Sunday morning, and some ancient programming hardwired deep inside tells someone to go to church.
Perhaps it would be a big decision if they decided not to do it, but in recent decades millions of people have made that very decision. They have reprogrammed themselves: they enjoy a divine lie-in on Sunday morning; they drink coffee and read the paper, catch up on Facebook, call relatives, go to the supermarket, hang out.
In the UK the numbers participating in institutional religion are falling, steadily. It’s the default position. No religion is the new religion.
But still, around the world, a lot of people continue to wear the religious habit. In Kampala and Manila, in Buenos Aires and Bethlehem, in Ho Chi Minh City and in Holloway, north London... on Sundays, people do church.
On Friday, Muslims say prayers at the mosque.
On Saturday, Jews walk to synagogue.
It’s a ritual. It’s a habit.
Taken together, our habits shape the lives we live. And good habits are a good habit. When life gets tough, they can help us find hope. ‘Hope begins in the dark,’ writes Anne Lamott. ‘The stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.’1
U. A. Fanthorpe in her poem ‘Atlas’, shows how the ordinary, overlooked habits of the everyday can become a beautifully engineered pattern, strong enough to hold up an entire life:
There is a kind of love called maintenance Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it. 2
She goes on to talk about how this hands-on, daily detail, love – leaves notes for the milkman; answers letters; makes dental appointments; reviews the car insurance. Like Atlas, she says, this ‘upholds/The permanently rickety elaborate/Structures of living...’
Any healthy life needs good habits. Although in religion, habit is often called ritual. Like our other daily habits – cleaning our teeth in the bathroom each morning – once we’re in the place of worship, the programming takes over.
Christians, for example, sing songs, make a confession, receive bread and wine, say prayers, give money away, listen to a talk, wonder what it’s about, hope it will soon be over. Many of them have undergone rituals called baptism, or confirmation – public commitments that they will try and follow the way of Jesus of Nazareth.
The scholar Karen Armstrong writes:
‘Religion is not about accepting 20 impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed.’ 3
Like other habits, we choose some rituals after deliberation, and some we do automatically, without thinking. But all of them contribute to the kind of people we want to be. Our habits inform how we live, without us realising it.
Rituals can be a performance that needs no explaining. Like a mantra, the repetition itself is the meaning. ‘Ritual is poetry in action,’ said Rabbi Chaim Stern.4
The best kind of rituals are a really good habit. ‘We are what we repeatedly do,’ Aristotle put it a millennia and a half ago. ‘Excellence is not an act, but a habit.’5
23
TELL IT LIKE IT IS
Most of us are happy giving organisations and institutions a piece of our mind. It’s a vital part of our liberty to call such monoliths and their ethos to account. As writer Salman Rushdie says: ‘The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.’1
But what about when it gets personal? What do we do when someone we know needs to be brought to book? How honest are we prepared to be?
‘Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary,’ said Winston Churchill. ‘It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things.’2 Constructive criticism – from a coach, a mentor or a tutor – is essential for anyone who wants to improve their performance, in whatever field. And we’re sometimes too close to see what we’re doing wrong, or how to correct it.
If someone’s actions are in danger of ruining their own lives, or hurting other people, then we have a duty to intervene. It’s the shadow side of kindness. Another world leader from another century, Abraham Lincoln, said: ‘He has a right to criticise, who has a heart to help.’ But it’s then a question of how, and when.
The playwright Alan Bennett once said that there’s only one appropriate response on an opening night, and that’s: ‘Marvelous, marvellous, marvellous!’3 Anything else appears niggardly, cruel and discouraging to someone who’s at their most vulnerable. But what about that creaky bit in the second act? To be fair, Bennett isn’t saying that we ignore defects, it’s a matter of waiting until the excitement and paranoia has died down.
When one of Lincoln’s generals, say, screwed up, he would write him an enraged letter pointing out his deficiencies in excoriating detail. He called these his ‘hot’ letters. But they would remain unposted. He would put them in an envelope, marked, ‘never sent, never signed’. He waited for his rage to cool before delivering a more measured critique.
We live in the age of the ‘hot’ email, when we unload our vitriol on unsuspecting victims. This purging may be of some temporary use to us but not to anyone else. If we want to help someone else effect change, then we need to couch honest criticism in a positive framework.
In management speak, there’s a (much-derided) feedback technique known as the ‘shit sandwich’. You start by telling your colleague how well they’re generally doing, before forensically pulling apart their performance. You then end by saying how much better it’s going to be from now on. Critics of this critique have a point. It’s a formula which doesn’t recognise that individuals respond to criticism – and how it’s delivered – very differently. Some will only hear the good news; some will only hear the bad.
We have to gauge our honesty, and our criticism, to each circumstance and individual. But the shit still needs some kind of positive, helpful sandwich, otherwise it’s simply belittling. The only point of honest criticism is to help us get better. That’s why we need critical friends. As the tender, ancient psalmist pleaded: ‘Smite me in kindness.’
24
Be more Beastly
We’re animals.
Most of us recognise this. We share a great deal with our fellow creatures. But how much?
The jury is still out on whether we humans are simply top of the animal class, or if we’re in a class of our own.
The origins of humankind are a mystery – not something we can be entirely
