Minister’s Considerations

January is a month of new beginnings, or so we like to think. We make resolutions and then find just how habituated we are to old habits. On the first Sunday of the year we will ceremoniously “burn the chaff,” all those things that prevent us from living lives free of unhealthy desires and useless habits. The newness we seek will remain illusive, however, until we take an inward journey to discover the precious gifts we have been given and how they can be used to help others.

There are serious limits to the way we usually construct our New Years resolutions. Generally we focus on our negative traits. We ask, what do we need to change? Certainly being honest with oneself is important. But we should remember that what we give attention to we often become. If we focus on our problems we easily become preoccupied with negative thinking. George Bernard Shaw put this conclusion harshly when he warned against becoming “a feverish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy…” So, the likely result of focusing on what is bad is that we become that problem we seek to correct. Thus, it is important to burn away all negativity.

There is an alternative to listing the negative. It is simply to cast your eyes on the positive within yourself and the institution you love—The Unitarian Church of Marlborough and Hudson. Decades ago Dale Carnegie made an industry out of positive thinking, as did Norman Vincent Peale. More recently David Cooperrider has applied this approach to the task of transforming organizations and called it appreciative inquiry.

In a book entitled Memories, hopes, and conversations, Mark Lau Branson demonstrates how appreciative inquiry facilitated the transformation of the First Presbyterian Church of Altadena (CA).

I have included in this issue of Tidings the appreciative inquiry questions that guided that congregation to a new and bright future.

Listing the gifts that you have, and thinking about how they can be used to help others and your congregation, will help you move from being that “feverish little clod of ailments” to becoming a positive force of nature. Ultimately it will have a profound effect on you and our congregation. The thirteen century Sufi mystic Rumi captured the implications of this alternative way of looking at the world when he said:

People want you to be happy.
Don’t keep serving them your pain.
If you could untie your wings and free your soul of jealousy
you and everyone around you would fly up like doves.

This new year let us fly up like doves and as we do we will discover that others—many others—will want to fly with us.

Blessings,
Stephen