In yet another scientific study that tells us something we already knew, research to be published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggests that prayer calms anger. In the study, participants who received demeaning comments on an essay they wrote displayed less anger and aggression when they were asked to pray for, rather than simply think about, the person who made the insulting comments. This anger management effect held despite religious affiliation or frequency of church attendance. According to study co-author Brad Bushman, “prayer really can help people cope with their anger, probably by helping them change how they view the events that angered them and helping them take it less personally.”
How, I wonder, can this study constitute what the article describing it calls “emerging research”? In Matthew 5:44, we are told Jesus counsels us to “pray for those who persecute you”? I was not aware that Jesus’s injunction to adopt the benevolent perspective of disapproving the action but not the person required scientific validation. Who knew an empirical basis was necessary? I always thought the truth of it was self-evident. And how, I wonder, do the results of this study differ from the advice many of us received when young to count to 10 when angered, precisely to avoid responding in kind? As a newly-fledged teen, I had, as they say, anger issues, which, of course, I blamed on the temperament I had inherited from the Italian side of my family. My mother, much too wise to countenance a my-ethnicity-made-me-do-it excuse for a personal failing, finally took me to task for my volatile and incendiary temper, offering this advice, her version of the count-to-10 rule:
“Jerry, what’s the most pleasant thing you can think of”?
“Well, I guess that Little League game where I struck out the side with nine pitches. Seven fastballs, two curves.”
“OK; the next time you feel yourself getting angry, think of that, think of those nine pitches, and if you’re really angry, like you might lose control, think of the person you’re angry at as one of the three you’ve struck out and sent back to the dugout.”
Fifty years later, I still use that strategy. It works. It works as well as prayer did for the study participants. In fact, I would argue that the technique my mom advised is a form of prayer.
* * * * * * *
I’m sure I scandalized a rather religious-minded colleague recently when, during a conversation we were having about prayer, he asked me if I prayed.
“Kind of,” I replied.
“How do you `kind of’ pray? What do you ask God for?”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t really pray to God, and I don’t really ask for things. Emerson says that kind of prayer `is meanness and theft.’”
“Jesus specifically says in John that `You may ask for anything in my name, and I will do it.’”
“Yeah,” I said, unable to resist a bit of Scripture-quote jousting, “but in Mark He says `whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.’ See, that ‘believe that you have received it’ is a kind of qualification. It’s more about the psychological stance than a divine gift. If your prayers are answered, it’s more you than God.”
“Well, but how can you pray even ‘kind of’ if you don’t pray to God? Isn’t prayer by definition addressed to God? I mean, if not to God, who do you pray to? And if not for things, what do you pray for?”
“Myself, for myself.”
He made a noise in his throat, as if a particularly spiny piece of mesquite was lodged there, and, despite my not having denied the existence of God or the value of prayer or even the imprecatory nature of it, he walked off, convinced, I fear, that my heretical assertions made me a fit subject for police surveillance.
* * * * * * *
The best prayer I know was written by one of the most spiritual persons I am acquainted with: Henry David Thoreau. Here is Thoreau’s prayer:
Prayer
Great God, I ask for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye.
And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe'er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou'st distinguished me.
That my weak hand may equal my firm faith
And my life practice what my tongue saith
That my low conduct may not show
Nor my relenting lines
That I thy purpose did not know
Or overrated thy designs.
Thoreau’s “Prayer” may seem irreverently self-regarding, but it really asks for nothing more than the courage of his “firm faith,”—the courage to avoid hypocrisy, the courage to persist in it despite his friends’ disappointment that he hasn’t adopted a career and made a life for himself, the courage to neither underrate nor exaggerate the end for which he believes the created order was intended. Thoreau’s “Prayer” is really about seeing himself clearly and being himself clearly, not as others “think or hope” him to be. He purposely uses the word “discern,” which, etymologically, means “to sift apart,” and the sifting he has in mind is a rigorous, truth- telling kind of self-analysis that reveals how well his life accords with the gifts by which he has been “distinguished.” In short, I take the prayer’s theme to be contained in the second line: “that I may not disappoint myself.” It was this appeal I had in mind when I told my colleague that I prayed to myself for myself.
* * * * * * *
Henry Ward Beecher is surely right when he says “It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim milk.” Herman Melville may be right when he says that prayer “draws us near to our own souls.” It depends, as so much does, on how one defines “soul,” and whether that definition occupies the space of a leaflet or the wide-ranged expanse of a novel. But I particularly admire Frederick Douglass’s resolutely unmetaphysical perspective: he prayed, he tells us, for twenty years for freedom, and his prayer went unanswered “until I prayed with my legs.” Prayer as doing, not seeking to receive; prayer as remastering a higher fidelity version of the scratchy vinyl we tend to become; prayer as mustering the energy to better ourselves, to strain, like a dandelion pushing itself up through the tarred gravel of a macadam road, toward the summer florescence of our full potential.
We are limited beings, physically and cognitively, but that it hardly a flaw. It simply means we can create the best self it is in us to be, and not some other self. Lucifer fell from heaven; our fall was garden-level. We can, as poet Amy Clampett says, “fall upward.” We are not neurochemicaled; we are not DNAified. “Human limits structure human virtue,” Martha Nussbaum points out, “and give excellent action its significance.” I pray that I don’t disappoint myself. I pray to articulate and reflect on what I am, what I can be, and how to bridge the difference.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Being Average
For Thoreau, social conformity creates a dull and deadening averaging tendency. He ends Walden with a parable about a “beautiful bug” that, having been deposited as an egg some sixty years previous in an apple tree, gnaws its way out of the kitchen table built from the wood of that tree. “Who knows,” Thoreau asks, “what beautiful and winged life . . . may unexpectedly come forth . . . to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!” For Thoreau, we capitulate to being average; it is not our destiny.
* * * * *
As a young man, I wanted to zig-zag, to tack, to feint and juke, rather than straighten to the average tendency. I wanted to be one of those fireworks that spins wildly, shooting off sparks and bursting into a mad profusion of clamor and color. I was determined to be one of the chosen, one of the elect, polymathic, an outlier, off the chart, gauge-breaking, one of a kind.
* * * * *
In my last year of Little League baseball, I lost only one game as a pitcher and led the league in home runs. In my first year of American Legion baseball, I won only one game and hit no home runs. Fifteen years ago, in a slow-pitch softball league, I had no hits. I never hit the ball out of the infield. My career in slow-pitch softball was unsullied by success.
* * * * *
The word “average” is taken to mean normal, ordinary, in the middle, what most things are. As an arithmetic mean, it denotes the sum of items divided by the number of items. It is not to be confused with “median,” the middle number in an ordered sequence, nor with “mode,” the most frequently occurring number. In its common usage, “average” means all three; it means being meaned, medianed, and moded
* * * * *
Moby Dick is now considered an extraordinary novel, above average’s above average, a masterpiece, perhaps the greatest ever written. Pure lyricism spills from Melville’s pen. The novel tells a dark truth about human nature and the universe, a universe Ahab defies. It explores Miltonic themes of fate and free will. It is celebrated for its democratic spirit. Most book reviewers at the time praised it for its imaginative sweep. Readers, however, were unimpressed; the novel did not sell. “Dollars damn me,” he told his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. He couldn’t write what he wanted to write and make a living. He turned to poetry and lived out his years, forgotten except as a less than average American writer, as a tax collector in New York. His reputation underwent a revival beginning with his centennial in 1919, and by the mid-1930s he had been catapulted from the rank of a lesser writer to the pantheon of literary immortals, a tax-collecting Matthew who finally received his beatific summons.
* * * * *
Rory Mcllroy, a 22 year-old Irishman, won the 2011 U.S. Open with a record-setting score of 16 under par, surpassing the previous record of 12 under par set by Tiger Woods in 2000. Mcllroy’s score will be bettered and he will become a footnoted second. That bettered score will be bettered yet again, and again, and Mcllroy’s score will come to seem customary, middling, average.
* * * * *
Some interesting averages: The average weight for U.S. males is 191 pounds; for women, 140 pounds. Both men and women use 16,000 words per day; their vocabulary averages 5 to 6 thousand words. They repeat themselves a lot. On average Americans laugh 13 times per day, eat 35,000 cookies in a lifetime, have 1,460 dreams per year, eat 18 acres of pizza per day, and consumes 3.1 cups of coffee per day. On average, a full moon occurs every 29.5 days; a blue moon, two full moons in one month, occurs once every 2.5 years. Once in a blue moon I dream of laughingly eating a cookie-topped pizza and washing it down with Starbuck’s Venetian Robusto. With a Hersheys Milk Chocolate Bar with Almonds on the side. It averages 6 whole almonds per 52 gram (1.8 ounce) bar.
* * * * *
The average age for getting bifocals is 40. I got bifocals at 40.
* * * * *
The average measures a tendency toward centralization, but not everything has a central tendency. What is the central tendency of dogs? Of a dewed, sun-dappled meadow? Of ice cream? Of home and poetry and courage and mirth and dignity and the little shard of mystery we are?
* * * * *
No one wants to be average. No one wants to appear ordinary to themselves, or to others. We almost always overestimate our knowledge, our common sense, our practicality. We almost always consider ourselves more original, more distinctive than we are. We set our lives to the meter of I-am-ic. We like to think of our lives as a bit of guerilla theater. What we fear is invisibility, a life unacknowledged, unheralded, ciphered, a cursive stroke written in disappearing ink. We fear cloaking conformity. To be average is a shackling littleness we desperately seek to leave behind. Average is tyrannous. The mean is mean.
* * * * *
In 2010, the Scream Awards, given to movies in the horror, sci-fi, and fantasy genres, had 32 categories, including one for the best mutilation scene. In his book Everyone’s a Winner: Life in Our Congratulatory Culture, University of Delaware sociologist Joel Best introduces the term “status affluence,” a recent phenomenon exemplified by the proliferation of awards and the emergence of subcultures and lifestyle clusters where group identity is often consolidated by handing out or receiving awards. We are rapidly becoming average at being above average.
* * * * *
The last line of Middlemarch, referring to the idealistic Dorothea: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
* * * * *
At my last wellness screening, everything—blood pressure, BMI, HDL and LDLcholesterol, triglycerides—checked out average, within the normal range. Here, average is good. My weight is below, well below, the 190 pound average for males. Below average is considered bad, but in this case it is probably good. I drink more, much more, coffee than the 3.1 cups per day average. Above average is good, but in this case it is probably bad. “Average” is a slippery word, never definitive, always contingent on circumstance. There is always a slippage between public and private meaning, what the world knows and what we know. Too often we take the world’s word for it.
* * * * *
To be average means to have been measured against something else. Average is a relational concept. It has the seductive, come-hither appeal of metrics. I’d like to think individual subjectivities are unaverageable, but even personally chosen measures of self-assessments are based on criteria we have internalized from the cultural milieu. Who is the “I” that measures? That is being measured? Are we available to ourselves as ourselves?
* * * * *
Michelangelo’s unfinished sculpture Atlas Slave depicts a half completed human figure that seemingly strains to break free and emerge from, to transcend, the block of marble that contains it. Thoreau’s apple-tree bug has a precedent. It is an old idea.
* * * * *
A new genetic paradigm, called epigenetics, is currently taking shape in biology. It revises the idea that DNA is deterministic, that it acts as a foreordained blueprint, that our genome shapes who we will be. DNA is itself shaped by the cells that contain it. Our cells, it turns out, are affected by a variety of environmental factors, even by our social networks, and these factors cause chemicals to attach to the gene which control its expression. Life is creative, not foreordained; ongoing, not given; a sculpture in process, in transit, mustering itself. We are, beyond measure, beyond average. We are our own average.
* * * * *
As a young man, I wanted to zig-zag, to tack, to feint and juke, rather than straighten to the average tendency. I wanted to be one of those fireworks that spins wildly, shooting off sparks and bursting into a mad profusion of clamor and color. I was determined to be one of the chosen, one of the elect, polymathic, an outlier, off the chart, gauge-breaking, one of a kind.
* * * * *
In my last year of Little League baseball, I lost only one game as a pitcher and led the league in home runs. In my first year of American Legion baseball, I won only one game and hit no home runs. Fifteen years ago, in a slow-pitch softball league, I had no hits. I never hit the ball out of the infield. My career in slow-pitch softball was unsullied by success.
* * * * *
The word “average” is taken to mean normal, ordinary, in the middle, what most things are. As an arithmetic mean, it denotes the sum of items divided by the number of items. It is not to be confused with “median,” the middle number in an ordered sequence, nor with “mode,” the most frequently occurring number. In its common usage, “average” means all three; it means being meaned, medianed, and moded
* * * * *
Moby Dick is now considered an extraordinary novel, above average’s above average, a masterpiece, perhaps the greatest ever written. Pure lyricism spills from Melville’s pen. The novel tells a dark truth about human nature and the universe, a universe Ahab defies. It explores Miltonic themes of fate and free will. It is celebrated for its democratic spirit. Most book reviewers at the time praised it for its imaginative sweep. Readers, however, were unimpressed; the novel did not sell. “Dollars damn me,” he told his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. He couldn’t write what he wanted to write and make a living. He turned to poetry and lived out his years, forgotten except as a less than average American writer, as a tax collector in New York. His reputation underwent a revival beginning with his centennial in 1919, and by the mid-1930s he had been catapulted from the rank of a lesser writer to the pantheon of literary immortals, a tax-collecting Matthew who finally received his beatific summons.
* * * * *
Rory Mcllroy, a 22 year-old Irishman, won the 2011 U.S. Open with a record-setting score of 16 under par, surpassing the previous record of 12 under par set by Tiger Woods in 2000. Mcllroy’s score will be bettered and he will become a footnoted second. That bettered score will be bettered yet again, and again, and Mcllroy’s score will come to seem customary, middling, average.
* * * * *
Some interesting averages: The average weight for U.S. males is 191 pounds; for women, 140 pounds. Both men and women use 16,000 words per day; their vocabulary averages 5 to 6 thousand words. They repeat themselves a lot. On average Americans laugh 13 times per day, eat 35,000 cookies in a lifetime, have 1,460 dreams per year, eat 18 acres of pizza per day, and consumes 3.1 cups of coffee per day. On average, a full moon occurs every 29.5 days; a blue moon, two full moons in one month, occurs once every 2.5 years. Once in a blue moon I dream of laughingly eating a cookie-topped pizza and washing it down with Starbuck’s Venetian Robusto. With a Hersheys Milk Chocolate Bar with Almonds on the side. It averages 6 whole almonds per 52 gram (1.8 ounce) bar.
* * * * *
The average age for getting bifocals is 40. I got bifocals at 40.
* * * * *
The average measures a tendency toward centralization, but not everything has a central tendency. What is the central tendency of dogs? Of a dewed, sun-dappled meadow? Of ice cream? Of home and poetry and courage and mirth and dignity and the little shard of mystery we are?
* * * * *
No one wants to be average. No one wants to appear ordinary to themselves, or to others. We almost always overestimate our knowledge, our common sense, our practicality. We almost always consider ourselves more original, more distinctive than we are. We set our lives to the meter of I-am-ic. We like to think of our lives as a bit of guerilla theater. What we fear is invisibility, a life unacknowledged, unheralded, ciphered, a cursive stroke written in disappearing ink. We fear cloaking conformity. To be average is a shackling littleness we desperately seek to leave behind. Average is tyrannous. The mean is mean.
* * * * *
In 2010, the Scream Awards, given to movies in the horror, sci-fi, and fantasy genres, had 32 categories, including one for the best mutilation scene. In his book Everyone’s a Winner: Life in Our Congratulatory Culture, University of Delaware sociologist Joel Best introduces the term “status affluence,” a recent phenomenon exemplified by the proliferation of awards and the emergence of subcultures and lifestyle clusters where group identity is often consolidated by handing out or receiving awards. We are rapidly becoming average at being above average.
* * * * *
The last line of Middlemarch, referring to the idealistic Dorothea: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
* * * * *
At my last wellness screening, everything—blood pressure, BMI, HDL and LDLcholesterol, triglycerides—checked out average, within the normal range. Here, average is good. My weight is below, well below, the 190 pound average for males. Below average is considered bad, but in this case it is probably good. I drink more, much more, coffee than the 3.1 cups per day average. Above average is good, but in this case it is probably bad. “Average” is a slippery word, never definitive, always contingent on circumstance. There is always a slippage between public and private meaning, what the world knows and what we know. Too often we take the world’s word for it.
* * * * *
To be average means to have been measured against something else. Average is a relational concept. It has the seductive, come-hither appeal of metrics. I’d like to think individual subjectivities are unaverageable, but even personally chosen measures of self-assessments are based on criteria we have internalized from the cultural milieu. Who is the “I” that measures? That is being measured? Are we available to ourselves as ourselves?
* * * * *
Michelangelo’s unfinished sculpture Atlas Slave depicts a half completed human figure that seemingly strains to break free and emerge from, to transcend, the block of marble that contains it. Thoreau’s apple-tree bug has a precedent. It is an old idea.
* * * * *
A new genetic paradigm, called epigenetics, is currently taking shape in biology. It revises the idea that DNA is deterministic, that it acts as a foreordained blueprint, that our genome shapes who we will be. DNA is itself shaped by the cells that contain it. Our cells, it turns out, are affected by a variety of environmental factors, even by our social networks, and these factors cause chemicals to attach to the gene which control its expression. Life is creative, not foreordained; ongoing, not given; a sculpture in process, in transit, mustering itself. We are, beyond measure, beyond average. We are our own average.
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