Unenforceable Rules

Unenforceable Rules

Community Ministry Sunday, January 29, 2023

Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Forgiveness

I’m going to talk about forgiveness. But don’t tune out just yet, there may be a surprise in store.

In the Gospel of Luke we’re advised that if we forgive others, good things will come our way. Or as the text says,

“A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap;(Luke 6:37-8)”

Sure. I believe that.

Ever Been Ticked Off At Someone?

Are you a badass? I hope so. I am. If you are not a badass, I will attempt to motivate you to become one by this sermon.

Let me explain.

I have a box where I do my daily meditation and self-hypnosis. In this box I have a collection of small objects that mean something to me. In fact, were I so inclined and someone cared to listen, I could basically sketch out the story of my life by going through those objects.

I still have my High School and College rings. They are in that box. So is the garter that Lindsay wore at our wedding. My father’s military dog-tags and his Masonic pin are in the box too. There is a shell given to me by my very first girlfriend - I’m embarrassed to say I don’t remember her name, but I’ve still got her shell. Items from my childhood, education and so on. Precious memories, precious things to me personally.

But there are also things that are not markers of happy memories. There is a cuff link that my family gave me when I was a freshman in college that actually reminds me of a deep betrayal. And a few other things like that.

It would be easier to toss that negative stuff out and never look at it again, but I keep it. Not because I cherish those memories in any way, but because they remind me of a mistake I made that I do not want to make again.

You see, I used to believe that people were somehow obligated to treat me the way I thought they should. The darker items in that box remind me that I need to be careful about what I expect. Because other people do not always do what we want.

But we think they should, and therein lies the rub. Because that expectation is what is called an unenforceable rule. The more unenforceable rules you have in your head is directly tied to your overall level of happiness. The more unenforceable rules, the less happy you will be.

Unenforceable Rules

As a Community Minister who specializes in helping people using hypnotism, I actually spend a good amount of time helping people to figured out what unenforceable rules they have in their minds, and finding ways to knock that off.

What are some of those rules? Here are a few common ones:

• I can’t get cancer, I’m too (fill in the blank - too young, too healthy, too busy, etc.)

• Everyone should like me.

• My romantic partner should never let me down.

• My hard work should be rewarded.

• People should tell the truth.

• Life should be fair, and many more.

These are all understandable things to desire. The problem is that one cannot control any of the circumstances. Therefore, these rules are unenforceable. You can’t make them happen because you can’t make other people follow them.

But if you think they are really rules, you will be perpetually frustrated. Because they are not actually rules. Something can only be a rule if people have agreed to it. You can’t make up rules all by yourself and then expect other people follow them. All you really have is a list of desires

People get this wrong all the time. The result is we can feel upset, angry, cheated, and a host of other negative emotions that corrode our mental, spiritual and emotional resilience like battery acid.

From birth on we are programmed to be what others want us to be. A lot of the times our parents or other authority figures project their unenforceable rules on us - and that’s the point of the poem “The Be The Verse.” by Phillip Larkin that I shared earlier.

As an example, a parent announces that no godly child should feel sexual feelings or have sexual thoughts - and there is something wrong with any child that does. We see this in the Purity Movement among some religious denominations where young girls are expected to suppress natural feelings to please parents.

Does it work? Nope. It can’t. No matter how sincerely a parent believes in their moral principles they have no meaningful way to enforce those rules on a child. They may be able to control the child’s behavior for a time, but as any kid who has ever snuck out after curfew will tell you - that’s not really going to work. All you get is a pretense. But that does not stop from parents from trying.

That cuff link reminds me not to make that mistake. As a very young person my unenforceable rule was that families would treat family members with affection and kindness. Nope. Wrong on that one. Maybe some families do, but not all of them.  I started feeling way better when I dropped that expectation. Unenforceable rules are a bad idea because all they do is make us feel bad.

The Stamford Forgiveness Project.

Stanford University Medical Center received a grant in the late 1990 from the John Templeton Foundation to explore the meaning and therapeutic benefit of forgiveness. The Templeton Foundation gives grants to people who want to explore the intersection of science and religion.

Obviously, the theme of forgiveness is one of those universal religious themes that can be found around the world. Here in the United States most of us learned about its importance in church school.

As an example, Jesus taught that “If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you (Matthew 6:14)” and Jesus emphasized that the act of forgiveness is unending. One has to keep doing it over and over as intrusive unforgiving thoughts arise - saying we have to forgive “seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:22), meaning that it is an ongoing sort of thing.

In Buddhism we have the whole Loving Kindness theme where one is advised to repeat phrases of forgiveness toward oneself, toward those who have harmed you and those who whom you have harmed.”

As any member of the clergy will tell you, working with someone to help them forgive some perceived wrong done to them is hard. The reason it is hard is that, in my humble opinion, most people do not want to forgive. They want to get even.

Mark Twain said something along these lines. “I have never killed anyone,” he remarked. “But I have read certain obituaries with an amount of pleasure.”

I once talked to a parishioner who said, “I really believe in karma. Problem is that karma can take too long. So I have another plan - I call it ‘sweet revenge.’”

My standard counsel on this is to remember a quote by the 16th century poet George Herbert who said “Living well is the best revenge.” There is a lot of truth to that - I’ve often taken comfort in it as I reflect on how upset the people who tried to hold me back must feel when they learned they couldn’t. So, the best revenge is just to go be happy despite them.

But that is hard to do because of the way the mind works, so I’m interested in any technique that can move the process along. So I was interested in what the social sciences had to say.

Now I am a cynical guy, and when I learned about the Stamford Forgiveness Project I assumed that it was another case of secular psychology stealing ideas from the religious community and repackaging them in order to make a buck.

There has actually been quite a lot of that in recent decades.

However, as I took a good look at what the Forgiveness Project was up to, I came to have a real appreciation for it.

First, they enlisted some of the best researchers and philosophical minds to come up with a definition of forgiveness.

If any of you have ever had to explain the concept of forgiveness to one of your children, you know how hard that is. Kids can be really good at holding a grudge and because children, by definition, do not have mature social skills, they sometimes are cruel to each other.

To just announce to a young person they should forgive someone who had trashed them is not likely to do much. You might not get verbal opposition, but any family therapist will tell you that people do not forget about malicious harm done to them.

The Stamford Project came up with a thoughtful definition of forgiveness that is probably different from any other definition you have encountered.

They held that forgiveness consists of taking less personal offense to the behavior of another.

Remember that. Forgiveness consists of you finding a way to take less personal offense.

You still hold that whatever went down was wrong, blameworthy, even nasty. The definition says nothing about the other person at all. What it says is that in order to be a forgiving person we simply need to not take bad things personally, even while continuing to regard them as bad things.

Headed by Fred Luskin, a psychologist I’ve actually met, the Project focused on the effects of forgiveness on a person’s health and sense of well-bring. The ability to forgive appears to produce statistically verifiable improvements in health outcomes. As a medical hypnotist, that immediately got my attention. A ministerial colleague who also studied this material came up with a wonderful saying about it which I promptly stole. She said “Forgiveness is Badass.”

Forgiveness is Badass.

Now when one says that something is “badass” what one means is that something is uncompromising, powerful and worth noticing. It can be either negative or positive. When my colleague said “Forgiveness is Badass” what she intended to communicate was that it’s not something to dismiss or overlook. In fact, being really good at forgiveness is something of a superpower.

You don’t forgive someone because you’ve decided to let them off the hook, or changed your opinion of how blameworthy their conduct may have been. You forgive someone so that the energy of harboring negative thoughts and feelings stops hurting you. Stops impairing your immune system. Stops raising your blood pressure. Stops clouding your mind and stops preventing you from thinking clearly.

As Mark Twain is said to have put it, “refusing to forgive someone is like taking poison yourself and then waiting for your enemy to die.” It only hurts you. You don’t forgive to help the other person. You forgive to keep whatever happened from hurting you on an on-going basis.

Forgiveness is badass because it makes you stronger and wiser.

Dr. Luskin tells the story of two business partners who discussed buying a block of stock that one partner really liked and the other thought was too risky. They agreed not to buy. But the partner who liked the stock really was convinced he was right and so made the purchase on the “down-low.” When the stock dropped in value the other partner discovered that his agreement with his partner had been broken.

Rage ensued. A long term business relationship was thrown into question. You see, the partner who felt betrayed had an unenforceable rule in his mind - that rule said “business partners must be trustworthy all the time.” Trouble is, they’re not.

Fortunately, the partner in question didn’t act rashly. He cooled down, remembered that even good friends and associates do things we may not like. Such behavior can be tolerated within limits. He didn’t break up the partnership which was otherwise a good partnership.

But how easily it could have gone in the other direction. How many romantic relationships that are basically right relationships go off the rails because someone over-reacts due to an unenforceable rule that their partner didn’t agree to and may not even understand.

Such unenforceable rules keep us from thinking clearly and move us away from good things in our lives that would still be enjoyable if we had been thinking better - free of the emotional fog created by our own unenforceable rules.

Self-Correction

The Stamford Forgiveness Project findings are that we get into this mess by taking things too personally. Here is where becoming more philosophical can help a lot.

It is normal to experience your life as something that is happening to you.

You wanted to go to Disneyland over Christmas but apparently Elon Musk purchased Southwest Airlines without telling anyone, because the performance of that airline over the holiday was a complete dumpster fire. Thousands of flights canceled, including yours. Anyone would feel upset and disappointed. You experience that as something personal. It hurt your plans and prevented your enjoyment of something you had looked forward to.

But actually you got that wrong. The bad stuff that happened was not really something that happened just to you. It was something that just happened. There was nothing personal about you involved. Thousands of others were in the same boat. It was just the way the world was at that time. The airline was not out to get you.

While it may feel otherwise, the reality is that the world isn’t trying to pick on you. The world does not revolve around any of us. The things that happen are just the things that happen. It’s a mistake to personalize them.

While it is natural to weigh events on the basis of how they impact us as individuals, the reality is that what happens really doesn’t have a lot to do with us. Things that happen are mostly driven by things we do not comprehend and cannot control.

Someone might do something mean to you in particular, the cause for their behavior is probably something you have no idea about. It comes out of their own world and their own pain. Their nasty behavior says things about the pain and weakness in which they live. The Stamford Forgiveness Project findings are that it’s a mistake to think that anything mean someone did says anything about us.

Forgiveness consists of you finding a way to take less personal offense.

Stop Trying to Enforce Unenforceable Rules

You can’t change what happened in the past, but you can alter what is happening now and your feelings are happening now, and you’re upset because you have an unenforceable rule.

What someone did may stink, but is there actually a meaningful rule that says people can’t do it? Is there a rule that says someone can’t be a cruel jerk, or a bad parent or an incompetent boss? No such rules exists.

Insisting that no one ever be cruel, or a lousy parent or a screwed up boss is a formula for failure - because there will always be such people.

You think, “No one can be cruel! All parents must be skillful! Every boss should be wise!” Great things to desire, but rules they are not. And no one is obligated to do them. Other people are entitled to be really rotten people if they want to.

As Dr. Luskin would put it, “None of us has the power to expect other people to always do what we want and therefore people often break our rules.”

Instead of focusing your energy on trying to get others to do what you want (an enterprise that will always fail), focus on what you can control. Often this will be to simply dismiss the behavior of others as a sign of their own weakness.

If my supervisor at work appears to be an idiot it makes no sense for me to cling to a belief that there should be no idiots at work. Instead, I can try to not act like an idiot myself. That may not always help, but the odds of it doing so are better.

If I do this I will not take things as personally, which means I will experience less personal offense. That’s what forgiveness is, and it’s badass because you will experience much less emotional pain.

So, I’m a badass and I hope you all become one too. Become a badass at forgiveness by learning how not to take things personally. It is a superpower, and will make you healthy and strong. That is what the writer of the Gospel of Luke promised when he said that if you can forgive, good things will come to you.

“A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap;(Luke 6:37-8)”

And that’s my sermon.