Good Will and Secret Lists
With some Elvis for good measure
The “Hold to the Rod” series is about faith-based living and putting spiritual principles into practical use. The name comes from a chapter in the Book of Mormon, in which an Old Testament-era prophet named Lehi (a contemporary of Jeremiah and Ezekiel) had a dream-vision filled with metaphor. Central to this dream was the image of an iron rod, which could be clung to and followed to allow an adherent to walk the path to God without faltering. There are many things that can tempt us to let go of the rod, wander off the path it marks, and end up in dangerous places where we can do real harm to ourselves and to others. Talking about those dangers is important.
-LD
As I write this, it is the beginning of December, a time of “Peace and Good Will.” Those are great things to want, and the holiday season spreads them all over everything. Peace and Good Will come from within. They are very specific to each of us individually, and they are things each of us needs to be cultivating. Sometimes those words float in front of us long enough for us to genuinely think about them, and if you’re in that place, this is for you.
Because I am a Christian, I will point to a simple example from within my own tradition: children and Jesus Christ. Christ said plainly that becoming as a little child was a good thing, and one facet of that is a child’s typically boundless love and empathy (or seasonally, peace and good will). Kids cry with those that cry, and hug people who need hugs (and hug people who don’t need a hug, and cry when nobody else is crying, but that’s a whole other thing). There’s a purity to a child’s capacity for good will, and we’re commanded to stay attentive to that.
But as we grow, we also learn how to sabotage that. We build weird emotional structures into ourselves that interfere with our ability to love. We raise defenses. There are usually reasons for that, and we individually convince ourselves that we have good reasons for these artificial defenses, but we need to realize that in many cases we’re harming ourselves; explanations are not excuses.
I want to identify one of these emotional structures today and offer some thoughts on how to dismantle it so it’s easier to fill your heart with good will. I’m not perfect, and I don’t want to come off like I’ve mastered this, because I totally haven’t. But what I am is aware of this, and naming a problem is always the first step toward a solution. I want to highlight it here so everybody’s aware of it, and hopefully it helps.
I want to focus today on what I call “the secret list”. Some of you might already know where I’m going now, because the name is pretty intuitive.
Just so we’re all on the same page, though, I’ll explain with another example: Elvis Presley, the king of rock and roll.
A few months back my wife and I went to see the new Elvis movie. Incidentally, it’s enormous fun, and if you are entertained by anything about Elvis (the music, the capes, whatever) it’s worth checking out. It’s awesome. But this is not a movie ad. I mention it here because there’s a relationship moment shown in the movie that is very relevant, and is a classic moment where a secret list is revealed.
Some of you may know the broad strokes of Elvis’s life, but the one that’s important here involves his toxic relationship with his lifelong manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Colonel Tom Parker was not a colonel, nor was his name even Tom Parker. He was a career carnie hustler and first-rank dirtbag who talked Elvis into contracting to give him half of everything Elvis made, EVER. That’s a lot of money, and Parker was very predatory (and manipulative and emotionally abusive) about this contract. His influence on Presley is nothing but poison. There comes a point in the movie where Elvis realizes the kind of damage the Colonel is doing, and fires him. Parker then produces a secret list that he has been keeping; we learn he has been keeping a running tally of every single service he has performed throughout Elvis’s twenty-year career, and he builds that list into a multimillion dollar bill for services he presents to Elvis. Covering that bill would be bankrupting, so the King is forced to bow to the Colonel, and remain in that awful contract.
What is the lesson? There is potential inside each of us to keep our own secret lists. On these lists we track every favor we think we’ve ever done for a person, and every slight we think we’ve ever received from them. We use these lists to create hierarchies in our minds where we rank all the people around us as better or worse than we are. We keep these lists secret, but we also keep them ready to use as a weapon when someone challenges us, so we can assert superiority and bend people to our will. I did you wrong? Well, you did me wrong at this time, and that time, and this other time, and how dare you accuse me of doing you wrong anyway when I did you this favor and that favor and this other favor, and since I’ve got a list then clearly you’re the one who is actually wrong and my behavior is totally justified.
See how that works? None of that involves good will. It’s a spiritual disease.
When we think about disease, we typically think it’s something that’s just part of life. Flu season is flu season, and there’s always flu season, and some folks just get the flu. Some disease does just strike. There is opposition in all things, and there is sickness in the world in opposition to health. But it’s also true that the natural man is an enemy to God, and it is here that we find the guts of this particular metaphor, in what I’ll call lifestyle diseases. All the heart disease and diabetes and inflammation and sleep apnea (and assorted addiction problems) that may partially be our bodies being randomly weird, but ultimately happen to us because of our choices, not because these things are just floating around in the air.
Keeping secret lists is the spiritual equivalent of making poor decisions with your health. It’s not something that just happens and “oh no, I’ve contracted a secret list!” It’s something we build ourselves, something we do to ourselves, little by little, snack after snack, slight after slight, interaction after interaction. Building a secret list can be very subtle and slow. But we do it to ourselves.
Some of you are thinking right now of a time somebody else’s secret list about you has been swung at you like a blade. I imagine we’ve all seen this happen, either to us or to someone close to us. It cuts deep, and it hurts. It doesn’t just hurt because someone names a whole list of stuff you did or that you owe them. What really hurts is the realization that this person, who probably was some sort of friend, has been silently keeping score, maybe for years. That’s a cooold betrayal, and that betrayal hurts.
On some level, that’s why we keep secret lists. We all intuitively understand their power, and it makes us feel powerful to keep them at the ready, like nukes in their silos. But if you’ve been on the receiving end, you know the hurt I’m talking about. It is in no way an exercise in good will to be ready to do that kind of hurt, even just in case. It restricts your ability to love, filling the space in your heart that should contain love with judgemental grudge-bearing, and we have been warned clearly that we will be judged the way we judge others.
At this point, some of you may be a little disconcerted. You might be realizing that you’ve got some secret lists, and maybe that isn’t as justified as you thought, and maybe in the long-term it’s more dangerous to you than it is to whoever the list is about. If you’re being friendly to other people while keeping a secret list of judgy grievances against them, that’s a cold blooded way to deal with people. Stop it.
Please don’t keep secret lists about the people in your life. Doing so only interferes with your ability to love. It’s never justified. We do favors for each other, and it’s good to do so, but it’s not good to keep a secret tally of those favors. We bump against each other and have issues, and that’s part of life, but keeping a secret grudge list about it only does more damage.
Now, the silver lining about the fact that we build these lists ourselves is that we have ultimate control over them. Just like we get to pick what we keep in our physical selves (what we eat) we get to pick what we keep in our spiritual selves. Each of us gets to pick whether or not we will build secret lists. And whether or not we will keep them or get rid of them.
Did you do somebody a favor? Great! Forget about it. If we’re commanded to do charity with one hand while not alerting the other hand, then we can’t do charity with one hand and then use the other hand to write it down for later. Get into the headspace where you do good things because you want to do good things, not because you will want credit later.
Did somebody do you wrong? This is the toughie. Emotional hurt is a rush, but it’s a dangerous rush, and it’s a rush we can start to treat like an addiction. We can keep a little pet hate in our pocket, and periodically pull it out and pet it, because it feels good to hate. Stop it. Take a bit, maybe a minute, maybe a day, maybe longer, to get some clarity about whatever has happened. And be honest with yourself. Maybe it’s not as big a deal as it seemed right at the moment. Maybe it’s actually your problem and you misunderstood whatever was going on. Maybe it’s something you genuinely need to address with your hurt-er, in which case you should work to have a rational calm conversation about it, state your case, and see if resolution can be reached. Whatever happens, though, you also need to be willing to let it go when it’s done. You can’t keep it on a list that will resurface later. If there’s a grudge in your heart, there’s that much less space for love. Too much grudge and you won’t have room for good will at all. And that’s an awful place to be. Don’t let yourself get there.
As in everything, we can look to Christ as the ultimate example. Let’s be honest. If anybody has reason to keep a secret list of all the things He’s done for us, and continues to do, it’s Jesus Christ. If anybody has a reason to keep a secret list of all the slights and hurts we’ve dealt him, and continue to deal him, it’s Jesus Christ. But he doesn’t do that. He doesn’t command us to love because of this thing and that thing and this other thing. He commands us to love because love is what reinforces faith and hope and brings us real spiritual power, and He wants us to have that power. He doesn’t command us to repent because we hurt Him in this way and that way and this other way, but because repentance makes us better, more powerful people, and he wants us to be better, more powerful people. Everything Christ does is motivated by selflessness and love, and in that we find the ultimate example.
Whether you’re a Christian disciple or not, I can truly promise that if you can get rid of a secret list, peace and good will will grow in you. You will be a better person because of it. It will increase your love for the people around you, and allow you to be a source of joy to the people you meet. This holiday season, give this some thought, and then carry it with you going forward.