You do me a bitter injustice. You cannot know my accomplishments. And only very few of my descendants know them either. Now let us get back to your present obligation. Since affection is based on the building of emotional bonds, it is usually the last phase to emerge in the development of human relations, following inclusion and control. In the inclusion phase, people must encounter each other and decide to continue their relation; control issues require them to confront one another and work out how they will be related; then, to continue the relation, affection ties must form and people must embrace each other to form a lasting bond. The person with too little affection the underpersonal, tends to avoid close, personal ties with others. One maintains one’s two-person relations on a superficial, distant level and is most comfortable when others do the same with one. Consciously, one wishes to maintain this emotional distance, and frequently expresses a desire not to get emotionally involved, while unconsciously one seeks a satisfactory affectional relation. One’s fear is that no one loves one. In a group situation one is afraid one will not be liked. One has great difficulty genuinely liking people, and distrusts their feelings toward one. One’s attitude could be summarized by this statement, “since I have been rejected, I find the affection area very painful; therefore, I shall avoid close personal relations in the future.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 12

The direct technique for maintaining emotional distance is to reject and avoid people in order to actively prevent emotional closeness or involvement, even to the point of being antagonistic. The subtle technique is to be superficially friendly to everyone. This behavior acts as a safeguard against having to get close to, or become personal with, any one person. The deepest anxiety for the underpersonal, that regarding the self, is that one is unlovable. If people got to know the individual well, one believes, they would discover the traits that make one so unlovable. As opposed to the inclusion anxiety that the self is of no value, worthless, and empty, and the control anxiety that the self is not smart and irresponsible, or has a defect that they want to hide, the affection anxiety is that the self is undesirable and unlovable. However, maybe these types of individual view themselves this way because they think they would not be able to love someone they deemed as defective, so they believe others will feel the same way about them. In contrast, the overpersonal type attempts to become extremely close to others. One definitely wants others to treat one in a very close, personal way. The unconscious feeling on which one is operating is, “My first experience with affection were painful, but perhaps if I try again they will turn out to be better.” Being liked is extremely important to one in one’s attempt to relieve one’s anxiety about always being rejected and unlovable. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12

The direct technique for being liked by a person who is overpersonal is an overt attempt to gain approval, be extremely person, ingratiating, intimate, and confiding. The subtle technique is more manipulative, to devour friends and subtly punish any attempts by them to establish other friendships, and to be possessive. The underlying feelings are the same as those for the underpersonal. Both the overpersonal and the underpersonal reposes are extreme, both are motivated by a strong need for affection, both are accompanied by a strong anxiety about ever being loved (and basically about being unlovable), and both have considerable hostility behind them stemming from the anticipation of rejection. For the individual who successfully resolved one’s affectional relations with others in childhood, close emotional relations with others in childhood, close emotional relations with one other person present no problem. One is comfortable in such a personal relation, and one can also relate comfortably in a situation requiring emotional distance. It is important for one to be liked, but if one is not like one can accept the fact that the dislike is the result of the relation between oneself and one other person—in other words, the dislike does not mean that one is unlovable. Unconsciously, one feels that one is a loveable person who is loveable even to people who know one well. And one is capable of giving genuine affection. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12

The primary interaction of the affection area is that of embrace, either literal or symbolic. The expression of the appropriate deeper feelings is the major issue. In most groups a paradox arises around this issue. At the beginning of the group there are many expressions as to how difficult it is to express hostility to people. It often later develops that there is only one thing more difficult—expressing warm, optimistic feelings. Affection problems, both giving and taking, are usually very profound. There are affectional elements in many of the foregoing techniques, especially the encounter and the two-person group fantasy. The question of whether religion can help us experience and express love is not simple. Either a “Yes!” or a “No!” answer would find many outspoken adherents. Much can be said on both sides. On one hand it seems undeniable that much of our idealism about love has had its origin and perpetuation in the Jewish and Christian traditions in our culture. In principle, at least, most of us value love and long for the satisfaction that experiencing and expressing love might bring in our personal, family, community, and national lives. The presence of this longing undoubted is related to our religious heritage, perhaps particularly to the New Testament and such passages as the following: If I speak in tongues of mortals and Angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am noting. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12

And when we do achieve some degree of emotional intimacy, if we disclaim the influences of our religious heritage on these experiences, in what may appear to be a nonreligious or even an irreligious setting, we are probably deceiving ourselves. However, the church has a rather poor record in helping people experience the love of which so much is spoken. Despite lip service to the primacy of love in human relationships, the church, by and large, tends in practice to see moral value primarily in terms of external behavior rather than in terms of the experience of love. As a result of this approach, religious groups often appear to be concerned primarily with judging people. They judge some people acceptable and stamp them with their good behavior seal of approval and make them feel welcome as long as their behavior remains acceptable. They judge others unacceptable and make them feel unwelcome, or at least uncomfortable, unless they repent and change their behavior to meet the group’s standards. As a result, the experience of being accepted, loved, and enjoyed as a person, irrespective of externals, is probably a rare experience in the church. And so the doors to the experience and expression of love are often rather effectively shut. And they are pushed shut under the guise of being lovingly concerned for the welfare and happiness, both present and eternal, of the individual! #RandolphHarris 5 of 12

Many of the people in the World want to be deceived. The truth is too complex and frightening; the taste for truth is an acquired taste that few acquire. Not all deceptions are palatable. Untruths are to easy to come by, too quickly exploded, too cheap and ephemeral to give lasting comfort. Mundus vult decipi; but there is a hierarchy of deceptions. Near the bottom of the ladder is journalism: a steady stream of irresponsible distortions that most people find refreshing although on the morning after, or at least within a week, it will be stale and flat. On a higher level we find fictions that mortals eagerly believe, regardless of the evidence, because they gratify some wish. Near the top of the ladder we encounter curious mixtures of untruth and truth that exert a lasting fascination on the intellectual community. We cannot, on the face of it, be wholly true, although it is plain that there is some truth in it, evokes more discussion and dispute, divergent exegeses and attempts at emendations than what has been stated very carefully, without exaggeration or onesidedness. The Book of Proverbs is boring compared to the Sermon on the Mount. In our trying to find meaning in such a transitional age, let us also refer to music. John Cage, the composer who has been very much in the forefront of modern music, was advertised as giving a concern in New York. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12

There was an expectant crowd which filled the auditorium, but John Cage ascended the platform and sat down at the piano for an hour, not lifting a finger. I think it tremendously important here is a musician who thinks art is so crucial, and his music so significant, that he believes that before anyone can really hear it, they have to learn to listen to the silence. What does this have to do with modern art and life? We have to realize that what people are trying to express often is a great emptiness, or sorrow and despair as in Picasso’s Guernica. When you see a picture entitled “White on White,” there is nothing on the canvas as far as you can discern. It was painted in two kinds of white and then framed. I am told that the modern artist Duchamp framed a toilet seat and hung it up as a picture. Like “White on White,” there are other offerings which consist of paintings with a little dot here and there, or a couple of lines in the corner, and then framed. When I go into the National Gallery in Washington, I see several great Leonardo da Vincis and Rembrandts and a number of other works for all time. Then I come to the contemporary artists, and I have a feeling of coldness. Their paintings contain nothing about human beings that we can recognize. What these contemporary artists are basically trying to say is that one must look, and often times we see a very bleak future. Their prediction is not about the lovely country of America where everyone is going to get rich. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12

It is a country that is becoming more and more mechanical, computerized, more and more money-occupied, directed by the Dow Jones Index—more and more humanly empty. Many of these artists, like the ones who draped cow’s intestines and blood over a rusty automobile as a still life in front of my office building in New York a few years ago, are trying to say people “Look! Really look, See what is happening, Take it in!” Mark Rothko, whose Chapel is in Huston, was one of the great figures in modern art. He committed suicide, but before he died he wrote a letter explaining his sadness at the reception of his works. He felt that people could not understand what he was trying to do, that any rich man could buy up all his paintings, dig a whole in his back yard, and dump his canvases in to bury them from the World. Now to somebody who had had a passion all his life to communicate by way of art, to say something important to his fellow human beings, this prospect was a great tragedy indeed. Where there is in Rothko is color after color—red, black, then perhaps brilliant gold and then a coast of black and another brown. Your initial feeling in that chapel might be dismal. Your second thought might be that to understand it requires a great deal of looking. Then you might sit on one of the benches in the chapel (which Rothko also designed) and you too would look. After a while you would being to feel that here is someone speaking to you out of subterranean levels, speaking out of his depths to those who will listen; he is the psalmist crying, “Out of the depths I call unto Thee.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 12

In a biographical film about Rothko, he is quoted as saying that when people look at his pictures, he hopes “They will laugh or cry or maybe pray.” These words are very relevant. People sometimes laugh and walk our again, and they sometimes cry. When they begin to take in what goes on with an artist like Rothko, then perhaps they pray. That is very fitting for this chapel. Perhaps people become unpersonal because they are not in their proper environment, they had in the past tried to reach out or get people interested in their work, but many are more interested in being side show clowns. Particular artist, Jules Olitski, has a Summer studio on an island, where he has built a great barn. There are canvases all over the floor. Olitski paints with a mop and spray gun. The mop has a white flap at the end like the kind one uses in mopping a bank floor. He dips the mop into big pails of paint and then spreads it on the canvases. There are a number of levels in each painting; it is a mirage of many different colors. When you look at it you not only feel those basic patterns of curving physical forms, but you also begin to see the many different hues shining through. The more you look at it, the more colors you see which were covered up and are now reflected through the painting. As you let yourself gaze upon these canvases, you are rewarded with a rich visual experience and with the ecstasy which accompanies such an experience. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12

What these artists are trying to tell us, what they are predicting, it seems to me, is that we are at the end of an age. I am not a great lover of our present hedonistic age and our materialistic society, where necessity is associated with horror and freedom with boredom, as Auden puts it: “This stupid World where gadgets are gods and we go on talking, many about much, but remain alone, alive but alone, belonging—where?—Unattached as tumble weed.” I think our society is radically faulty in a number of ways—such as our amoral economic system, our loss of values, our vulnerability to nuclear war, the millions starving while wheat rots in our storage bins, the Sacramento Unified School District getting ready to be take over by the state of California, the dramatic increase of homelessness in Sacramento, with the sky high rents, and how the Oroville dam broke, meanwhile the city invested nearly $300 million taxpayer dollars into a sports arena. The results are that the quality of human relationships has diminished. It is difficult for people in our day to see beyond the glamour, the sensational advances in science and medicine, the technological ease with computers, the fata morgana appearances of progress on all sides—yes, it is indeed difficult to see the reality underneath. In contrast, freedom is possibility. The word possibility comes from the Latin posse, “to be able,” which is also the original root of our word power. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12

Thus beings that long and tortuous relationship, interminably debated in the parliaments of the World and fought and bled over on countless battlefields, of the relationship between freedom and power. Powerlessness, we know, is tantamount to slavery. It is a truism that, if people are to have freedom, they must have the equivalent personal power in the form of autonomy and responsibility. The women’s liberation movement, which Reese Witherspoon is part of with her legal defense group to help working women gain equality called Time’s Up, has argued this point wit cogency. To be sure, one has to discriminate between possibilities: hectic acting, because it is more comfortable to act than not to, is a misuse of freedom. President Nixon is guilty of this, as illustrated in his own writings about “the unbearable tensions that can be relieved only by taking action, one way or the other. Not knowing how to act or not being able to act is what tears your insides out.” This compulsion to act in any extreme form is what is meant by “acting out” in therapy and is often symptomatic of the psychopathic personality. Personal freedom, on the contrary, entails being able to harbor different possibilities in one’s mind even though it is not clear at the moment which way one must act. The possibilities must be there to begin with, otherwise one’s life is banal. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12

The psychologically healthy person is able to confront and manage the anxiety directly in such situations, in contrast to the neurotic, in whom anxiety sooner or later blocks off his consciousness of freedom and one feels as if one is in a strait jacket. Freedom always deals with the possible; this gives freedom its great flexibility, its fascination and its dangers. The very idea of a quest involves a passage, a definite movement from one place to another. Here, of course, the passage is really from one state to another. It is a holy journey, so one who is engaged on it is truly a pilgrim. And as on many journeys, difficulties, fatigues, obstacles, delays, and allurements may be encountered on the way, yes! And here there will certainly be dangers, pitfalls, oppositions, and enmities too. One’s intuition and reason, one’s books and friends, one’s experience and earnestness will constitute themselves as one’s guide upon it. There is another special feature to be noted about it. It is a homeward journey. The Father is waiting for his child. The Father will receive, feed, and bless one. It is a movement from the outward to the inward but it is effected only with much labor, though much despondency, and after must time. “My soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will never be shaken,” Psalm 62.1-2. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12