For
over twenty years now, I have concentrated on developing my emotional intelligence,
with significant success.I’ll never
be an emotive virtuoso, but my capacity for empathy and compassion has
grown significantly.My experience
is a testimony to the reality that one can increase one’s emotional intelligence
and sensitivity.
And
if I can do it, so can you.One important
school of emotional growth for me was my Unitarian Universalist congregation.This
community is a place where that learning can happen for you as well.
Let
us point our attention this morning at increasing the intelligence ofour
emotions as we join together in the celebration of life.
What emotions do I have access to
as I move inward now for this
time of meditation?
I always find I have easy access to thankfulness right here in this
place.
Thankfulness for the vibrancy of this religious community
And each individual in it that helps create that vitality.
I’m thankful for the opportunities of my birth to wise, and caring
parents,
Who continue to watch out for
me and wish me well.
I’m thankful for my wife Philomena and my son Andy and
All they bring into my life.
I’m thankful I live in a nation that values justice, equality and freedom
I’m thankful the spirit of the American Dream is found
In the heart and soul of Unitarian
Universalism as well.
I feel thankful today.
And I’m joyful today.
The pleasure of ear and eye and nose and mouth and skin and thinking
Lift my spirits as I witness the
exuberance of being all around me;
The abundant creative principle
of
which the human species is one of its most amazing results;
In a vast galaxy, for all we know, practically devoid of life
we have the opportunity to exist
on this blue green orb teeming with life.
I feel joyful today.
Yet for all my joy, I know sadness too.
Not everyone is able to celebrate at the feast around us.
My knowing of those suffering deprivation, addiction, illness,
the insults of aging and death, brings a heaviness to my heart.
The hatred and violence seething around the globe troubles my mind.
There are those who suffer wrongly at another’s hands, children brutalized,
Women abused, men maimed, victims
of the will to power and control.
I feel sadness opening myself to their plight.
As I feel that sadness, a sense of anger and disgust wells up within
me.
Much of the hunger, homelessness, and suffering could be solved, IF
The collective will could be mobilized
to bring it to an end.
Much of the problem is not in the limitations of the world
But rather in the limitations
of our collective hearts and minds.
I feel anger today.
That anger is tempered by recognizing those who are responding.
My heart warms as I remember the many people and organizations
Rolling up their sleeves and giving
of their assets to help others.
We may not have all the answers but we know the right directions
Toward love and away from hate
Toward generosity and away from
greed
Toward wisdom and away from ignorance.
I feel love today, thinking of the great works of generosity being
done in the world.
Even though some of these efforts are small, they inspire hope,
a hope grounded in inherent human worth and dignity.
Knowing our worth and dignity can be touched and brought forward,
is the ground of my thankfulness,
joy, sadness, anger, love and hope.
Human worth and dignity may wax and wane with the times
but it is never extinguished.
My faith springs from this awareness of the eternal potentiality that
Love can conquer hate;
Generosity can overcome greed;
Wisdom can dissipate ignorance.
I am feeling grateful
This community is committed to activating that potentiality,
Bringing love, generosity and wisdom to life.
I feel hope today and I am thankful to be part of this community.
Not
that anyone wanted to abandon feelings, mind you.Scientists
still wanted to go to the opera, and exuberantly yell ‘Bravo’ at the end
with tears in their eyes.They still
wanted to attend agonizing Shakespearean tragedies that explore the human
capacity for evil.They still longed
to fall hopelessly in love--just not during their work hours.
What
particularly disturbed these modern, largely male, divinators of truth
was the capacity of emotions to disturb the intellect.I
was reminded of this power while watching the romantic comedy, A Family
Affair, shown last Sunday night as part of the anti-Super Bowl party.The
star, Rachel, has a falling out with her lover Reggie, and moves from New
York City to Southern California where her family lives.There,
she seeks a new relationship and falls in love with Christine.They
decide to marry but Rachel struggles with fully committing herself to the
relationship, even though she loves Christine very much.They
return home one evening and there is a message from Reggie on the phone
for Rachel.Compulsively, Rachel
must secretly call her back.Even
though every rational bone in her body knows this is foolish, even though
Christine is the best friend she has ever had, her longing for the fantasy
of what could potentially happen with Reggie returns.I
remember wanting to shout at the screen “don’t do it,” while remembering
my own misadventures of just this kind when I was young.
Strong
emotions can be devastatingly brutal when it comes to grief.An
unexpected, violent death of a loved one can literally feel like being
disemboweled.The flood of emotion
can completely overwhelm one’s capacity to think or function normally--not
just for hours, but for days, weeks, even months, sometimes years.Life
threatening illness and clinical depression can be triggered by a major
loss.No one who has been through
such a loss can belittle the power of emotions to make one feel out of
control.The power of emotions to
overwhelm the mind and drive it to behave irrationally can lead one to
believe that emotions are primitive, unrefined expressions of our animal
nature, unreliable and unsuitable for serious study.
The
newer technologies for peering into the brain have motivated a few scientists
to take a second look at the world of emotions.Advances
in medical imaging have allowed researchers to examine the biological systems
that generate emotions in much greater detail.In
the process, they have discovered a deeper logic to the emotions with a
foundation in neuroanatomy.This
more detailed understanding is revealing what is fixed in our brain function
and what is malleable and responsive to conditioning and learning.
The
emotional central processing unit seems to be the amygdala, a pair of almond-sized
structures that sit on the brain stem.The
amygdala generates the signals that initiate chemical messengers in the
blood stream and neurological signals to various organs.The
amygdala is a little like our body’s panic button.When
it is stimulated it rings all the alarm bells in the body and gets us ready
to flee, freeze or fight.
The
stimulation of the amygdala is done by both lower and higher levels of
the brain.The sensation of heat
coming from the fingertips doesn’t need much brain processing to send a
signal to the amygdala that initiates a reflex to pull the hand away from
the source of heat.Now, think about
someone pointing a gun at you and cocking the hammer.This
is just the kind of thing that would cause my amygdala to go into overdrive.A
high degree of brain processing is required to recognize that the object
being pointed at me is a gun and to remember that guns are life-threatening.
Recognizing
a gun first requires the thalamus to process data from the optic nerve
then send it on to the visual cortex.The
hearing of the hammer cocking is not a sound that is inherently threatening
such as a very loud sound might be.The
integration of sight and sound with an understanding of how guns function
creates the danger signal to the amygdala.
Similarly,
there is nothing inherently disturbing about getting an email that should
cause us to panic.But reading a
message that contains a credible threat can elicit an intense reaction
just as if someone was standing in front of you with a gun.Many
levels of brain function are involved with triggering such an emotional
response but the end result is the activation of the amygdala.
Emotional
responses created by the amygdala after it is stimulated are biologically
based and have a fair amount of similarity around the globe.Their
purpose, says neurology professor, Antonio Damasio, is primarily the preservation
and maintenance of the organism’s homeostasis.The
basic, universal emotions are: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise,
and disgust.Emotions are directly
connected with biologically determined processes and can feed back into
the brain to reshape the mental and physical landscape inside the body.
Feelings,
in Damasio’s typology, are the brain’s cognitive interpretation of emotions.Anger
is an emotion; jealousy is a feeling linked to anger.Sadness
is an emotion; grief is a feeling linked to sadness, but also fear, anger,
surprise and even disgust.
I
found an interesting example of how this works.Scientists
filled two test tubes with the same substance that created the same smell
to test for the emotion of disgust.They
told their subjects one contained feces and the other contained an expensive,
finely aged cheese.Most people
reacted with disgust to the smell of the test tube labeled feces.A
significant number of those same people found the one labeled cheese quite
appealing.Clearly our perception
heavily influences our emotions.
Martha
Nussbaum has written a fascinating new book on the intelligence of emotions
called Upheavals of Thought.In
it, she presents her theory that emotions and feelings are strongly linked
to our valuing of the objects of our perception.If
we glance through the obituaries, for example, we generally don’t have
much of a reaction.People die every
day--it is a normal part of life.But
if we recognize the name of someone near and dear to us, the emotions of
surprise and sadness are likely to follow quickly.Our
emotional response will be linked to how much we value that person in our
lives.Nussbaum believes values are
central to understanding the intelligence of emotions.
In
Nussbaum’s analysis, for an emotion to arise, we need an object to appear
in our minds, such as the example of the gun or the sensation of hotness.Not
only must the object arise but we must have some sense of intention or
relationship with that object.Most
people are emotionally reactive to chocolate and the smell of decaying
flesh, for example, because they have a preexisting desire or aversion
in relation to those objects.My
emotional response is likely to be in proportion to the involvement I have
with that object.
What
most strongly affects my emotional response to an object are my beliefs
associated with the object.Believing
guns are potentially lethal is very important to recognizing them as a
threat.After the immediate reflexive
response to hotness many emotions and feelings will follow filled with
beliefs about what the hotness may have done to my hand.
The
final determiner of the emotional response will be the value placed on
the intention and the beliefs directed at the object.If
I recognize that the gun pointed at me is a prop in a skit and that the
person pointing it is my friend and the gun isn’t loaded, I’ll value the
situation differently than if I find myself in a dark alley at night, alone,
facing a stranger’s gun.
That
valuing process can profoundly shape the emotional response to the same
type of object or event.A five-year-old
Ifaluk boy died of meningitis after a short illness and at the moment of
his death, the boy’s biological mother “rose to her knees and began violently
pounding her chest. The adoptive mother…began to scream and throw herself
about on the ground. The whole house was filled with crying.”The
Ifaluk believe that those who do not “cry big” at a death will become sick
afterwards.
An
anthropologist related the story of a young Balinese housekeeper who cheerfully
asks for a week off to attend her fiancé’s funeral, showing no signs
of unhappiness.The anthropologist
is hard pressed to explain her feelings until he learns of her cultural
context.In the Balinese culture,
sad feelings are thought to be dangerous to one’s health.If
you brood or grieve over a loss, you weaken your life force and become
prey to malicious forces.Thus it
is culturally appropriate to deal with grief by expressing exaggerated
happiness.
These
two stories illustrate how beliefs and values shape emotional responses
to what we would classify as similar events.I
interpret this wide variation as really good news for all of us!It
means our emotional responses are not determined but rather are malleable
and can respond to conditioning and instruction.We
need not be prisoners of our emotional reactivity; we can influence and
redirect it in positive, non-harmful ways.
One
good example of this redirection is anger management training.Individuals
that have problems managing their anger can be greatly helped by directing
them to examine carefully the triggers, beliefs and values that support
their outbursts.By consciously
deciding to change those beliefs and values, their relationship to anger
can be transformed and brought under conscious control.
Another
wonderful example can be artistic appreciation.By
learning about the life circumstances of a composer and the intentions
and feelings that motivated the composition, one’s emotional enjoyment
of a piece of music can be increased.For
example, knowing that Tommy Dorsey was grieving the death of his wife and
son when he wrote the hymn, Precious Lord, deeply changed my feeling as
I sing it.By studying the style
of painting and the challenges an artist overcame to capture the image
on canvass, can deepen one’s appreciation of the work.By
knowing what economic, material, mechanical and engineering challenges
an architect faced, the beauty of the design can be magnified.
The
same logic applies to religious feeling.One
important dimension of what we do here on Sunday morning is to educate
our religious feelings.In every
service, I seek to elicit the feelings of joy and hope and connect it with
many different aspects of our lives.The
feelings of community and transpersonal love, what the Greeks called agape,
are important outcomes I strive to stimulate in relation to many different
people.Once felt, I seek to extend
that sense of community and love beyond the self and our congregation to
the world outside our doors.At times
that feeling of compassion is uncomfortable and confronts us with our limitations.At
other times, it validates the values and beliefs we already hold dear.The
education of our religious feeling allows us to extend our love and care
into larger and larger circles beyond ourselves.
As
I prepared this service this past week, I realized just how integral this
emotional education process is to what we do here.The
development of religious feeling is the highest level of emotional development.By
reshaping our beliefs and values inspired by the lives and teachings of
wise women and men, we are learning to love more fully.Through
looking at the art in Channing Hall or listening to our choir or singing
hymns, we are deepening our appreciation of art and music and infusing
our feelings with powerful religious associations.Just
the act of sitting in these pews for five, ten, twenty, or more years can
shape the emotions.I know of some
of our members who have described just sitting in our sanctuary as a holy
experience.Just our presence here
in this beautiful space can change us and enhance our emotional life-–in
a loving way.
Discovering
the feelings of love transformed the mental landscape of Proust’s character
M. de Charlus.What before was flat
is now full of hills and valleys.In
the experience of that range of emotion, he feels more intensely alive.Feeling
and emotion are key to our sense of well-being.The
examination and reflection on our beliefs and values can profoundly affect
one’s emotional responses to life.Participation
in this religious community is one way to educate those feelings and expand
their range.
May
we all better understand the beliefs and values that drive our emotions
so we may learn how to create more love here and in the wider community.And
through that learning, may we develop a richer emotional life that contributes
meaning and satisfaction to our lives.
Copyright
© 2004 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore.All
rights reserved.