| Know Thyself |
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Sermon by Mark Wakefield on Sunday 12th July 2009 Last August Bank Holiday my wife and I decided to spend the weekend down in Dorset. It goes without saying that now that both our children have left school they didn’t want to join us. Instead we took along our baby substitute who comes in the form of a miniature Dachshund called Otto. As the weather was good we were able to do some really nice walks. On the first of them however, we lost our way and ended up in a field where a herd of cows were grazing. Now I was brought up in the country and have always really liked cows, not least because my best friend at primary school was a dairy farmer's son, so as a young boy I spent quite a lot of time around them. I therefore had no hesitation in walking across this field, much to the distress of my wife who really wasn't so sure. In the end I gave in to what seemed to me to be her unfounded fears and turned back. I did so with a bit of irritation. After all, what could the smart city girl tell the country boy about cows? Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I'm sitting at the breakfast table eating my toast when I hear on the radio a rather distressing story about a woman out walking her dogs who had died when stampeded by herd of cows. When I read in the paper the next day that this had come on top of a similar event last year I had cause to ruefully reflect on what I should have learnt by now - that Belinda is always right. Now I realise that many of you will jump to the immediate conclusion that this is yet another case of female intuition triumphing over the stupidity of male bravado. Well, we can debate that after the service. For me however, the moral of the story is that our instincts and emotions are not an unerring guide to action, except in the most extreme circumstances. For instance, had the cows decided to stampede I would not have manfully stood there saying "not just hold on there Buttercup, I'm sure we can talk about this". No, I would have legged it faster than anyone. But too often things just aren't that clear cut, especially when we experience conflicting emotions. And it's just such a case of conflicting emotions that we find in today's gospel reading that tells the well-known story of the beheading of John the Baptist. King Herod is clearly a man in emotional turmoil. In the story he is caught between two dominant emotions - love and affection on the one hand and fear on the other. He feared John the Baptist because John told him the truth about the wrongness of his taking his brother's wife as his own and we know from historical sources other than the bible that Herod's family was notoriously incestuous. At the same time, Mark tells us that Herod nonetheless "liked to listen" to John. Of course, Herod is also charmed by his wife's daughter, Salome, fatefully so as he effectively writes her a blank cheque on account of her lovely dancing and promises to give her whatever she wants, even half his kingdom. And finally - and I think crucially - he clearly fears losing face in front of his guests having made this promise to Salome. Now, heinous as Herod's crime is, his is a very understandable human dilemma: quite simply, which emotion should I trust? And you get the strong sense that it's the press of events that governs his decision to behead John, whereas what he really needed to do was to buy some time to reflect a little and interrogate his feelings. For me, one of the most interesting developments in the world of business over the last 20 years or so is the newly enhanced understanding of the importance of emotions in decision-making. When I made the move from television production into the hard commercial world of management consulting ten years ago I expected all the talk to be of bottom lines, revenue maximisation, profit and loss accounts and so on. Well, so it proved to be but I was very surprised to find that my new colleagues were also talking about the importance of emotions in business too. The reason was quite simple - the latter part of the last century had seen major scientific advances in the understanding of how the brain works that are brilliantly expressed in a very influential book called "Emotional Intelligence" by the American journalist Daniel Goleman that I am sure some of you will have heard of. The book describes how modern behavioural and neuroscience research has revealed the importance of the emotional centres of the brain in determining actions as distinct from our rational faculties. Hitherto, it had been assumed that emotion played a secondary role to that of reason. And this, of course, mirrored the view - still in many ways dominant in Western culture - that emotions are always to be mistrusted and that the exercise of reason alone can lead to right action. And yet, as we all know and as the research confirms, it's the emotional centres of the brain that make us the people we are in our passions and interests, our moral sense and our ability to relate to others. Now "Emotional Intelligence" does not argue that we should come over all fluffy and emotional - quite the contrary. Rather, it argues that we first of all need to acknowledge the vital role that emotions play in our lives and to then apply intelligence to them so that we can discern what they are telling us and work out which are to be trusted and which not. In all this, a capacity for reflection is key. Had Herod given himself time to reflect he might usefully have asked himself some questions such as:
Now if "Emotional Intelligence" has made self-awareness and self-understanding fashionable in business circles it's fair to say - great book that it is - that all it has done is to speak of a truth that is as old as the hills. Much of our great literature focuses on the struggle of men and women to understand themselves better. Think of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, all of them doomed because of a fatal lack of self-understanding. As Polonius says in Hamlet: "To thine own self be true and it must follow, as night follows day, Thou canst not then be false to any man". Put simply, without a degree of personal integrity there can never be peace for any of us, whether inwardly or in our relations with others. As an example, isn't it interesting in the gospel story that on hearing of Jesus for the first time Herod immediately jumps to the guilt-ridden conclusion than he is none other than John the Baptist raised from the dead? There really could be no surer sign that Herod had acted against his true nature than that. Elsewhere in the gospels we find Jesus challenging men and women to understand themselves better. Think of the rich young man in Matthew who comes asking what he must do to win eternal life. Jesus knows what will do this. In this particular case the young man must go and sell all his possessions. And of course he goes away grieving because he has so many of them. Conflicting emotions again. Or think of the woman at the well in John. She rejoices at her encounter with the man who, as she says, "told me everything that I have ever done", and there is a wonderful sense in that story of someone becoming at last unburdened through understanding themselves better. It is, I think, one of the great paradoxes of religion - and this seems to be a feature of all the great religions - that the quest for God goes not outward but inward, for there is no knowing God without first knowing ourselves. Why is this? Quite simply, because if we have a distorted view of ourselves we'll inevitably have a distorted view of the world and - ultimately - of God too. Whereas God wants us to be ourselves - our true selves - and in so being to live our lives abundantly, as Jesus says in John's gospel. But wonderful as that prospect is it's not all that God has in store for us. For self-knowledge is not an end in itself but a means to an end and that end is nothing less than self-transcendence - our being caught up in the infinite and great mystery that is God. Or, as St. Augustine put it in the 4th century: "We must first be restored to ourselves and then, making of ourselves, as it were, a stepping ston, we rise thence to God". Amen |
