April 29, 2012 | 8:00 a.m.

Our Posture in the World

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 23
John 10:11–15

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”
Psalm 23:1

There is a part of me that wants to want. . . . There is a part of me that wants never to be satisfied with who I am and what I have achieved, that yearns to reach higher, to understand more.

Harold S. Kushner
The Lord Is My Shepherd

Over the course of history, philosophers, theologians, anthropologists, neuroscientists, psychologists have all tried to complete the following sentence: “The human being is the only animal that . . .” They have offered different theories about what distinguishes human beings from all other kinds of beings. Ancient Greek philosophers based whole ethical systems on the notion that human beings, unlike all other beings, are rational. Theologians have claimed that human beings are distinctive insofar as they are made in God’s image. Historians of religion have argued that human beings are the only animals who worship God. Linguists have argued that human beings are the only creatures that use symbols.

Recently I came across a new theory, argued by Harvard University professor of psychology Daniel Gilbert in his book Stumbling on Happiness. Professor Gilbert argues that “the human being is the only animal that thinks about the future” (Stumbling on Happiness, p. 4). To all those who would argue against him that nonhuman animals often act as though they have the capacity to think about the future, like squirrels in the fall that act as though they know that food will be scarce in the winter, he would say unarguably that human beings think about the future in a way that no other animal can, does, or ever has and that this is a defining feature of being human.

In fact our brains are so hardwired to think about the future that it is difficult for human beings to prevent themselves from doing so. When researchers actually count the items that flit through the average person’s consciousness, they find that about 12 percent of our daily thoughts have to do with the future. On average, this comes to approximately one hour out of every eight hours of thinking.

Given that the future is a state of affairs that hasn’t happened yet, we cannot be certain that what we imagine or want to happen will really happen, and when things don’t happen as we had wanted, or when things happen that we never would have wanted, we have to deal as best we can. We have to cope.

In a book entitled Raising Resilient Children, leading clinicians in child development and psychology Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein write on the theme of resilience as the key to helping children cope with everyday challenges, adversity, and trauma. In working with many children over many years, they have concluded that the mindset of resilient children has to do with two things: (1) how children view themselves and (2) how they view the world. Not only must children view themselves as having worth, they must also view the world as a benign, nonthreatening place.

It is this second point that I want us to think about this morning. How do we perceive the world, and what difference does this make in our own posture toward the world?

What begins in childhood carries through into adulthood. Resilience is as important for older adults as it is for middle-aged and younger adults, teenagers, and children. The impressions of the world that we form as young children can become solidified into adult worldviews, and these outlooks get reflected in the posture we take toward all that happens in life.

Albert Einstein once said that although “science can tell us a lot about our universe—how old it is, how vast it is, what laws of physics control it,” it is “powerless to answer the most important question of all: Is the universe a friendly place, supportive of human hopes and aspirations?” (Harold Kushner, The Lord Is My Shepherd, p. 7). I don’t know to what extent Einstein was a religious man, but I do think that with this question he had his finger on the essence of religion.

Every religion provides a particular view of the world that supports a particular way of being in it, a particular stance or posture. For Christians and Jews, that God created the world and called it good makes it possible for us not to take a suspicious or defensive stance, a plaintive or paranoid posture. It makes it possible for us to go through life trusting that the universe is a friendly place, supportive of, not indifferent or threatening to, us. Such a view of the world makes confidence, courage, generosity, and resilience possible.

This is the posture with which the psalmist goes through life in Psalm 23. The psalmist walks through life, its ups and downs, even its darkest valleys, with trust and confidence that God is with him, leading him, caring for him, shepherding him. The psalmist’s outlook does not offer us the prospect of a perfect world or a life free of danger, hardship, or pain; it sees the world without illusions but at the same time as a world in which we can live courageously and do good for ourselves and others. Despite the fact that life is not free of evils, dangers, and darkness, the psalmist’s trust and confidence in the Lord overcomes any fear, so much that he imagines not his enemies, but rather goodness and mercy, pursuing him all the days of his life.

Writing about the darkest time in his life, Rabbi Harold Kushner tells of the death of his fourteen-year-old son. When his son was three years old, Rabbi Kushner and his wife learned that he had an incurable condition that would cause premature death. Thereafter it became desperately important for the rabbi to know whether God was on his side or on the side of the illness (The Lord Is My Shepherd, p. 107). It was at that time that Psalm 23 took on personal significance to him. Only when he began to trust, as the psalmist does, that God is always on our side, that God is always with us, despite all the bad things that can happen, did he begin to feel that the future would not overwhelm him.

At times when we are uncertain about the future or have to face a devastating future, as Rabbi Kushner did, trusting that God is with us and cares about us makes all the difference. It makes all the difference to imagine God as a shepherd who loves his sheep and not as a hired hand who, at the first sign of danger, abandons his sheep. It makes all the difference to know that God is intimately concerned about us and connected to us.

Near the end of his life, the great American philosopher John Dewey wrote a book entitled A Common Faith. Dewey had already gained a reputation as an aggressive atheist, but late in his life, when he wrote this small book, he articulated an appreciation of the importance of relating to God, not as an abstract concept, indifferent to us, but as a being who cares for us, intimately relates to us, and without whom we would surely fall into despair or defiance in the face of uncertainty.

In uncertain or tough times, we need a God who relates to us personally and whom we, like the psalmist, can call upon in the second person. For when we call out to God, pray to God, and speak to God, we begin to relate to God not as a being about which we talk, but as a being in whom we trust.

Though we sometimes mistakenly equate faith with a set of beliefs about God to which we must give our assent or with a set of practices to which we must adhere, at its core, faith is trust. Faith is trust not only in God and others, but also in the world that God made and keeps. Faith is trust that God is for us, not against us, and that God’s world is benign, not threatening.

Without a doubt, for all of us there will be times when we will experience hardship and uncertainty in life, when we will need resilience, courage, and hope. Especially at those times, it is important to remember from where we get our grounding. May we, like the psalmist, turn to and trust in the Lord, name him as the source of our strength, and then sing of it.