Sermon Library
“Believing Is Seeing - III”
Gregg R. Anderson
April 17, 2005
Service Theme: Easter IV - 2005
Source: Acts 2: 42 - 47
I watch very little sports on TV and have never been to a professional sporting event, but I did happen to turn the TV on to the last few holes of the Masters Golf Tournament last Sunday afternoon just in time to watch Tiger Woods chip in his remarkable birdie on the 15th hole. It was replayed on every news broadcast for the next few days. It was the chip shot that landed on the green and took a right turn, rolled toward the lip of the cup, paused for a few seconds and as though the ball had a will of its own, dropped into the cup for a birdie for Tiger. As we know, Tiger went on to win the Masters again in what I would call overtime, but is called this strange name, “Sudden Death.” What about “Sudden Victory?” Well that’s another question.
I bring up the news about Tiger Woods because last Sunday he was in what reporters referred to as athletes in “The Zone.” Richard Keefe, the director of sport psychology at Duke University, explores this phenomenon in a book called On the Sweet Spot: Stalking the Effortless Present. He describes the Zone as a state of mind and body in which action and reaction seem to happen automatically, a state that people can enter while hitting a ball, playing a musical instrument, or even typing on a word processor. According to brain-imaging studies, professional piano players don’t actually think about hitting the keys on the piano; instead, their brain neurons fire in areas associated with mechanical motion rather than consciousness. Great players - whether they are on the piano or on the basketball court - don’t have to think about what they are doing. They just do it.
Hear are Tiger Woods’ words on October 4, 2004 in Newsweek magazine after the worst summer of his professional life. “I’m working toward something, retooling my swing, fixing a bunch of things, and it’s taken time for it to gel. But I’m starting to see results. When you’re playing your best, you don’t even think about it. I’m still thinking about it. When I can just step up to the ball and hit it, give the ball flight I envision without really thinking about it, then I’ll know I’m there.”
Effortless Present
Of course, no one can pick up a golf club for the first time and hit below par. Perfect practice makes perfect performance, which is why professionals build routine and repetition into their highly disciplined daily lives. “This is how the adage ‘practice makes perfect’ really works,” writes Keefe in his book. “The more you do something, the more the brain changes to devote its energy to that function.” The more you practice, the more you are training your brain neurons to fire in a way that creates flawless mechanical motion.
Visualization can help as well. Simply imagining yourself doing something can light up the areas of the brain you’ll need to accomplish what you have in mind. A pro golfer will mentally play a round, shot by shot, before stepping onto the first tee. A major-league pitcher will reflect on his strategy for each hitter, inning by inning, before he arrives at the ballpark. “By doing so,” says ESPN senior editor Jon Scher, “he’s warming up his neural pathways before he warms up his arm, increasing the likelihood that he’ll wind up in the effortless present.” The Effortless Present is a zone of automatic action, reached by practice and visualization. It takes us beyond stress and self-doubt to an experience of truly optimal performance.
Practice and Prayer and Something “Other”
So practice and visualization are important, but to be in the zone or effortless present there appears to be something else, something “other” in addition to such synergy. What that is - is sometimes difficult to explain or unexplainable. I am purposely juxtaposing the zone or effortless present with the title Believing Is Seeing. Certainly, Believing is Seeing has great similarity to visualization.
Homiletics commentary for this week compares visualization with prayer. “In prayer we are able to express our longing for a deeper walk with God. We are able to ‘picture’ what kind of experience we desire and hope for during the moments ahead. Morning prayer helps us set the tone for the entire day. Evening prayer allows us to express thanks, and ‘review the film’ as it were, to look for spots where we stepped out of, or away from the zone. It allows us to consider why what worked, worked, and what didn’t work, didn’t work.” Maybe it’s obvious, but I greatly appreciated comparing prayer with visualization. It can be a deeper and stronger visualization because we do place our mind in a slightly different state in prayer and meditation. The Bible has always told us to devote ourselves to prayer and to pray unceasingly. Meditation has been a significant practice for many other ancient religions. Today, we are learning more and more the psychological and sociological benefits of prayer and meditation. Visualization is an important part of praying.
Believing Is Seeing is more than visualization. It is also about practice and about faith. We, of course, need to practice what we believe and pray. That is an obvious statement, but we have had strong influences within Christianity, past and present, stating that all one has to do is believe in Jesus and the main thing is covered, so to speak. To use an even older phrase, even though we are not justified by our works but by our faith, practicing our faith in various ways needs to follow.
Believing Is Seeing also includes that element of faith or “otherness” that cannot quite be explained and is in the mysterious and wonder zone. For every aspect of life that is explainable, there is another aspect of life which is unexplainable. As I have stated the past two Sundays with this theme, faith and fact are equal ingredients of life. Rational and irrational often play equal roles in our world, both known and unknown. Believing Is Seeing involves utilizing all the facts we can know of life, visualizing our hopes, practicing our faith and belief in that dynamic of life which is simply beyond us. This statement comes from the thought I received at Easter which prompted me to suggest stopping for a moment trying to figure out Easter and resurrection and allow Easter and resurrection to comprehend you. I am still working on what that might mean, but I think it has something to do with letting life itself hold you up in the ocean and flow of creation itself.
The Fish Who Thought Too Much
I received this story from Dr. Potthoff almost 25 years ago and have not retold it for a long time, but it is worth retelling more often. I know I heard it from Dr. Potthoff many times. “Once there was a fish who lived in the great ocean, and because the water was transparent and always conveniently got out of the way of his nose when he moved along, he didn’t know he was in the ocean. Well, one day the fish did a very dangerous thing, he began to think: ‘Surely I am a most remarkable being, since I can move around like this in the middle of empty space.’ Then the fish became confused because of thinking about moving and swimming, and he suddenly had an anxiety attack and thought he had forgotten how to swim. At that moment he looked down and saw the yawning chasm of the ocean depths, and he was terrified that he would drop. Then he though: ‘If I could catch hold of my tail in my mouth, I could hold myself up.’ And so he curled himself up and snapped at his tail. Unfortunately, his spine wasn’t quite supple enough, so he missed. As he went on trying to catch hold of his tail, the yawning black abyss below became ever more terrible, and he was brought to the edge of total nervous breakdown. The fish was about to give up when the ocean, which had been watching with mixed feelings of pity and amusement, said, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Oh,’ said the fish, ‘I’m terrified of falling into the deep dark abyss and I’m trying to catch hold of my tail in the mouth to hold myself up.’ So the ocean said, ‘Well, you’ve been trying that for along time now and still you haven’t fallen down. How come?’ ‘Oh, of course I haven’t fallen down yet,’ said the fish, ‘because, because - I’m swimming!’ ‘Well,’ came the reply, ‘I am the great ocean in which you live and move and are able to be a fish, and I have given all of myself to you in which to swim, and I support you all the time you swim. But here you are, instead of exploring the length, breadth, depth, and height of my expanse, are wasting your time pursuing your own end.’ From then on, the fish put his own end behind him (where it belonged) and set out to explore the great wide ocean.”
Thinking Less and Trusting More
Another part of Believing Is Seeing is trusting. The fish was doing more thinking than trusting. By his own admission, Tiger Woods was doing more thinking than just swinging. Richard Keefe stated that the zone and stalking the effortless present is a state of mind and body in which action and reaction seem to happen automatically. Jon Scher described the baseball pitcher who needs to warm up his neural pathways before he warms up his arm, increasing the likelihood that he’ll wind up in the effortless present. The effortless present is a zone of automatic action, reached by practice and visualization. Homiletics commentary correlated prayer and meditation with a deeper visualization. I said Believing Is Seeing also includes that element of faith or ‘otherness’ that cannot quite be explained and exists in the mysterious and wonder zone.”
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Keeping all of this in mind, let me introduce the theme of today’s New York Times best selling book entitled Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking authored by a staff writer for The New Yorker named Malcom Gladwell. Malcom Gladwell is the author of another best selling book entitled The Tipping Point. (Is anyone familiar with him and his books?) Mr. Gladwell was a former business and science reporter at the Washington Post. In the inside jacket of Blink it states, “Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology and displaying all of the brilliance that made The Tipping Point a classic, Blink changes the way you understand every decision you make. Never again will you think about thinking the same way.”
“The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.” “There is a part of our brain which is like an internal computer which leaps to conclusions called the adaptive unconscious, and the study of this kind of decision making is one of the most important new fields in psychology.” “The only way that human beings could ever have survived as a species for as long as we have is that we’ve developed another kind of decision-making apparatus that’s capable of making very quick judgments based on very little information.” “Our unconscious is a powerful force. But it’s fallible. So, when should we trust our instincts, and when should we be wary of them? Answering that question is the second task of Blink.” “It is possible to learn when to listen to that powerful onboard computer and when to be wary of it.” “The third and most important task of this book is to convince you that our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled.” “In Blink you’ll meet doctors and generals and coaches and furniture designers and musicians and actors and car salesmen and countless others, all of whom are very good at what they do and all of whom owe their success, at least in part, to the steps they have taken to shape and manage and educate their unconscious reactions.” Gladwell states that when we can learn something about this non-thinking thinking “we would end up with a different and better world.”
Gladwell presents illustrations and studies on just about every page. His first chapter is entitled The Theory of Thin Slices: How a Little Bit of Knowledge Goes a Long Way. For example, if an employer would like to hire someone for an important position would it be best to study the resume, have several interviews and even social encounters or spend 30 minutes unannounced looking around the potential employees home when he or she is not there. Insurance companies have done extensive studies on doctors who have been sued or even sued a couple of times and those who have never been sued. They discovered it has very little to do with their medical credentials or skill. It has everything to do with their bedside manner and how long and well they communicated with the patient. Since 1980 Dr. John Gottman has brought more than three thousand relatively newly married couples into his “Love Lab” at the University of Washington and has developed a very scientific test and instrument which can predict which couples will stay married and which will divorce within a 15 year period. He can now make this analysis in 15 minutes of the couples’ interaction. After three thousand couples, he’s had a 95 percent accuracy predicting whether or not a couple will be married fifteen years later. Brian Grazer, who has produced many of the biggest hit movies of the past twenty years, describes after auditioning hundreds of people for the male co-star in the movie Splash, he knew in an instant this relatively unknown actor named Tom Hanks was not only perfect for the part, but would become a great actor and star. There were many actors who were funnier than Tom Hanks, but they were not as likable as him. “I felt like I could live inside of him,” said producer Brian Grazer. One example of how first impressions can work against us is the Warren Harding era. Gladwell gives some detail about how Warren Harding was elected to every office and finally the presidency almost completely on his looks and demeanor. Harding served for only two years before dying unexpectedly of a stroke. He was, most historians agree, one of the worst presidents in American history. These are just a few examples. Gladwell goes on to describe how we can manage the power of thinking without thinking to make our lives better and our world better. I highly recommend this best seller.
Power of Pentecost
In our brief scripture lesson this morning we read about the new spirit of the people from Pentecost. They were believing even when they could not see or comprehend everything that had happened and was happening, but they felt the spirit. Just listen. “And fear came upon every soul; and many wonders and signs were done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook of food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.”
There is a great deal which can be explained about religion and, in this case, the life of Jesus and the origin of a new Way of thinking which became Christianity. But it is probably the parts we cannot explain, such as the power of Spirit, which has really been the adaptive unconsciousness and has created the largest religion in the world today. Think about it. On second thought, don’t think about it. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
Aspen Chapel
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