Text Box: Interfaith Celebration Gathering Sunday, October 29, 2000 Interfaith Celebration Gathering Service Service agenda: Opening Prayer Readings Message OPENING PRAYER: Dear Mother, Father, Great Spirit, God, please hear my prayer. Please teach me how to always respond to others with love. I ask this knowing that all I need do is ask and it is granted. AMEN READINGS: A Critic is a legless man that teaches running. A Critic is a wet blanket that soaks everything it touches. He has a right to criticize who has a heart to help. Abraham Lincoln To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing and be nothing. Two things are bad for the heart, running up stairs and running down people. He who throws dirt loses ground. Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend’s forehead. Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship. Zeuxis The sweetest of all sounds is praise. Xenophon MESSAGE: Cold Pricklies When your friend comes to you seeking approval, what do you offer? Do you take it upon yourself to point out what you consider to be all the flaws in his thinking? Do you feel it is your duty to ‘set her straight’? Do you offer any praise for the good parts of your friend’s endeavor before jumping in to criticize what you see as the flaws? Praise is a sweet song that gives the hearer a ‘warm fuzzy’ whereas criticism offers a ‘cold prickly’ feeling. Many of us who were raised by a critical parent (or parents) tend to repeat that parent’s patterns in dealing with our friends and loved ones. As Earnie Larsen says, “What we lived with we learned. What we learned we practiced. What we practiced we became, and what we became has consequences.” For the critical parent, nothing we did was ever enough or ever good enough. Good grades in school, awards in life, none of these seemed to have meaning for the critical parent. Unfortunately, when we grow up with a critical parent (or parents) like this, we internalize this behavior, and use it to demean and undermine ourselves. That critical parent’s voice which once was (and may still be) external takes up residence in our heads, and we tend to view our own and others’ best efforts through the eyes of this critical parent mindset. It is from this posture that when our friend comes to us for approval, we feel sure it is our responsibility to point out what we consider to be all the errors of her ways, flaws in her thinking, and mistakes in her judgment. Unfortunately, doing all this acts much like throwing ice water on a cold person. This ‘ice water’ verbiage can have the effect of freezing the hope, exuberance, and excitement right out of people on whom we dump it. How many wonderful plans have you yourself had dashed into the ground by nay-sayers and critics? Unfortunately, this supremely negative feedback happens to all of us occasionally. While we cannot stop it from happening to us, we can ensure that we do not do it to others. It is imperative that we treat others with the same love with which we would like to be treated. Treating others with love means encouraging them, not criticizing the life right out of their projects. It means offering praise. It means stepping back from our own opinions and making an effort to see our friend’s project through our friend’s eyes rather than our own vision that may be clouded with our internal (or external) critical parent’s views. When we treat others with love, it does not mean that we have to keep our opinions silent. It only means that we need to strive always to deliver them with love. As Marianne Williamson says in her book, A Return to Love, if we cannot do an act with love, then we need to not do the act at all. Rather than saying, “That’s just my style” when we receive feedback that what we said was crushing to another person, we need to step back and access our style to see where we can improve it. Instead of thinking that the other person just needs to be more thick-skinned in order to better handle our crushing remarks, we need to think about what has caused us to become so callous that we offend others in this manner. We need to remember that we each have different ways of doing things. No one person owns the ‘right’ way to do, say or think things. There is no one of us who owns the way, the truth and the light as it applies to religion, politics, abortion, or any other major earthly concerns. We are all individuals, and as such we have an infinite variety of ways of doing things. My way of doing things may not suit you, and your way of doing things may not be suitable for me. But neither way is ‘wrong.’ We need to remember that there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ As long as we remember that we were created by a God of love and act accordingly, we will be doing the very best we can. After all, God is love. God created us in His/Her image, so we are created out of love in the image of love. We need to always remember this so that we ensure that we access that love at all times in our dealings with others. May God add a blessing to these humble words. AMEN © 2000 Rev. S. Suzanne Fisher