The Spiritual Life
December 2002
Gifts of The Heart
By Rev. Michael Lee Burgess
This is the time we give gifts and a hard job it is too. Of course every store
will tell you they know exactly what you need to buy from them that will bring
delight and joy to everyone you know. But of course they are wrong, they are
trying to get you to buy something, anything, because that will bring them the
joy of your money. Still we go looking, for the looking itself it a worthy
thing, the desire to give a gift of love is important, especially in this season
when we remember the gift of God. But the giving of a gift has to have moral
beauty in the intent as well as the manner to carry such a sacred thing as joy.
The thing in itself can't bring the warmth to their hearts and the joy we long
for them, their needs to be a bit more. Let me share the research of Jonathan
Haidt to help you understand what I mean:
We've all seen how one rotten apple can spoil the barrel. But can one person
acting nobly spread goodness in the world? Absolutely, suggests researcher by
Jonathan Haidt, PhD, and associate professor of psychology at the University
of Virginia. Haidt coined the term elevation to describe the emotion we feel
when we encounter evidence of what he calls moral beauty. Seeing - or even
just reading about - others' courage, compassion, or generosity can not only
make us better people but increase the likelihood we'll do good works of our own.
"Elevation seems to have a ripple effect, triggering cognitive, emotional, and
behavioral changes," Haidt says. "It makes people more open, more loving,
grateful, compassionate, and forgiving."
Goodness is catching, in other words. And it doesn't take extraordinary heroics
to trigger it. Simple human kindness - a teen stopping to shovel an elderly
woman's walk; someone helping a blind person cross the street; a community
rallying behind a family in need - can be enough to open our hearts and inspire
us to help others.
"There are many kinds of moral beauty," Haidt points out. "Mother Teresa
exemplifies compassion. The firefighters and rescue works on 9/11 embody
courage and heroism. There's also loyalty, kindness, integrity - somebody
staying true to their values despite tremendous pressure and threats." Nelson
Mandela is an especially powerful trigger, Haidt says, "because he exemplifies
forgiveness and vision. To have spent most of his life in prison, then his
first words before his release are about working together - I get chills just
remembering how I felt when I first that."
Chills - and for some people, tears - are hallmarks of elevation, along with
the most common physical sign, a warm, expansive feeling in the
chest . . . . Haidt's interest in elevation began with
research on it opposite, disgust - a common response to behaviors like hypocrisy,
racism, and betrayal. Then five years ago, Haidt had what he calls a positive
psychology awakening. He started wondering what emotion we felt when we looked
up rather than down the moral scale, at people behaving in virtuous or superhuman
ways. Haidt and his colleagues asked students to recall times that they had
seen humanity's better nature at work. Most described acts of unexpected kindness
or generosity, one stranger helping another. A follow-up study found that people
who watched a documentary on Mother Teresa felt more loving afterward and were
more likely to volunteer for charitable work than a group that saw clips
from America' Funniest Home Videos.
"All of us have a built in responsiveness to good or evil," Haidt says. "When we
see more exemplars - moral saints - it affects us emotionally. And that effect
is to elevate us, too. Exposure to goodness pull all of us up a little bit."
Haidt is quick to point out he didn't "discover" elevation - philosophers and
theologians have long noted the effects of contemplating virtue . . . .
So how can we cultivate more elevation in our lives and pass it on to others? "By
seeking out stories of moral beauty and, when you encounter them, noticing any
skeptical or cynical reactions you have and challenging them," Haidt suggests.
"Notice how people so often go out of their way to help others."
And be a role model yourself. "Recognize that your own actions often have a ripple
effect that you don't realize," Haidt says. "Anytime you make an effort to do
something good, you may benefit not just the person you help but also those who
witness your act. We don't feel elevation from thinking about charity," he
emphasizes. "We fell it from seeing someone do something charitable."
(The Oprah Magazine. December 2002, Pages 77, 91)
When the Scripture say that the Lord loves a cheerful giver, there was a reason for
that. Give the gift in a loving manner and with some joy of your own will be
contagious. Contagious in that life changing way that builds the Kingdom of joy,
Heaven on earth. The thing we give can't carry that much weight, you have to do it
with skin and voice.
You will see reminders everywhere this year from "Jesus is the reason for the
season," to "Don't forget the baby this Christmas." But if you truly want to give
a gift to the Christ child, to walk the footsteps of the Magi, then it is the
way you do it that will lead you to the manger.
There is a young couple I know who have always, and still have, real trouble with
money. There is just not enough for their growing family. But over the years
they have made determined and conscientious effort to learn to budget and structure
their money so that they could give 10% of their available take home money to God.
I worried that in this case that might be too much, since God does not desire them
to injure themselves or their children by giving. But they were determined to grow
and paradoxically enough, by doing so they seem to have a more stable family
economy. A few weeks ago they oft hand mentioned that for the last few months
of the year they were trying to give 20% and it was hard. I protested, but they
said that "the church needs it and we want to." I felt like crying. I was overwhelmed
to be, for a moment, in the presence of the divine. They did not look different,
but suddenly I felt the presence of God. I know they will still have crises of money,
but for a moment they carried the mantel of glory and wrapped me with it. I was elevated
and given hope. Maybe you had to be there to see the gift, so let me share one you
can see in lights. From More of Paul Harvey's The Rest Of The Story.
Bantam Books, 1980, pages 187-188.
"Of history's six major epidemics, influenza in 1918 was the most recent. During
World War I, more people were killed by flu than by bullets. In this country alone,
within six months of the outbreak, twenty million cases, four hundred and thirty
thousand deaths.
In the wake of such devastation, we are inclined to focus on the statistics; we
tend to ignore, as a measure of self-defense, the lives of the families which the
figures comprise.
Herb Gilbey, resident of Wallace, South Dakota. By the winter of 1918, the flu
epidemic had cast its deadly blanket over the South Dakota prairie, had spread
to Herb's hometown.
Now Herb was, in many ways, just an ordinary fellow. But in the bleak season,
he was called upon to do a most extraordinary thing in saving the life of a dying boy.
It was the night of the big snowstorm in Wallace, South Dakota, during the winter
of 1918. Herb Gilbey was snug in his own hearthside.
A knock at the door. It was Herb's friend, the neighborhood druggist. Herb let him
in. Pale, trembling, out of breath, the druggist explained that his seven-year-old
son was gravely ill, was near death.
The boy had caught the flu and there were complications. Pneumonia. He couldn't
survive, unless . . .
There was an experimental drug, a new medicine effective in combating pneumonia.
The druggist had heard it was available in Minneapolis, but that was two hundred
and fifty miles and a blinding snowstorm away.
He, the druggist, was himself ill. He was too weak to embark on such a treacherous
journey. The family's only hope - the boy's only hope - was Herb Gilbey.
Herb knew the druggist's son, the little fellow called Pinky by his mother. For
anyone else Herb might have argued that the mission was impossible. Herb neither
argued nor hesitated.
After receiving detailed instructions from his druggist friend, he got his car
and drove off into the cold night. In those days, thirty-five miles an hour was
approaching red-line speed for an automobile in good weather. Herb raced over
rough rural roads in a dyspeptic, unheated Model T Ford in a blizzard!
But he made it to Minneapolis. And he made it to the wholesale pharmacist. Without
stopping to rest, he recrossed the state line and returned to Wallace. It was more
than twenty-four hours after his odyssey had begun and he delivered the medicine safely.
Seven-year-old Pinky lived.
Of all the good deeds Herb Gilbey may have done, most significant was this one - during
the winter of 1918, when weather and disease ravaged the plains of South Dakota and
the life of a little boy was saved.
For not even Herb could have imagined THE REST OF THE STORY that night when he went
five hundred miles out of his way. That Pinky would grow up, ten thousand times to
demonstrate a sixty-seven-year lifetime of similar selfness.
You never knew Herb Gilbey. But now you'll recall that stormy winter night when he
cast his own safety to the howling wind, and bequeathed to us the life of a little
boy - Hubert Humphrey.
May your Christmas glow with joy, may other see you and feel God, and may our family
become a beacon we can all grow warm beside.
Your brother in Christ, Rev. Michael Lee Burgess
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