Brad Fregger: The first speaker this morning is a very, very close friend. I’ve often embarrassed him by calling him my guru. It’s a joy to be a member of the congregation of the Presbyterian Church of Sunnyvale, because the man who is going to speak is Senior Minister there, and the good that comes from him, and the stimulation that he gives to me and to the other members of the congregation is a joy. So, Dr. Bruce Coleman, Sunnyvale Presbyterian Church.

Dr. J. Bruce Coleman

“THE PERSON FOR THE FUTURE”

There is a play called “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail" in which Ralph Waldo Emerson is portrayed as one of the leading characters. Emerson is about to speak in a small town and an unsophisticated farmer standing nearby says to Thoreau, “Is he going to give a sermon, or say something?” That question may be in your mind, so I would like to give Thoreau’s answer: “Both, God willing!”

If you have been reading about or are close to the problem of cancer currently, you may be aware that there is developing an idea, which is growing in acceptance, which is that there is a “cancer personality.” That is to say, the theory is that all of us produce cancer cells all of the time and when healthy take care of those cells so that they do not find a place where they can grow.

For some reason, once in a while, a person, because of the trauma of an emotional shock becomes host to the developing cancer. In addition, some people who have cancer, if this theory is right have a “cancer personality.” The cancer personality is one who has very low self-image. It’s a person who is unable to be forgiving, who takes on all kinds of hostilities, angers, which eat away inside him or her. Carl Symington of Fort Worth, Texas, is among the M.D.’s that make quite a case for this kind of definition of the “cancer personality.”

Well, I think, that there is a personality that is going to be successful in the future, the same kind of personality that has been successful in the present, and has been successful in the past. The basic fundamental ingredient for that personality is the ingredient of hope.

Now, yesterday, about 10:00 in the morning, the doctors in Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane removed my mother’s right leg. She is 84 years old this coming week, it’s her tenth operation since January 31st this year.

I went up a couple of weeks ago and she said, “CNo more operations, please, because there is nothing for me in the future.”
So one doctor said to me, “Well, we need to amputate and we will be able to do it because your mother is always cooperative.”

I almost exploded with “That is not significant at the moment, all of us together must help her have some hope for the future or we will be destroying her. We’re not doing her a good thing unless that happens!”

Well, the three doctors apparently worked very hard in helping her have some hope for herself in the future that she will be able to be a whole person, to maintain control of her life and to be able to relate to others in a meaningful way; because three hours later, I called up, expecting to ask the nurses in the recovery room how she was doing, and was told, “She would like to talk with you.”

So you see, somehow hope had come, and I think, the doctors probably learned something about the necessity of helping a person find that hope if their work was to have any meaning.

It really bothers me to see a movie like “Jaws” be as popular as it is in our society, because I think its popularity symbolizes the fact that a substantial number of persons believe that the dominant force in the sea of life is demonic, all powerful, and inescapable. That attitude leads to a dead-end street!

If our society becomes dominated by this hopeless mood, we’re going to turn in upon ourselves and destroy ourselves.

The second fact of the personality I’d like to point out that is basic to being successful in the future is that of being able to dream dreams. Tomorrow is found first in the frontier of the mind!

My high school English teacher Jerry Niamy wrote an interesting book of poems “One is a Number.” One of these poems goes like this:

Where is the west, young man, young man, where does the west begin? Where will you go, young man, young man, where does your west begin? I think I know where the west begins but I don’t want to go. Teacher told me where the old west was, T hen told me I must find frontiers in my own mind, frontiers in my own mind.

The person who lives successfully into the future will have a mind open to life’s possibilities and will dream about them!

Those of you who have been in Taiwan these last few years are aware of what happens when society modernizes without the image of how to live that way being in the minds of the people. Fifteen years ago in Taiwan the way you got around was either by walking or by riding on an ox cart.

Today there are bicycles, motorcycles, cars and trucks all over the place, going in all directions at once! It’s chaos! There are lines painted on the street but drivers pay little attention to them. There are traffic laws, but people don’t understand them. You see, in their minds they haven’t been prepared for the future into which they have gone.

I dream dreams, as I know you do. I dream dreams of no unemployment, of no people starving, of days when war shall be no more. I dream of a woman standing up and saying, “To be a woman is beautiful,” and looking at a man and saying, “To be a man must be beautiful.”

I dream dreams of a black person saying, “To be black is beautiful, to be white is beautiful, to be brown is beautiful.” Are these foolish and fanciful dreams which will never be realized? No indeed not! But unless we dream those dreams into the future, they will not happen!

I think that the successful personality for the future will have a central integrating belief. There is no such thing as pure science any more than there is such a thing as totally objective psychological counseling. It never happens! That which I bring, my basic philosophy of life, is very effective and affective in my counseling and in my science. For me, this philosophy is constructed about and determined by the person of Christ. He is, for me, the central integrating ingredient of my philosophy of life.

I remember last year at the symposium someone asked the question, “If there are many worlds in the universe, did God’s son go around getting killed in each world?”

That is a very good question. My response was, “I don’t know, but I believed that the truth about God revealed by his son’s death on Earth will be revealed one way or another in the many worlds, if there are such.”

I found out later that there is a poet, Alice Meynell, who died in 1922 and who already had put this idea into poetry. She called the poem, “Christ in the Universe.” In part it states: “’

But in the eternities, doubtless we shall compare together, hear a million alien gospels, In what guise he trod the Pleades, the Lyre, the Bear. Oh, be prepared, my soul, to read the inconceivable, to scan the million forms of God, Those stars unroll, when, in our turn, we show to them a Man!

I think that the successful personality in the future will be the person who is an actor, not a re-actor. By actor I don’t mean a ham, but one who acts.

Have you ever felt like a piece of furniture? Pushed around, sat upon and moved by your environment? That’s not really living. It’s when we are self-motivated, when we act; then we are really alive!

I’m not just a minister, or a father, or a husband, or a man. I am Bruce Coleman, who is a minister, a father, a husband, a man, a Christian, and more. I am so much more than my name implies and so much more than just the sum of my responses to the stimuli of my environment.

Do you remember Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs?”

1. First he speaks of our physiological needs: food, oxygen, rest, sex, drink, elimination.
2. Then, when those are cared for, he refers to our safety needs: physical safety, economic safety, psychological security, emotional surety,
3. Then of our love and affection needs, our belongingness.
4. Then our esteem needs are mentioned: respect, approval, recognition, status, a sense of worth.
   
5. Finally, he says, after we have met the four basic needs a person may enter the stage of self-actualization.

He states that people who enter that stage are as rare as Olympic gold medals in the athletic community, and they are found only with persons who are over 50. (I think Maslow was 52 when he came to that decision!) Such a person is creative, knows and understands himself or herself, is capable of mature relationships and is self-motivated.

When addressing a question of personality that will be successful in the future, there is something that I would like to avoid, but I cannot. I refer to Barry Downing’s Alpha problem, which, if I understand him correctly, is the problem of evil, or sin, or whatever title one cares to give it. We can’t run off into space to escape it any more than we can lose ourselves in futuristic thoughts to escape it. We can’t seem to educate ourselves free of it.

Have you read the novel Terminal Man by Michael Creighton? The person that they are trying to help medically, ends up by destroying, and being destroyed by the computer designed to help him. The doctor who was helping him most had to shoot him!

That seems to describe rather well what happens too often to our best intentions. They result in entirely different results from that which we anticipated. This problem calls for the miraculous, for divine intervention, for something more than human adventure, human belief, human endeavor, human dreams, human hope.

That, I believe, is what the incarnation is! It is divine intervention. It is God cutting across the plains of history so that all of human history has not a focal point. It gives the time and space coordinate a reference point. It is God who is the creative source of the universe; but it is the presence of God in human life, in the person of Christ, where we have our hope! In the light of this Christ-even, we must re-orient ourselves.

In antiquity, there was the god of war, the god of the sun, the god of the fire, the god of the hunt, and the god of love. They were gods representing the most important sources and facts of human experience.

Then the Jewish concept developed which seemed to be that God is a great general and all that are Jewish are lieutenants. But in Christianity this changes drastically! In Christ our responsibility and our status as persons are maximized. We are treated in Christ as a part of God. So it seems to me the “alpha problem” of sin becomes the “omega solution” of discovering in Christ what a whole person, a complete person, a real person. can and will become.

Time won’t allow us to explore this matter much further, but I think when one is caught up emotionally, intellectually, volitionally in the Christ-event, when one is conscious of the presence and the power of God in one’s life, one is immediately confronted with, and involved in being a lower and a reconciler, willing to risk all for others even the very faith he or she has.

Just a closing thought now. In the play to which I referred in the beginning, Henry David Thoreau often felt like he was the only one who was right, who had things in proper perspective. He seemed to be the only one who saw the wrongness of the war against Mexico.

For this attitude he was forced to spend the night in jail. At one point that night Ralph Waldo Emerson came to visit him and shouted: “Henry, Henry, what are you doing in jail?” Henry’s reply was, “Waldo, Waldo, what are you doing out of jail?” Thoreau never lost hope in this play. Leaving the jail his final thought was this: There is more life to come, the sun is but the morning star.” I change that thought of his by respelling one word: “There is more life to come, the ‘S’ ‘O’ ‘’N’ is but the morning star!”