© Jeremy D. Nickel 2014. All Rights Reserved.
Mission Peak Unitarian Universalist Congregation
April 13, 2014
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Godfrey Minot Camille was in many ways a huge success just by getting into the Harvard class of 1939. Although raised in an upper class household, his upbringing was colored more by his pathologically suspicious and extremely anti-social family then any privilege bestowed upon him by his last name. He came from one of those closed families that clearly had skeletons in its closet, and no love in its most important relationships. So Godfrey had grown up completely unloved and alone, and when he arrived on Harvard's campus he had no ability to connect with other people. This caused young Godfrey to reach out in the only way that he could think to, by repeatedly diagnosing himself with ailments, injuries and infirmities requiring care from the campus medical clinic. This behavior of course only further isolated poor Godfrey and although he did fine in his studies, he was growing more and more disconnected and depressed by the day.
Now it just so happened that Godfrey's entering Harvard freshman class of 1939 was the first of five classes to be enrolled in a life-long study, which continues to this day. The study aimed to answer many of our fundamental questions about life: how do we change and evolve, in what way do our values change through time, and the billion dollar question; what will actually make us happier and leave us feeling fulfilled at the end? You know, no big deal. Every two years through their lives they were checked in with through questionnaires, information from their doctors and personal interviews they participated in.
At the 75 year mark of the study, as well as other milestone points through the years, Harvard scientist have attempted to glean what meaning they could from the patterns of these men's lives. It is important to make some disclaimers about the study. This research, called the Harvard Grant Study, has been following only men, and only men from the Harvard classes of 1939-44 and, as you may guess, this group skews highly abnormally towards a certain type. These were very much the stereotypical guys you would imagine got into Harvard in the late 1930s. For example the study included four members who eventually ran for the U.S. Senate, one who served in a presidential Cabinet, and one was someone by the name of John F. Kennedy.
That being said, the most recent data dump and analysis, creatively titled "The 75 Year Study", has yielded some very compelling results, and perhaps few participants represent the findings as well as our desperate-to-be-loved protagonist Godfrey Minot Camille. It was this needy picture of Godfrey, evident in their collected data on him, that left an impression so low on the researchers who began this study that they ranked him in the bottom three percent of all participants in terms of 'personality stability.' It was then no surprise to these researchers when he attempted suicide shortly after graduating from medical school. They had already passed judgment on him, that he was unfit to thrive. And what was the metric these esteemed Harvard researchers themselves offered, as their consensus choice for what would be a predictor of the future success of the men in the study? Would you believe it was those with the most "Masculine body types' defined in the study as having broad shoulders and a slender waist, which they predicted would be the most successful of the group over their lifetimes.
Thankfully Godfrey was not successful in his suicide attempt, his most desperate plea for love yet, for attention from anyone. As he would soon prove, the researchers' hypothesis was ridiculous and strangely misguided, body type having absolutely no statistical appearance in the eventual findings.
That being said, perhaps Godfrey would have continued along this sad and isolated path had not the universe intervened in the most ironic of manners; Godfrey finally got sick for real. And when he finally really got sick, he got really, really sick, diagnosed at the age of thirty-five with such a severe case of pulmonary tuberculosis that he was confined to a hospital bed for well over a year.
Surviving this ordeal led Godfrey to an epiphany: he had been spared. He felt in that moment that even if his parents were pathologically incapable of loving him, that nonetheless he was clearly worthy of love. Why else, he reasoned, would he have been saved? From this moment on, he completely flipped the script on his life. Knowing that he was loved gave him the confidence to figure out how to relate to other people and to start investing in relationships. He fell in love, got married, and - here was the big one for him - he had kids. As he replied when he was 70 years old to one of the lead researchers of the study when asked what he learned from his children: "You know what I learned from my children?' he blurted out, tears in his eyes. "I learned love!'
And that is really it. That is the number one finding of the entire study after 75 years of research. As the Harvard Psychiatrist who lead the study from 1972 to 2004, George Vaillant, wrote in his book [Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study] about it: there are two pillars of happiness. "One is love," he writes. "The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away."
When Godfrey was asked to describe how he had been healed by love, he gave this beautiful response:
"Before there were dysfunctional families, I came from one. My professional life hasn't been disappointing - far from it - but the truly gratifying unfolding has been into the person I've slowly become: comfortable, joyful, connected, and effective. Since it wasn't widely available then, I hadn't read that children's classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, which tells how connectedness is something we must let happen to us, and then we become solid and whole.As that tale recounts tenderly, only love can make us real. Denied this in boyhood for reasons I now understand, it took me years to tap substitute sources. What seems marvelous is how many there are and how restorative they prove. What durable and pliable creatures we are, and what a storehouse of goodwill lurks in the social fabric. . . I never dreamed my later years would be so stimulating and rewarding.'
Vaillant reported in a recent interview "that the study's most important finding is that the only thing that matters in life is relationships. A man could have a successful career, money and good physical health, but without supportive, loving relationships, he wouldn't be happy. As he put it: "Happiness is only the cart; love is the horse."
Indeed, what the study confirmed for many of us is that happiness has nothing to do with money or power and everything to do with connection and relationships and ultimately love. One of the ways that Godfrey exemplified the findings of the study so well is that it turned out to have nothing to do with where you started. While they found somewhat of a set of necessary ingredients, it was as possible to assemble them intentionally through life as it was to hold on to them from early influence. While our family of origin can give us a boost up or a rough start, they are not our destiny.
When I read through this report to its eventual conclusion, I have to admit that a large part of me said: "Well, duh!' I mean, you don't need a fancy 75-year study to convince me that relationships and love are the true path to happiness. I mean, it is fun to have the data, but it's hardly a surprising conclusion. But the fact is, surprising or not, we clearly do need this reminder. This world of ours is positively crammed with messages about wealth and power. So much of our culture reinforces a very different set of priorities. We must study hard in school so we can get a good job that we work diligently at so we can attract a mate and support a family. It is actually quite easy for the truth that we all know in our hearts to get lost: that the money and power mean absolutely nothing if they are not surrounded and supported by loving relationships. The greatest achievement in the world, the dream job, the perfect grade, the work of art, means almost nothing if you have no one meaningful to share it with.
So we do need reminders of this fact, even if when we hear it we say: "Well, duh." I think, really, at the end of the day, this is why we belong to communities like Mission Peak UU. Because just hearing this message occasionally is not enough. We need to be enabled, supported and sometimes even cajoled into living this message. More than anything else, this is what we strive to do here.
One of the things that I found so fascinating about the study's findings is how they relate to our current congregational development. As you know we have our twentieth birthday coming up soon, and just as we are approaching this major milestone, we are also approaching another developmental checkpoint.
Churches, just like people, are understood to have distinctly different wants and needs at different ages and sizes. Decades ago four distinct congregational growth phases were identified and over the years we have learned that no matter the denomination, these categories are very instructive. The first one is known as the family sized church, and it is defined as having fifty or less members. Mission Peak UU surpassed that milestone on its Charter Sunday on May 2, 1994 when around fifty people signed our membership book for the first time. A congregation next moves into the category known as pastoral sized, and is considered to be there until it gets close to 150 members. This stage of development, between Pastoral and the next stage known as Program sized is the most difficult to navigate, and it is where we are right now. Like the learnings from the Harvard Grant Study, we now have some very good information on what makes for healthy transition from pastoral sized to program and, guess what, it sounds pretty familiar.
It turns out it is all about investing in connection and relationships. That is the key to our development as a congregation right now. As we continue to attract new members and grow in so many ways, it is absolutely essential that we also invest more in small-group activities that help us build new connections within the larger group. So please, if you haven't before, strongly consider checking out one of our existing small groups, or consider getting involved with our new garden project, or teaching in our children's classrooms a few Sundays a year, or to joining a committee or taking one of our diverse set of adult religious education classes. Do it for you and for us. Or even better, if something is missing, something that could be helping us get to know each other better, please help us bring it into creation. We need you to help us continue to unfold yet more opportunities for us to gather and share with each other and with the larger community. We have taken some very tangible and exciting steps in this direction this year, and I am hoping that we will continue this momentum in the year to come. But as the Harvard Grant Study, and our research on healthy congregational growth clearly has shown: as we give, we receive. The more we invest outside of ourselves in real relationships with other people and give to causes greater than ourselves, the more we will grow in what is truly most important; happiness and love.
One of my favorite hymns in our UU canon is also one of the most simple. It is intended to be sung over and over in the taize style of worship, as a sort of communal sung meditation. Today, as we collect our pledges towards Mission Peak UU's operation in the coming year, I invite you all to sing this song with me as we ritualize our commitment to this community, to these relationships, to another year of growing deep connections within and without of these walls. The song is #402 in your hymn book, but you will not need it. The words are simply: "From you I receive, to you I give, together we share, and from this we live.' I have also projected them above just in case.
As we sing this song, I will slowly invite each row to come forward. Even if you have already sent in your pledge, or are not ready to pledge yet, I encourage you to come forward with your row and to simply touch the pledge container in a symbolic gesture of connection to this community of love and support.
For all that has been given to support this congregation for another year, whether it be a gift of time, or talent, or of treasure, we give abundant thanks. Amen, and blessings to our continued deepening of growth.
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