HOME
SUNDAY SCHEDULE
NEWSLETTER
CALENDAR
DIRECTIONS
LEADERSHIP
PROGRAMS
OUR BELIEFS
SERMONS
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
SOCIAL ACTION
ABOUT US
CONTACT US

Imagine that your doctor calls you up one day and tells you, “I’ve got good news and bad news. Bad news is that you’re going to die within a month. Good news is that if you significantly change your lifestyle right now and for the next month and beyond, you’ll live a long and happy life.”

Could you make the change? Could you turn on a dime and go another direction with your life? After all, this is a real choice for many people, so you’d think the odds would be fairly high, especially if you were told that if you don’t change, you’ll die.

Sounds like a no-brainer. I’ll change. I’ll change. No, you won’t. In fact, if you got this phone call in which you were told, “Change or die,” odds are 9 to 1 that you won’t.

Of course, you’ll say, “Yes, I’ll change.” And of course, you’ll begin to make those changes in lifestyle, eating habits, recreational pursuits and so on. But it’s not long before your enthusiasm tapers off, and soon you’re back to square one. No change. No chance.

Case in point: People who’ve had heart bypass surgery, most definitely a life-and-death matter, are directed by their doctors to change their eating habits, stop smoking, exercise, significantly alter their lifestyle.

They know they should make those changes — know that they’ll die sooner than later if they don’t — yet multiple studies have shown that in just two years after such major surgery, 90 percent of these patients have not significantly altered their behavior. Change is just too tough.

Changing people’s behavior isn’t just a health care issue. It’s an issue for businesses, where companies go belly-up every day still chanting– “We’ve always done it this way.” Corporations spend millions each year on consultants to bring in new practices and promote change, but any changes made are, at best, short-lived and, at worst, rejected out of hand.

It’s like that old joke.

Question: How many UUs does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: What do you mean, change?!

It’s not that we don’t know what to do.

According to articles published last year in The Lancet, the information we need to keep many people from dying prematurely is already with us. It's straightforward lifestyle changes.

Research indicates that at least 80 percent of heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes, and 40 percent of cancer could be prevented through healthy diet, regular physical activity and tobacco abstinence.

So, if we know what to do, and we know how to do it, and if we know the consequences of not doing it involve imminent death, and that still doesn't move us to change, are we completely lost?

Well, no. The good news is that change does work for some people and institutions. There are people, few though they may be, who are able to engage in lasting, healthy change for themselves and their families or organizations. Change is tough, but not impossible. How do we do it?

The answer lies in understanding the nature of change itself. Part of the problem is that we most often view change as something we do — an activity or habit that must be altered. We tend to approach change issues such as heart disease or other behaviors with facts, analysis and information. We think about changing something in ourselves, but thinking is only one part of the process.

What we’re missing, says John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor, is the right brain. “Behavior change happens mostly by speaking to people’s feelings,” he says. “In successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought.”

Dr. Dean Ornish, founder of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute in California, agrees. Rather than tell a heart patient to change or die — the conventional approach — Ornish focuses on helping them tap into their emotions. He realizes that death is too frightening to think about for most people.

On the other hand, Ornish convinces his patients that feeling better is the goal, believing that those who feel better live longer. “Joy is a more powerful motivator than fear,” he says.

I know from experience that this can work. Many years ago, I had been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, for 20 years. In seminary, I realized that the following summer, I was going to be a chaplain at a hospital. That meant I would be dealing with people's families. Families whose their loved one had died of cancer – including lung cancer.

I decided that it was finally time to quit smoking. And I quit cold turkey. And it was very hard to do. But what I concentrated on was how good it would feel to be free of the nicotine monkey in my body.

A few weeks after I had quit smoking, I noticed that I hadn't really gained any weight. I was happy about that. And I forgot to pay attention to it. Within a few years, I gained about 40 pounds. Ouch.

And of course, you can guess what happened then. I developed Dunlop's disease. That's where your belly done lopped over your belt. And I was getting lower back pain. And I didn't have much energy, things weren't right.

And so then, I thought of how good I would feel, if I were more in shape. And so that led me to lose the weight. And so, I think Dr. Dean Ornish is on the right track. At least, it has helped me.

What we need in order to make real change is the ability to “reframe” our thinking. And this is harder than it sounds. Our frames, our perspectives work well for us at some point in our lives, so we put them into semi-automatic mode.

Eventually, we become very efficient at doing this, and we adopt our mind sets so well, we don't even realize we have them anymore. It is simply where our baseline perspective is, it is where we begin when we want to interpret new experience.

We become very attached to our frames. This is partly is why, for example, liberals & conservatives each think the other is nuts. They won’t hear anything that falls outside their frames.

Frankly, we have pre-sets in our minds, just like our car radios. We have margins of acceptability, just like our word processors automatically start with the margins in a certain place.

We have a picture of the world, just like we have a standard desktop screen saver for our computer monitor. Of course, we can change them from time to time, right? But we have to think about doing that.

It seems clear to me that by the time we’ve become adults, we’ve got some serious mind-sets, faults and defaults in our brain. And just like the pre-sets on the car radio, a mind-set, once the mind is set, is not easy to change.

When asked about their mind-defaults, here are how some people responded:

One said, “While I enjoy humor, my mind does not default to a joke. Many is the time when I’ve been in conversation with someone who has said something outrageous to get a laugh, and I have taken them seriously, only realizing belatedly that they were just kidding.

Another said, “The old moralist in me tends to default to seeing everything in social justice terms."

Still others said their minds went to suspicion and cynicism (especially about people in power).

Obviously there are times when mind-defaults are helpful, but there are also times when they aren’t. Particularly when we get stuck in them. Nonetheless, mind-defaults are part of our reality.

If you were here last week, you may have noticed that our neighbors to the East put up a large sign facing our parking lot for you to read. Here's the situation: almost 30 years ago, our current neighbors moved into their house. It was discovered that their fence was actually built on Eliot Chapel property. No one paid too much attention to this, until a storm came along a couple months ago and blew down the old rickety fence.

We came into the office one fine morning, and found a bunch of stone and construction equipment sitting in our handicapped parking spots. I asked Joy, our church secretary, to see if it was the neighbors or someone else's and to get it removed from our handicapped parking spaces because we were expecting people with mobility issues to come to church that day.

Then, our neighbors wrote us a letter, something to the effect of– we know the fence is on your land, why don't you just sell the land to us for $1,000. Then the neighbor did a lot of research on the Internet. Apparently, he now believes that the land is either already his, or he plans to take it through adverse possession.

Although our lawyer, has given the neighbor a copy of the Missouri statute that shows that adverse possession does not apply to churches, and has pointed out that property is legally described by deeds, and not by multiple surveys, our neighbor is sticking to his guns. So, the bottom line, is that we believe the property line is in one place, and our neighbor believes it is in another.

The tricky part here, is that there really isn't any compromise. It's like being pregnant – either you are or you aren't. Either we are right about where the property line is or we're wrong and he is right.

We've asked him to get a lawyer. And to have his lawyer talk to our lawyer. And we do this to take the emotion out of it, and because we want to be good neighbors. So really, it's up to him, as to what happens next.

And I tell you all this for two reasons really. One is to let you know what's going on. And another reason is: it is a perfect illustration of being locked into a particular mind set. One that doesn't want to admit that you don't have all the answers.

Sometimes, the best thing we can do when we're faced with a particularly thorny issue, is to bring in other people. Sometimes it might be a lawyer, or a physician, or a marriage counselor, or some other expert. Sometimes, an outside opinion is extremely valuable because it can shed light on our blind spots.

We can have default mind sets located in our blind spots and never even know they are affecting us, until one day, new light happens or some experience shakes us to our core. I think we inherit some mind sets from our parents & families; some we learn through school and friends; and the big ones come from our own direct experiences.

A Jewish man who was the only member of his family to survive the Nazi death camps explained that before the camp, he had been a happy person with a positive view of life. Afterward, though, his outlook was never the same. His mind now defaulted (though he didn’t use that word) to sadness, pessimism and a sense that life had no meaning. The death camp had reset his mind.

But that can happen in a more positive direction as well. Think about people who perceive the world as an unfriendly or unlucky place, who meet someone and fall in love. When they are loved in return, truly and deeply loved by another person, that is often enough to change everything, including the person’s gloomy outlook. Positive experience can change how we think.

Our experience colors the way we think and therefore the way we experience!

You might not normally be charitable. Then you serve dinner here for our guests at Room At The Inn– that's where 3 Thursdays a month, we drive some pre-screened homeless here, feed them, put them up for the night, wash the bedding the next day, and drive them back.

You might try this as a way of deepening your own spirituality, but you also are giving a gift to someone in need– a local homeless person.

You didn't think of yourself as generous and directly helping the homeless, and now look! You might be changing your mind set. You might have met someone who is more like you than you thought.

Or, you might not normally say a lot of positive things to people. Then, as part of your spiritual journey, you decide to try something new. You decide to say something nice to at least one or two people a day whether you're in a good mood or not. And you discover that this actually makes you feel better. Your mind set about saying positive things to people changes.

Or maybe your own life is such a big drama that you don't normally think about how others are doing. Then, as part of your spiritual journey, you decide to try something new. You decide to find at least one person each day with whom you can listen deeply about their life. And you discover you learn new things– things that broaden your own perspective. And your mind set changes.

In fact, there are scientific studies coming out all the time that reinforce this paradigm. There are recent studies on racism, for example, that challenge the older idea that racial prejudice is hardwired into all of us.

The earlier theory was that suspicion of people who are different from us is something inherent in our makeup, perhaps as a survival holdover from when our stone-age ancestors came upon other peoples who were not like them. At such a moment some primitive instinct identified the strangers as outsiders and caused our forebears either to run like crazy or to attack.

Recent studies conducted at the University of Toronto challenge the conclusion that racism is unavoidable. The researchers used technology that let them view the brain activity of the subjects. What they discovered was that the thoughtful, rational part of the brain snuffed out the prejudicial response that would have otherwise popped up in the “be careful” brain region.

The study highlights an important conclusion about our thinking processes — that we can modify or override our so-called mind-defaults with the cognitive regions of our brain. Source: Begley, Sharon. “Racism studies find rational part of brain can override prejudice.” The Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2004, B1.

We can learn that stereotyping is inaccurate – whether it's about race or gender or gays & lesbians. And we can learn it is possible to arrive at new mind sets based on that knowledge.

This is good news! It means that – with practice – we can change our actions to match our beliefs. If we affirm and promote the inherent worth & dignity of every person, but our actions don't seem to match up, this news means we can take steps to actually change our behavior, and reset our mind-defaults.

Some of you may be thinking that this is impossible. Others of you may be thinking this is no big deal. But it is a big deal. Orthodox religions tells us we are all degenerate sinners in the hands of an angry god, worthy only of damnation and destruction for all eternity!

Religious liberalism says we are capable of bettering ourselves and our world, and therefore have an obligation to try to do so. Unitarian Universalism says: Let our community strike sparks within us.

When the fire of commitment sets our mind and soul ablaze
When our hunger and our passion meet to call us on our way
When we live with deep assurance of the flame that burns within
Then our promise finds fulfillment and our future can begin

Let's sing it shall we? It's an insert in your order of service.