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A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Bruce Clear
Sunday,
All
One of the earliest and wisest pieces of self-help advice ever given comes from the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who declared that “the unexamined life isn’t worth living.” In his day, thousands of years ago, the examined life was quite theoretical and philosophical. If you look at his writing in context, examining your life meant understanding the metaphysics of being human.
Today, any talk about examining your life is far more precise and specific. It is about whether the choices we are making in life lead us to a fulfilling existence. It means measuring our emotional health. “Examining” our life can use the word “examination” somewhat literally. We look at the way we are living, put it to the test to see if it passes the standard of what we want out of life. And as you review your life, understand if the strategies and values you have chosen meet up to what you expect from life. Plato may have called it, “examining your life.” Dr Phil would look you in the eye and say, “So, how’s that workin’ for ya?”
This morning, I use Dr. Phil as a lens through which to discuss examining our lives. He is perhaps the most visible popular example in our day of modern attempts at examining our lives.
It is not my intention either to endorse or critique Dr. Phil as a celebrity, psychologist, or self-help author. I know he is not universally celebrated, and his public celebrity invites careful evaluation and review. But he offers perhaps the most accessible and popular example of the phenomenal “self-help” movement which is today’s version of Plato’s admonishment to examine our lives carefully.
Over the period of my lifetime, there has been an explosion of self-help books and an industry of seminars and retreat centers and workshops that are built around these books. Many people have had some reservations early on about this self-help movement. Maybe it’s the commercialization surrounding it, combined with a typical target audience of vulnerable people, combined with a long history in our country of what we euphemistically call “snake oil salesmen.”
Yes, that is probably it. It isn’t always that easy to discern with confidence the difference between honest “self-help” teachers and snake oil salesmen. I know it isn’t always that easy for me.
Many years ago I was listening to another Unitarian minister give a workshop on some topic or other, and while explaining some theory or other of personality development he paused and said,
“Now admit it. When you go into a bookstore, aren’t you drawn first to the shelves that are labeled “self-help’ books?”
The fact was that then only rarely did I check out the self-help shelves, though I do admit they offered some of the cleverest titles. As the other minister was talking, I reflected on this and as I glanced around the room I discovered a lot of heads nodding in agreement with him. The others in the audience really did check out the self-help books first! Wow! I realized two things at that moment: first, that I was again out of step, and second, since that room was filled with Unitarians, if I want to keep in touch with my own people – that is if I want to keep my job – maybe I'd better give those "self-help" shelves another glance.
Please don't get me wrong. I don't have any specific criticism to say about self-help books. I've read quite a few over the years, and found some to be quite, well, self-helpful. Even more importantly, I know some people who read them voraciously – I could have said "religiously” – and testify that they have changed their lives for the better, and I can see evidence of such change.
So now I say to myself and others: “have at it!” After all, I think I'm fairly safe in guessing that there have been more self-help books published in the last thirty years or so than have been published in all previous human history. That is not a scientifically derived statistic, just an educated guess from a bibliophile.
A
credible argument can be made that self-help books are needed these days because our lives are somehow different from
previous eras of history. One wonders
whether the village blacksmith in 18th century
The fact is that
self-help books are probably
needed more today than in earlier years, in part because the human
"self" in modern culture is more isolated than ever before. The blacksmith in colonial
The blacksmith in colonial Vermont also had a community to shape him up if he got out of line, to cheer him on if he met with some accomplishment, to cheer him up if he got depressed, and to help him out if he came on hard times. The community could not be escaped. The people who came into his blacksmith shop were the same people he ran into shopping at the dry-goods store, they were the same people he went to church with, and they were the same people who hung out at the tavern and played checkers.
How different our life is in modern times. Few of us are fortunate to have more than one or two extended family members within a day's drive. If we do run into someone we know at the store, it is such an unusual occurrence that it is worth mentioning when we get home. ("Guess who I saw at Marsh?") If we want to meet with a friend these days we have to get out our calendars first and make an appointment.
Even our own immediate families have culturally induced distance. Both spouses work, and are tired when they get home. The kids have music lessons, sports, and school events – all away from home. In most cases, the number of waking hours that we don't see our family far exceeds the number of waking hours that we do see our family.
It seems to me there is an important role for the self-help work these days. While there are plenty of snake oil salesmen and merchants selling psycho-babble, some work is quite valuable. In fact, I now do visit self-help shelves in the book stores, and I have found a number of them to be useful.
I suppose I don’t need to introduce TV personality Dr. Phillip McGraw, best known as “Dr. Phil,” to many of you. He is a psychologist with a Ph.D. credential who hosts a daily television talk show which focuses on a plethora of dysfunctional behaviors among people. He also has written several self-help books. It is the books which are more of interest to me today.
I’ll begin, though, with a couple of comments about his TV show. When interviewed, Dr. Phil goes to great pains to point out that what he is doing on his show should not be confused with therapy. He has received some criticism in some psychological circles for seeming to portray therapy on his show as solving serious problems in a fifteen minute exchange with the show’s guest. He does not pretend to be functioning as a therapist. What he is doing, he says, is education, though he also admits it is also entertainment. “I think about myself as an alarm clock,” he has said. “I think about myself as an emotional compass.”
A second observation about his television show is that his style is definitely interesting to watch. He can be confrontational, he can be sympathetic, but he is always direct, even blunt in his opinions and advice. He also has affected a folksy, “Aw-shucks, I’m-just-a-country-boy-from-Oklahoma” way of talking filled with aphorisms that sound genuine. If a couple gives differing versions of the same problem, he’ll say, “No matter how flat you make it, even a pancake has two sides.” If he’s telling a husband how his wife should deal with his misbehavior, he might say, “She’ll be on you like a duck on a June bug.” When talking to someone who is keeping secrets from family, he’ll say, “Don’t you know that monsters live in the dark?” If someone is afraid to make important decisions in their lives, Dr. Phil might say, “You can’t play the game of life with sweaty hands.”
But his books seem to revolve around one well-known Dr. Philism: “So, how’s that workin’ for ya?” It is a plea for the examined life and a few tools to apply if it needs a little fixing.
A deliberate and regular examination of our emotional and psychological life, it seems to me, is especially important in our society. We take our cars in regularly for servicing, or at least oil changes. We have regular physical check-ups with the doctor, or at least we know we should. Pets get their regular shots. Furnace filters get replaced on schedule and your computer should run a virus scan once in a while, whether it needs it or not. There are plenty of things in life that deserve our attention on a regular basis, but it is so easy to overlook our emotional health.
That is, I think, what a good “self-help” book should do. It requires us to take stock of our lives, examine it, and it seems to me an important exercise to undertake on a regular basis, whether we need it or not. Dr. Phil says his role is like an “alarm clock.” Time for a check-up!
Dr. Phil’s down-home aphorisms appear in his books as well in his TV show. Some of his aphorisms seem to get right to the point. One of my favorite of his observations is “your life is not a dress rehearsal.” He repeats many of these, but I remember when I first heard him say this, I realized this was a fresh way of bringing home an important point. So many times we seem to live as if we are making preparations for the life we want to have, not realizing that we are shortchanging our present life. Sometimes it seems that we’re more focused on trying to live rather than actually living.
Let me shift gears briefly. One of the interesting concepts I carried with me out of seminary years ago is the phrase “heuristic device.” I’ve rar3ely had a context to use it, but I think of it here.
A “heuristic” device is a tool one uses to find a new way of interpreting things, even if the tool is artificial. For example, some people (not very many) suggest that the New Testament book of Revelation – which is filled with visions of ghost riders descending from the sky, apocalyptic disasters and mysterious cosmic images – some suggest that this book might have been written under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs.
There is, of course, no empirical evidence to support the hypothesis, but if you read the book through that point of view, it reveals a whole lot that might be missed if read differently. The hypothesis that the author of the book of Revelations was on some kind of “magic mushrooms,” is a “heuristic device.” It is entirely invented, but the interpretive power it can supply is impressive.
Sometimes I am asked what I think of things like astrology, tarot cards, runes, I Ching, crystals, and other forms of fortune-telling that I put under the broad category of “divination.” My answer is that I see them having good potential value as “heuristic” devices. Such activities can be used as a tool to look differently at our life and our fate. The question of whether they are true is beside the point of the question whether they can be useful or creative tools for interpretation and self-understanding.
In many ways, I look at psychological self-help workbooks and exercises as “heuristic” devices. Dr. Phil’s books are filled with suggested exercises for examining your life more closely. For example, the heart of the exercises in his book “Self Matters” is that everyone can evaluate who they have become through identifying:
10 Defining Moments
7 Critical Choices, and
5 Pivotal People
in our lives. The numbers, of course, are somewhat arbitrary, but it makes sense that we each have defining moments, critical choices and pivotal people in our lives. Readers are told to reflect on and as a written exercise identify in their own lives ten defining moments that were their most life-altering experiences. These moments could have been traumatic and disastrous or moments of joy and even epiphany, but our life was changed because of them. Readers then identify seven critical choices over their lifetime. Easy ones might be our choice of spouse or choice of career, but others may not be so easy to identify – to put your children first or to turn down a promotion. Then readers identify five pivotal people who over the course of their lives helped make them who they are. Teachers are popular here, but also parents and mentors. The pivotal people may even be influential by reverse, because you changed your behavior so you wouldn’t be like them. When I did this exercise, I picked as one of my five pivotal people someone who has been dead for over 200 years.
Nancy and I did this exercise some years ago, sharing our result with each other. I recall our discussions having meaningful insight. We repeated it again this week in anticipation of this sermon, and again, I think we found even new insights.
We can actually try a piece of it here, in our heads. I’m going to ask each of you, if you wish, to take about thirty seconds, and come up with what for you are the five pivotal people who shaped your life into what it is today. It can be from childhood, it can be from reading, but try and think of five.
PAUSE
I know it is not enough time to be thorough. But this may help to show how it works. Now comes an important question: Was your name on the list? Are you among the top five people who have shaped your life? Shouldn’t you be? That is, I suppose, the whole point of “self-help”: no one has, or should have, greater influence or power in shaping who we are than we ourselves do. Sometimes it is helpful to have tools for self-reflection. Or, as Dr. Phil says it, “Sometimes it’s hard to see your own face without a mirror.”
“The unexamined life isn’t worth living,” Plato told us many years ago. It remains true today. But it helps, I think, to find tools for reflection, and whether it is Dr. Phil’s tools or some other useful ones, the idea of regularly examining life – where your’s originated, and why it is what it is – is a healthy thing to do.
Whether you are among those who admire Dr. Phil or find him boorish and arrogant and simplistic, we all can have different opinions of course. Remember, “no matter how flat you make it, even a pancake has two sides.”