Good as it is, it’s sometimes not easy for human beings – particularly human beings in these polarized, disconnected, alienating times. A poll by the American Psychiatric Association in January of this year found that 30% of U.S. adults feel lonely at least once a week, and 10% feel lonely every day. Last year, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released an official advisory on our epidemic of loneliness and isolation.
The report said that from 2003 to 20219 (so this is before the pandemic), time spent alone increased for the average American from 285-minutes-per-day to 309-minutes-per-day -- representing an increase of 24 hours per month spent alone. We need some alone time – but not 36 hours a week, on average, which is what we were getting in 2019 -- and then the pandemic, of course, spiked that number further upward.
From 2003 to 2020, the report said, time respondents engaged with friends socially in-person decreased from 60 minutes-per-day to 20 minutes-per-day. That’s not enough.
In 1990, nearly a quarter of Americans (27%) reported having three or fewer close friends. In 2021, nearly half (49%) said they had three or fewer close friends. Whatever “close friends” might mean, Americans are reporting that they feel close to fewer and fewer people.
Being the Surgeon General, Murthy looked at this as a medical issue. The physical health consequences of poor or insufficient connection include, the report said: A “29% increased risk of heart disease, a 32% increased risk of stroke, and a 50% increased risk of developing dementia for older adults.” Overall, “lacking social connection increases risk of premature death by more than 60%.” So: it’s really good to be together.
Just coming here is such an important thing you do for yourself and for each other – and yet, any kind of relationship with others is something Americans have been finding it harder and harder to do. “The thing we need most is relationships,” writes David Brooks, adding: “The thing we seem to suck at most is relationships.” Why is that?
I heard Nicholas Epley, professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago, on a recent "Hidden Brain" podcast. Epley said he commuted to work on the train, where he had an unvarying protocol. He said:
“I just sat there and ignored everybody. I'd read a book, I'd listen to music, I'd scroll through my phone, looking at the news, the kind of thing that everybody else does. Sit down, you leave other people alone.”Epley was doing this, even as he was on his way to the office where, among his academic duties, he was also working on a book “describing how we're made happier and healthier by reaching out and connecting with others by being social.”
One day it hit him, “like a lightening bolt,” he says:
“that here we are, highly social creatures with brains uniquely adapted for connecting to the minds of others. And yet, we're all sitting here ignoring each other. And that struck me as bizarre.”We have this image of the obnoxiously gregarious passenger, and we don’t want to be that person, so we withdraw into our phone or a book. Where did we get that image? We probably picked it up from movies or TV rather than experience. Epley says,
“I decided I'd try to have a conversation with somebody that morning. I'd take an interest in somebody else. Eventually, all the seats are taken, and a woman comes and sits down next to me. She's an African American woman in probably her mid 50s or so, I would guess. She had on a bright red hat. I remember that very vividly. She sat down next to me, and I decided I'm going to try to get to know a little something about her. And so I said the first thing that came to my mind, which was a joke, but a compliment at the same time, I complimented her on her hat. I said how much I liked it, and that I had one just like it. And we both chuckled. I mean, it wasn't, look, it's probably not the best joke you've ever heard. But that got the conversation started. And from there it just went. We talked about our careers and our jobs and what we did for a living, but also whether this was really what we wanted to do for a living. I remember her feeling sort of stuck in her job and it wasn't quite what she wanted to do and thinking about making a change. She talked a little bit about her family, how she needed to support her family. And, you know, the conversation went really fast. It was about a half an hour trip. It was over really quickly. I was struck by that. And as I got up to leave, I thanked her for taking time to talk to me. She seemed delighted to have talked to me. And as I walked off the train, I remembered two feelings. One, that it felt nice. It was nicer than what I'd normally done that morning, which was probably scroll through the news. But the other thing I remembered was that it was surprisingly nice. I was, I was surprised by how nice it was.”So Epley, being a research psychologist, began a study. He and a colleague went to the Homewood, Illinois Metra station and set up a sign on the way up to the train platform that recruited people to participate in an experiment if they were interested. He says,
“we handed them a $5 Starbucks gift card, and then we randomly assigned them to do one of three things on the train that morning. In one condition, we asked people to just do whatever they normally do on the train. In the next condition, this is our solitude condition, we asked people to keep to themselves, to just focus on their day ahead, and not engage other people in conversation. And in the third condition, we asked people to do the thing that I did on the train that morning, which was when somebody comes and sits down next to you, try to have a conversation. We then handed them an envelope that had their Starbucks gift card in it and a survey in it. And we told them, at the end of your commute, fill out the survey, drop it back in the mail to us. And off they went.”The survey asked them how pleasant was your commute compared to normal? How happy do you feel after this commute? And how sad do you feel? Epley reports:
“What we found was that people actually reported having the most positive experience when they talk to a stranger. And they had the least positive experience in the solitude condition, where we asked them to keep to themselves. The control condition where people did whatever they normally did fell in the middle. We conducted another experiment where we asked people not to tell us … how they thought they would feel if they were in each of these conditions -- to predict how they would feel. And what we found was that people actually predicted that they would have the least positive experience in the connection condition and the most positive experience in the control and the solitude condition. And those expectations were just precisely wrong.”Epley goes on to say that extrovert vs. introvert doesn’t matter. He says:
“Psychologists have been doing lots of experiments where they ask people to behave more extrovertedly or more introvertedly, and the very consistent finding is that when people actually do this, people feel happier when they act extroverted than when they act introverted, and that's just as true for folks who are consistently extroverted as it is for folks who are consistently introverted. As far as we can tell, where introversion and extroversion matters is not in people's experience of social interaction, as much as it is in their choices of social interaction. That is, extroverts choose to reach out and engage with others a little bit more often than introverts do. And as a result of choosing to reach out, they tend to be a little bit happier. In many ways, it seems a little bit like physical exercise, that some of us choose to exercise more than others, even though all of us, regardless of whether we choose to or not, would actually be a little healthier if we exercised more often. The same thing seems to be true with our sociality as well.”So research from Epley and others shows we systematically underestimate how much we will enjoy connecting with people, and how meaningful our outreach will feel to others. Why do we underestimate this?
We have a desire to connect, but we also have fears that lead us to avoid other people – and the “avoid” circuitry tends to win out over the “connect” circuitry more often than is really optimal for us. Most of us, usually, have to give ourselves a little push, stretch ourselves a bit, to go ahead and start up that conversation.
The quality of the connection is especially enhanced if we don’t just stay at the level of small talk. We have this idea that we have to get to know a person over a long period of time, and slowly work our way up to deeper conversations. Actually, it doesn’t take so long. You can very quickly – not quite immediately, I would say, but almost – ask a relative stranger a really deeply connecting kind of question: What do you regret most in your life? Or what do you want to be known for? What are you most proud of? If we were to become friends, what would be most important for me to know about you? If a crystal ball could tell you anything about the future, what would you want to know? When was the last time you cried cried in front of another person? Or if you just say, “tell me about yourself,” they will often start going pretty deep into who they are – their hopes, trepidations, yearnings.
We’re afraid of being rebuffed, but Epley says,
“I cannot think of a time where I've tried to really connect meaningfully with somebody in conversation and they've said no. You take an interest in somebody, you ask about something they really care about, they're happy to talk to you about it typically.”I’m talking about gathering in: gathering in as a congregation – and what it takes to gather people into our lives. Why do we gather here – why are we a part of this church? I said, first, that it’s just so good to be together – so necessary, even, though its sometimes a push to make ourselves do it.
When we ministers get together, we have sometimes been wont to express a little frustration about congregants who seem to think church is just a social club. But you know, in these days of increasing isolation and loneliness, the fact is we need more social clubs. If that’s all that we were, that would be reason enough to keep the doors open. At the same time, that’s not all that we are – we are not just a social club. We are a covenantal people – a people of covenant, and Bill and I reviewed the levels of covenant at the beginning of our service today.
We have a mission: "love radically." That's not typically what a social club would say. "Grow ethically and spiritually. Serve justly." So we gather in because its so good to be together, and we also gather in to carry out our mission. We gather in to love radically – and to learn from practice and from each other how to do that. We gather in to grow ethically and spiritually.
We have work to do. And like starting up a conversation with a stranger, it might feel a little uncomfortable at first. You can think of this church as a social club, but also a gym. Earlier I cited Nick Epley as saying that sociality was like exercise – some of us may be more inclined to it, but its good for all of us. This is a place for toning those spiritual muscles -- strengthening the meaning, purpose, and wholeness of your life.
In my sermon a year ago at our in-gathering, I cited my colleague Rev. Victoria Weinstein. Let me this year remind you what she said:
“If I go to the gym and people are sprawled out napping on the floor of the aerobics studio, I will think the gym management is not just remiss, but nuts. It’s no different in church. We’re all there for heart strengthening of a different kind. Leaders should be empowered to be able to say: 'Get off the aerobics floor, please. You can nap at home.' This isn’t about not loving people. It’s about being clear what congregational life is for. Napping on the floor of the aerobics studio is not part of our mission, so we won’t be addressing your complaints about the pillows.”Thank you, Rev. Weinstein.
To say that a church is a spiritual gym is not to forget that the church is also a spiritual infirmary. There are times in life when we come to church sick at heart, soul weary, broken-spirited. Before we can think about the exercises and disciplines which cultivate and strengthen our wisdom, compassion, and equanimity, we just need to be cared for. We need replenishing rest. We need salve for our woundedness, for indeed salve is the root of salvation, with which our religious forbears were particularly concerned.
Yes, the church has that pastoral function in addition to its prophetic task to serve justice. As the saying goes, the church’s function is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Let us recognize that every one of us is both – in some ways afflicted and in need of comfort, and in some ways comfortably complacent and in need of an afflicting prod. What we are here for, the reason we gather in, the thing that both comforts us in our affliction and afflicts us in our comfort, is this mission: love radically, grow ethically and spiritually, and serve justly.
We grow by continuing to learn and reflect, and to help focus that, we have 10 monthly themes we’ll be developing this year:
- Hospitality,
- Fear,
- Reason,
- Awe and Wonder,
- Vow,
- Borders and Boundaries,
- Dignity,
- Caring,
- Beauty,
- Community.
Radical hospitality is our theme this month, and it’s what today’s sermon has been about, though I didn’t mention the word hospitality until now. The need for hospitality given our epidemic of loneliness and isolation; the benefits of talking with strangers, on trains or anywhere – both to us and to them; how quickly we can go deep in conversations even with people we haven’t known long. It doesn’t come easily and naturally to us to open up to others, to build real connections, but that’s what being hospitable is all about.
As we gather in as a congregation, let us gather into our lives more people. We need it. They need it.
May it be so. Amen.
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