“Golfing with Monkeys”
Rev. Scott Alexander
29 April 2007
Rev. Shana Lynngood: Reverend Scott W. Alexander is someone I feel I knew before I knew him, someone you hear about when you’re in seminary, someone whose books are often assigned to you as Scott has written three, no six – excuse me – six books, including “Everyday Spiritual Practice,” which someone knocked on my door this morning to find out how to order. Scott Alexander has served a congregation in Maine; he served for several years – ten, I think – with the Church of the Larger Fellowship which is our congregation for Unitarian Universalists all over the world, and he has served for almost ten years now as the Senior Minister of River Road Unitarian Church which is in Bethesda, Maryland. He has a fabulous sense of humor; he has an indomitable spirit and he’s here with us this morning. Reverend Scott Alexander. [Applause]
Rev. Scott Alexander: Good morning. I am proud to serve one of your children. River Road is one of many churches which came into being because of A. Powell Davies. My congregation began around a speaker at a community center in Bethesda, listening to the great A. Powell Davies. Well, actually Cedar Lane did; Davies was dead by the time River was founded, but all of the suburban churches are your children. And we children like to see healthy parents. You are a very healthy church. When I came nine years ago, you were not a healthy church; you are now a healthy church and that is a delight. [Applause]
Now you heard about the Chalice Lighters earlier. That’s about parents giving birth to healthy children. We have given birth at River Road to the congregation, Sugar Loaf, out in Gaithersburg. They are receiving a $20,000 grant this year so that they can hire their first full-time religious education director. They are growing in leaps and bounds right now. River Road, over forty percent of the members of our congregation are Chalice Lighters, and you don’t want to be outdone by your children, right? You’re at a measly fifteen percent and so your children are chiding you to do better. Become a Chalice Lighter today. Please do that.
Golfing with monkeys, now there’s a title that tells you absolutely nothing about what I’m going to say today unless you know the story. How many of you know the story? Great! I love basically clueless congregations. [Laughter] No, I’m serious. Clueless congregations are truly more receptive to the message that I bring. Here’s the story. The Reverend Gregory Knox Jones, a Presbyterian minister who serves a church right over the river in Virginia, writes that once the English had colonized India and established their businesses, they yearned for recreation and decided to build a golf course in Calcutta. Golf in Calcutta, however, would prove to present a unique obstacle: Monkeys from a nearby natural habitat would drop out of the trees, scurry across the course and seize the little white golf balls. The monkeys would play with the balls, tossing them here and there. At first the golfers tried to control the monkeys. Their first strategy was to build high fences, Knox reports, around the fairways and greens. This approach which seemed to initially hold promise was abandoned when the golfers discovered that a fence is no match for an ambitious monkey.
Next the golfers tried luring the monkeys away from the course, but the monkeys found nothing so amusing as watching the humans go wild whenever these little white balls were disturbed. In desperation, the British began trapping and relocating the monkeys, but for every monkey they carted off, another would appear. Finally, the golfers gave in to reality and established a rather novel ground rule for that particular course. Golfers in Calcutta were obliged to play the ball wherever the monkey dropped it. [Laughter]
And then Knox goes on and says, “As you can imagine, playing under this rule in Calcutta could be maddening. A beautiful drive, shot right down the middle of the fairway, could be picked up by the monkey and dropped ignominiously in the rough. Or the opposite could happen. A hook or slice that gave you a terrible lie could be picked up by a monkey and laid right in the sweetest spot in the center of the fairway. The unpredictable monkeys, then, brought equal measure as it would seem of gratuitous bad and good luck.
Now, when I first came across this story I was charmed by it. And the perpetual preacher in me immediately knew that this interesting story deserved an entire sermon. In fact, it’s the sermon you’re going to get now. It deserves an entire sermon because life is so often like this as we try to navigate the course of our lives. This morning I want to focus on this story about mischievous monkeys who insert themselves into the games that we humans are trying to play, for I believe it is a telling and spiritually instructive metaphor about the lives we live in this open and unpredictable creation.
I want to make several points about the story. First, there is the obvious truth of life’s utter unpredictability, its frequent randomness and its related unfairness. For almost as soon as we begin to think about life as children, we human beings like to think, despite the regular, abundant and unmistakable evidence we receive regularly to the contrary, we like to think that, just as every golf course has clear rules that the players will observe to get through the course successfully, in the game of life, we think, there’s also clear rules to follow over the course of our lives which, if we faithfully observe them, will help us to successfully navigate our way. Most of us, even into adulthood, have this tape running and the tape goes something like this: If I just work hard, live right, mind my Ps and Qs, obey the law, live by my principles, watch my diet, brush my teeth, don’t drink too much, tend to my marriage or partnership, carefully rear my children – if I follow all these basic rules about the things I know I should do, then I will sail through this thing called life and everything will work out as planned. This tape playing in our head is fine except, of course you all know, for one thing: life doesn’t work this way. I can say so with certainty because not only have I been banging around this beautiful and dangerous and unpredictable creation for 57 years, for almost 35 I have been in the business as a minister of helping people come to terms with unexpected and sometimes profoundly unfair and tragic events and conditions which intrude suddenly upon their lives.
Just one heartbreaking example, if I might, from my own personal circle. A few months back, I received a shocking and unexpected call from my dearest and oldest friend in this world – Paul – a guy my age, successful veterinarian, husband and father who complained the last time we took a big cycling trip together that his neck was stiff. He went to see his doctor and, instead of a diagnosis of muscle pull, the doctor found a tumor the size of a grapefruit eating through his spine. They operated for eight hours, put plates in his spine. Now he is living with cancer. Overnight, his life was swept into difficulty and sorrow. This past Good Friday, the day after his last round of powerful chemo, I called Paul. He has lost 40 pounds. He said “Well, things are going okay. I’m off the painkillers; I still have something of an appetite. My energy level is pretty good. You know, I think I’ll take it.” I think, my friend said, I’ll take it.
Tell me if the world you live in is any different, because where I live, you can be happily playing along some fairway when a monkey comes out of nowhere, snatches the ball and deposits it in some difficult or painful place that you and I do not expect. It is an unpredictable universe; it is often unfair and we are not in control. And, just as in the case of these mischievous monkeys in Calcutta – and here I arrive at the second aspect of the story, which fascinates me – while it is undeniable that sometimes our ball is capriciously dropped, right in the rough, as is the case with my friend’s cancer diagnosis, at other times, it is graciously placed right in the middle of the green where all we have to do existentially is tap our ball right into the hole.
I passionately believe this remarkable and open and fluid world of ours which we do not, despite our best and most dutiful efforts, succeed in controlling, this remarkable open and fluid world of ours has at least as much amazing grace and good luck as it does misfortune and bad breaks. And I for one, and this is one of my core theological, spiritual assumptions; it informs and guides my life – I do not believe that this creation of ours has any sort of will or intention or plan, no more than the monkey who randomly intruded into the game of the people who were playing in Calcutta had a plan or an intention to drive them crazy. Life on this planet is neither out to get us nor does it promise us an easy ride. Life on this planet, rather, is full of random and unexpected events and outcomes and there is no way to know, no matter how well we think we’re playing by the rules we think are in place, there is no way we can control either of these things.
We cannot control, even if we wanted to, the glorious, miracle, pleasant events that come into our lives randomly, like meeting the love of your life by commenting on the weather to your seatmate on Metro, or having all three of your kids grow up to be bright, charming and successful adults – what’s the chance of that? [Laughter] Or having, because of no discernable competence on your part, falling into your dream job through a want ad. Or defensive driver or not, going through life never being involved in so much as a fender bender. You cannot control the good luck and abundant undeserved grace that comes your way and, of course, you cannot control the other side of life’s equation – the unpleasant events, the tragedies, the accidents, the difficult outcomes that come our way like a life-limiting, life-threatening disease, or falling badly after slipping on a wet spot at home, or having a marriage fall apart despite your best efforts, or losing a job due to global economic conditions, or having someone in your family go to jail for a crime.
No matter how careful or competent or clever we are in our lives, no matter how diligently we follow all the rules we imagine that are in place to make life predictable, we cannot control most of the misfortunes which will come our way. Life on this planet is a lot like the chaos that exists on the monkey-infested golf course in Calcutta. It is weird and wild and woeful and wondrous. Things happen for both good and ill. And the sooner we accept the fact that we are not in charge, the sooner we learn how to begin to cope well with this world.
And I will pause after making that second point to make a third. It is my observation that we human beings are far better in our daily lives at paying attention to and cataloging in our psyches, all the misfortune and unpleasantness and things we don’t like than we are noticing and taking into our hearts for care and cultivation the amazing graces and blessings that come our way. We are better at seeing and feeling the negative. Let me speak personally for a moment. I am, my spouse will tell you and others, a really cheerful and upbeat guy, sometimes irritatingly so, but nonetheless, I know that in my daily life I am quick to notice and grumble to myself and complain to any others I can find who will listen about any number of inconveniences or difficulties or challenges that randomly come my way, like the toilet handle that snapped off in my hand the other morning, as I sought to flush it, or the flat tire I had on my bike a few days ago, just after saying to myself, “Gee, I haven’t had a flat for awhile.” [Laughter] Or the chronic knee pain from arthritis that now crimps my style and makes my parishioners say to me “Why are you limping?” Or the unexpected weekday interruptions at my office up at River Road that prevent me from achieving my complicated work plan. If these parishioners would just leave me alone I could get my . . .[Laughter] Oh! You know about that! I am not putting words in Shana’s mouth. Of course, we are always glad when you call.
I notice and I complain when some monkey of everyday life tosses my ball into the rough and, what is more, despite my best efforts as a cheerful soul to spiritually and emotionally notice all the good breaks and the blessings that routinely come my way, I am routinely more reluctant to acknowledge in my heart how very lucky I routinely am. The breeze that is so often at my back, the kindness and courtesy which comes my way, the perfect poem for Sunday worship that drops into my lap on Thursday, the beauty of the natural world around me. Did anyone notice this morning? The good night’s sleep that blesses me in rest. Why do I not regularly and spontaneously whistle cheerfully to myself about all these wondrous daily monkeys of blessings that drop my ball into the middle of the fairway? We have no emotional or spiritual choice, of course, not to notice when hard, painful, bad things come our way. But the blessings and the breaks we all regularly receive, these somehow require more diligence and discipline to notice. I’ll bet you anything the golfers of Calcutta were much more irritated by the monkey dropping the ball in the rough than they noticed when the monkey did the right things for their game score.
How are you doing in your daily lives with this balance of knowing the positive and the negative? And how are you doing in tuning your heart, the camber of your heart to the blessing as well as the things that go badly? And here is the fourth thing that I want to say about this grace and difficulty that breaks into our lives in monkey moments. Recent studies about happiness conducted by psychologists at Harvard and other leading universities in the United States, which many of you no doubt have heard about, conclude – all of these studies – and now I’m going to put this into the context of my golfing with monkeys story, that whether our ball is dropped deep in the rough by some mischievous event that really throws us for a loop and breaks our game up, or whether our ball is placed right on the sweetest spot on the green, we human beings, these studies reveal, consistently overestimate how happy or unhappy these turns of fate will make us. We overestimate their power.
Dr. Daniel Gilbert of Harvard: “A death in the family, a new gym membership or a new husband are not the same, [Laughter] but in how they affect our wellbeing, they are similar. Our research simply says that, whether it’s some pleasant event or a difficult one that breaks into our lives, both of them – the unhappy and the happy – will matter less than you think they will in terms of your happiness.” And then he goes on, “You are overestimating how much a difference such events make; none of them makes the difference you think.” And why is this? The answer, according to these scientists is simple: We human beings, and now I quote them again directly, “are generally unable to recognize that we adapt pretty well to new, unforeseen circumstances. We seem unable to predict,” they go on, “that we will eventually successfully adapt to new life situations, be they wonderful or woeful.”
And thus I arrive at the crucial spiritual point of this story about the monkeys in Calcutta. And that is simply the supreme value of an adaptable heart. I might as well say it loud and clear because this is what I’ve been waiting to get to all morning. I am passionately persuaded that emotional survival and spiritual success for all of us, over the course of our lives, depends, as it did for those Calcutta golfers, on their willingness – our willingness – to adapt to unforeseen realities that come into our lives that we cannot, despite our best, illusory efforts, control. Just like the golfers in Calcutta wrote the monkeys into the rule book, we need to write into the rule book of our hearts that we will go with the flow of life. We will cope; we will adapt.
Four years ago, the morning after Hurricane Isabel slammed into our region, I was down in a little cottage we own – my partner and I – in Prince Frederick, and all of our neighbors (we’re on the other side of the road from the water), all the neighbors on the water side – the Chesapeake Bay had come up 16 feet and overnight had washed all of their lawns away. Many of their homes were then precariously perched on a new gaping hole. I went across to my neighbor Jinx – he used to fly helicopters in Vietnam, tough guy – and we’re looking down this cavern and realizing he’s going to have to spend a couple hundred thousand to rebuild his property with rocks and rip-wrap and tiered railroad ties, and I’m commiserating with him and, all of a sudden this little twinkle comes into his eye and – he’s about 60, about my age – he said, “Well Scott, Isabel took my lawn, but she gave me a beach.” [Laughter] And I looked down, and sure enough, where there had never been a beach, there was this sweet little beach where he could put a couple of lawn chairs for his grandkids and he looked at me again and he said, “She took my lawn, but she gave me a beach.”
I had a long conversation recently with a wonderful guy in my congregation named Bob who, similarly, has been able to find his spiritual and emotional way by adapting to a tough situation. He was just recently diagnosed with a pretty severe diabetes which, as you all know, requires you to make real changes in your life if you’re going to cope with that illness. When I was commiserating with him about it, he said, “You know, Scott, I never, of course, would have wished this medical crisis on myself, but I honestly believe, and I’m not a Normal Vincent Peale rewrite, I honestly believe this crisis is the biggest opportunity in my life. It’s an opportunity for me to lose weight, to live much happier, to be healthier than I’ve been in decades. I honestly feel that diabetes is the best thing that’s happened to me in 30 years.”
Even a little closer to home. For most of my adult life, I was an avid runner; those close to me would say addicted. I ran for 25 years, half a marathon – about 13 miles – every day, seven days a week. Once a friend said to me, “Scott, why did you do that?” And the answer is “because I could.” But I can’t anymore. My knees are, as they say in the movies, shot. I must tell you this has been a most unwelcome change in my life. I grieve the loss of running; I grief the loss of being in a strange city with a pair of running shoes and being able to go out of the hotel. I still dream at night that I am running again. I dream that I can still run. But I can’t; because of my monkey knees, I can’t. But, ahhh, the virtue of an adaptable heart. I’ve become a crazy cyclist. [Laughter] I bet you know nobody who cycles 13,000 miles a year, except for me. Two years ago, I cycled from Los Angeles to Boston in 30 days and I’m going to do it again a year from today. [Applause] I’ll be riding again.
My cycling has opened new worlds – and I swim also [Laughter] – but my cycling has opened new worlds. Every morning I commute from 12th and U where I live, in your neighborhood up to my church, mostly up the Capital Crescent. I see herons; I see fox; I see people with bugs on their teeth coming down the hill. I see my world. Cycling has opened new worlds of monkey joy. Many days when I’m on the Capital Crescent Trail, I pass a guy. He’s about 30; he’s unremarkable except for one thing. His legs do not work; he’s a paraplegic. He has a special bike, a recumbent that I’ve never seen before, with pedals right in front of him. He pedals with his hands. He always has a big smile on his face and he pedals with his hands! He has adapted to biking without legs, adapting to a loss most of us would fine sorrowful. He pedals with his hands.
The words of Albert Camus come to mind: “Yes, there are deprivations; there are deprivations which could rise to our worst sorrow. But what does it truly matter what has been lost when what has been lost is not yet used up?” And then he went on: “There are so many things susceptible of being loved that surely no discouragement can be final. To know how to suffer, to know how to love and then, when everything collapses, pick it all up again, simply richer for the suffering, happy almost, in the awareness of our difficulty.”
Rabbi Harold [inaudible] tells about violinist Itzhak Perlman in this story poem. He’s talking about his wife and himself at a concert with Itzhak Perlman. “We have seen Itzhak Perlman who walks the stage with braces on both legs, on two crutches. He takes his seat, unhinges the clasp of his legs, tucking one leg back, extending the other, laying down his crutches, placing, then, the violin under his chin. On one occasion, one of his violin strings broke. The audience grew silent but the violinist did not leave the stage. He signaled the maestro and the orchestra began its part. The violinist played with power and intensity on only three strings. With three strings he modulated, changed, recomposed the piece in his head. He retuned the strings to get different sounds, turned them up and downward. The audience screamed delight, applauded their appreciation. Asked later how he had accomplished this feat, the violinist answered: ‘It is my task to make music with what remains.’ A legacy this, mightier than a concert; make music with what remains. Complete the song, left for us to sing. Transform the loss, play it out with heart and soul and might, with all the remaining strength within us.”
Every study of human success as people go through life, says that it is the adapter, those supple enough to role with life’s punches, those willing to adapt to new information about their lives, howsoever sorrowful, it is the adapters who make new rules in the rule book of their heart. It is the adapters who survive and find love and meaning in their lives.
The sermon is about to end. Here is what I have said. Life is often hard; life is often difficult. Life is unpredictable, chaotic and unfair. Random things happen to us that throw us for a loop, wreak havoc in our lives and render inoperative all the rules we wish were in place. In a creation as open and fluid as this one, God bless it, we cannot control such random and difficult circumstances. We are not masters of our outward life. But we are masters of our inner lives; we can control how we react and adapt. We can align the cambers of our hearts in ways that will allow us to move on in life and love. Like the golfers in Calcutta, we are free to stay in our game and be a player on whatever fairway we find ourselves. But we need to remember the new rule: Play the ball where the monkey drops it. Now some of you are going to go home to that naughty spouse who stayed in bed with the Washington Post this morning, and they’re going to say to you, “Hon, what did you learn in church this morning?” And you’re going to say, “Play the ball – let me hear it – Play the ball where the monkey dropped it.” Hon, what did you learn in church this morning? [Congregation: Play the ball where the monkey dropped it.] By God, I think they’ve got it! [Laughter]
Amen! [Applause]