic,” and “incontinent.”

Let’s see. . . even as I write this, researchers are trolling the blogosphere, analyzing each word to determine the nation’s well-being.  It’s especially incumbent on us middle-aged bloggers to show the world that we Americans are HAPPY, by gum!  So, here goes: Satisfaction!  Contentment!  Fulfillment!  Goodness and beauty!  Peace and prosperity!  Happy happy, joy joy!

 

Work

My son Elliot has been blogging about his reactions to The Truth Project, a DVD series presenting a Christian view of knowledge that was screened this spring at the church where he is interning.  As Elliot describes it, Del Tackett, the presenter, has his sights set mainly on post-modernist epistemology and on related social phenomena.   I was struck by Elliot’s post about the Project’s take on work and economics.  According to him, Tackett strongly criticizes contemporary society’s view of work:

“The world’s view of work, according to Del, is that it is a ‘four-letter word.’ It’s just something people do because they need the money. He says that ‘we’re seeing an increase in a negative view of work, corporations and this whole sphere.’”    

According to Elliot, Tackett contrasts such aversion to work with a Biblical emphasis the value of work, relying for his exposition on the creation story in Genesis.  He suggests that God was the first worker and put Adam in Eden to work within it. Thus, work is good.  His economic model is based on the premise that material things belong to God and humans are to be creative stewards of those things.

I’m not convinced that American society has such a negative view of work.  If we can’t stand work, why do we do so much of it?  According to a 2005 Business Week article, “More than 31% of college-educated male workers are regularly logging 50 or more hours a week at work, up from 22% in 1980.”  Sure, Tackett’s explanation fits some cases: working more earns us more money, which we like.  In that regard, one explanation that’s been offered for the disparity between the length of the work week in America and Europe is that the marginal tax rate is much lower here than in much of Europe, so we get to keep more of whatever income we generate.  Still, if we don’t like the work, would those extra couple hundred dollars a month be enough of a lure to keep us at the office for such long hours?

I work two jobs, often totaling 60 hours or so a week.  I like what I do.  As both a professor and psychotherapist, I’m constantly challenged by complex problems that have a significant impact on the lives of others.  Sometimes I manage to do something that helps someone, sometimes I don’t, but it’s a privilege just to be able to try.   In the classical Protestant sense, I regard what I do as a calling.  I see myself as not just earning an income but as serving the greater good.  Am I the exception?  I don’t think so. I talk to lots of people about their lives, and many of them seem to find meaning in the work they do.  They’re a little reluctant to say that; perhaps there’s a norm that we’re expected to be a little jaded or cynical about our jobs, so we’re afraid of seeming too much the Pollyanna if we don’t complain.  When people get past this, though, they talk about how interesting the work is, how much they enjoy the challenge, or how they feel good about making a contribution.   

 

This is not to say that such an attitude about work is universal.  Most of the people I talk to are native-born middle-class Americans.  Perhaps the Protestant work ethic described by Weber is still driving that group in particular.  If so, though, we aren’t particularly focused on the theology of work.  We just like what we do and believe it to be worthwhile.   We may shirk from it at times—most of us don’t particularly enjoy having to expend the effort that our jobs take.  Still, far from being a four-letter word, our work is a blessing to us.

 

Happy Planet Index

Whitney Larrimore recently alerted me that still another list has been released purporting to tell the world what countries are happiest.  Leading the happiness parade in this accounting is Costa Rica.  The article that Whitney sent the url for had a slide show of the top ten countries.  I was surprised that none of the European social democracies that usually top these lists was in evidence.  Instead, there were countries like Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.  What gives?  The land of sclerotic cold-war Communism is a place of joy?  I expected to see Sudan or Zimbabwe show up next.  

It turns out that the list—named the Happy Planet Index—was calculated by the New Economics Foundation, an English advocacy organization concerned with social issues and the environment.  The index isn’t designed to measure which places are happiest.  Instead, as the index’s website states, it aims to show “the relative efficiency with which nations convert the planet’s natural resources into long and happy lives for their citizens.”   To get the index, its developers in essence divided each nation’s “Happy Life Years” by its “Ecological Footprint.”  An “Ecological Footprint” is a variant of the per capita carbon footprint.  The authors don’t explain precisely how they calculate “Happy Life Years,” but they do indicate that it is a function of two indicators:  life expectancy at birth and answers to the life satisfaction question on the Gallup World Poll.  In other words, if you say you’re satisfied with your life and you’re likely to have a long life span, you have lots of “Happy Life Years.”  The statistic seems flawed.  If I’m totally dissatisfied with my life but will live a long time, I would have more Happy Life Years than if I was miserable and am expected to die young.  In the first case, shouldn’t I be said to have lots of “Miserable Life Years” rather than “Happy Life Years?”  

Anyway, the US doesn’t fare so well on the Happy Planet Index.  We have plenty of Happy Life Years, but use up a ridiculously large amount of carbon.  Thus, we land in 114^th place, right between Madagascar and Nigeria.  Almost all the nations below us on the index are in sub-Saharan Africa, where Ecological Footprints are low but there aren’t many Happy Life Years to be had.

It’s easy to fault the Happy Planet Index for not really being a measure of happiness at all.  To do so, though, would be to accept the currently prevalent conception of happiness (i.e. as self-reported life satisfaction) in preference to another way of thinking of happiness that dates to Aristotle.  In that view, happiness is about a life well-lived, a life of virtue.  Certainly, there is more to virtue than limiting one’s impact on the environment, yet I don’t fault the Happy Planet folks for starting there.

 

The Harvard Developmental Study

George Vaillant

The June, 2009 issue of The Atlantic has an article on the Harvard Developmental Study (also known as the Grant Study after department-store magnate W. T. Grant,  who provided initial funding), begun in 1937 to trace the long-term course of healthy adult development.  Here is a link to a video in which George Vaillant, who has been the study’s lead researcher for over 40 years, discusses life lessons that he extracted the accumulated data.  Though the Atlantic article frames the study as being about happiness, the intent all along has been to study each life in all its complexity, regardless of whether the outcome was joy or misery.

Vaillant is a psychoanalytically trained psychiatrist whose initial involvement stemmed from his fascination with the rich trove of information found in the study’s archive.  He was successful at revitalizing the study at a time when resources were quite limited, and has continued the work unabated until its final phase, when data collection is nearing the end as participants die off. 

In reviewing the information gathered, Vaillant concluded that the men’s lives were successful or unsuccessful not because of their good or poor fortune—the favorable or unfavorable events that happened to them—but because of their adaptations to those events.  By “adaptations,” he didn’t mean so much conscious coping strategies but unconscious reactions to the world.  In other words, he was interested in the defense mechanisms first identified by Freud and subsequently described most thoroughly by the ego analysts.  Adaptations range from the primitive, psychotic reactions, through the immature and neurotic reactions, to the healthy, mature reactions. 

Besides adaptations, Vaillant found that relationships were invaluable to fashioning meaningful and fulfilling lives.  In 2008, he told an interviewer that “the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”  In particular, he found that the Harvard men’s relationships at age 47 were the best predictor of adjustment in late life.  Not surprisingly, relationships early in life were also important to later life adjustment.  One finding is particularly fascinating: “93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger.”  Sibling relationships have been neglected in most psychological theories; maybe they are more important than we realize.  

We tend to think of positive emotions as something people always seek.  Who doesn’t want to be happy or joyful?  As described in the article, Vaillant thinks positive emotions have a cost as well.  Hopes can be dashed; love has inherent within it the possibilities of rejection and loss; the pride felt in success can be accompanied by the fear of future failure.   Vaillant thought that it was because of such considerations that some of the Harvard men avoided experiences that would have been likely to evoke positive emotions.  For example, one of the men, a physician, retired when he reached 70.  His wife secretly contacted many of his patients and asked whether they would be interested in writing a letter of appreciation.  A hundred of them did.  His wife collected these and presented them to him.  During an interview with Vaillant eight years later, the man proudly showed the box containing the letters.  He started crying, and said “I’ve never read it.”  Vaillant’s comment about the incident was, “It’s very hard for most of us to tolerate being loved.”  What a paradox: we desperately desire yet desperately fear love.

 

 

The Unhappiest Cities

The magazine Business Week recently tried to determine the most unhappy cities (among the 50 largest) in America.   To make their estimates, they combined several measures that they judged would indicate misery among the populace.  The factors weighted most heavily were depression level, suicide rate, crime rate, and economic factors.  The first three of these certainly make sense; though income level is a fairly weak predictor of unhappiness, the economic indicators that were chosen–unemployment and job loss–may be a better predictor.  Attention was also given to divorce, the amount of green space, and number of cloudy days.  So, what rust belt city came out on top . . . er, on bottom?  None of them did!  Number one in misery was instead awarded to:

 

That’s Portland, Oregon, with Mt. Hood in the background.  Portland residents have achieved their lofty rating by having the highest depression rate of any of the 50 cities.  They also divorce a lot (ranking fourth in that category) and have plenty of cloudy days (220 a year).  Second prize goes to St. Louis largely by virtue of having the highest crime rate of any of the cities studied; third was New Orleans and fourth was Detroit.  More dreary Midwestern cities made the top ten, but so did sunbelt havens Las Vegas and Jacksonville, Florida.  The entire report can be found here. 

I wonder about the methodology of the study.  Though some of the measures at least have good face validity, others are more arguable.  How sure can we be that the clouds over Portland actually make its residents more unhappy?  Green space is nice to have, but does it really contribute substantially to happiness?  Depression estimates were based on doctor/hospital reports and insurance claims.  Maybe Portland’s high depression rating is an artifact of more people in Portland than elsewhere discussing their mood with their physician.  Or it could be that Portland doctors are more prone to use the mental health codes from the diagnostic manual when billing insurance providers.

Regardless of how accurate the specific rankings are, it does make sense to think that some cities have more unhappiness than others.  Though factors such as those examined by the Business Week writers may start the unhappiness ball rolling, it probably acquires a momentum of its own.  I blogged earlier about the contagion of happiness–happiness, like the flu, seems to pass from one individual to the next.  It makes sense to think that unhappiness works the same way.  So, Portlanders, watch out for those depressed neighbors!  Washing your hands often and sucking up zinc capsules may ward off colds, but they won’t keep you from catching this form of dis-ease!

 

Announcing Joy

I’ve posted recently about joy, so, when I ran across this quote from Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation, I wanted to add his voice to what I said:

“I have committed myself to joy. I have come to realize that those who make space for joy, those who prefer nothing to joy, those who desire the utter reality, will most assuredly have it. We must not be afraid to announce it to refugees, slum dwellers, saddened prisoners, angry prophets. Now and then we must even announce it to ourselves. In this prison of now, in this cynical and sophisticated age, someone must believe in joy.”

What a marvelous vocation: Announcer of Joy.