Here's my latest sermon that I delivered a couple of Sundays ago.  It's about the difficulty we all have in asking fo help.  Please let me know what you think.

Every telephone call is an act of courage.  Each time we cast our digitized voice into the void we send a hidden plea, an obscured question.  Thanks to caller ID we begin with, “Please value me enough to pick up.”  Then, “Please listen to me,” followed by, “Please take me seriously.”  We may think we’re calling to tell someone about our day or to make dinner plans or to make a hotel reservation, but what we are really doing is asking for respect.  Is that why  it's so difficult for some of us to ask for directions to a restaurant?  And why are we put off by the prospect of asking someone to dinner?  Is it really that difficult to say to our spouse, or our co-worker, or our neighbor, “I can’t do this project alone.  Can you set aside a few hours to help me?”

The English language has many terms for the act of giving help or assistance, but few words accurately describe the act of asking.  The words for giving, “altruism,” “generosity,” and “liberality” all connote an unselfish and bighearted approach to the world.  But where are our words for asking?  We have “entreaty,” “plying,” “coaxing,” and “wheedling,” all of which that the other affirm our value to them and to reassure us that we matter.

If we can make twenty telephone calls a day, why is it so hard for conjure up the unsavory image of a dark alley where a pusher and a junkie negotiate the cost of today’s fix.  Even the mildest term, “solicitation,” is a crime in most states and placards in front doors across the country warn, “No solicitors.”

We ask each other for help every day.  The cycle of giving, getting, and gratitude begins with one person declaring his need to another.  The cycle ends with both the recipient and the donor enriched by the experience.  We are interdependent beings and to thrive we must have the synergy that comes from our cooperation.  That synergy does not and cannot begin with an offer from a magnanimous giver; rather it begins with a plea from someone with a need.  We all have the need to feel connected to others.  Asking creates connections.

We are taught from youth to, “Stand on our own two feet.”  Free market capitalism reveres the entrepreneur and the self made man.  Oh sure it’s important to be a “team player,” and we need “indians” as well as “chiefs,” but our greatest myths involve someone who lifted himself up from poverty to become a great leader.  One would think that Abraham Lincoln, who taught himself to read and worked his lessons by firelight on the back of a shovel, never asked anyone for help.  Or that Bill Gates never went to a teacher, or an accountant, with a question.  We call our national holiday Independence Day and our country has always seen itself as a “City on the Hill,” separate from and somehow better than the rest of the world.    

In his book, “Habits of the Heart,” author Robert Bellah noted, “American cultural traditions define personality, achievement, and the purpose of human life in ways that leave the individual suspended in glorious, but terrifying, isolation.”

To ask another for help would shatter our façade of self reliance.  It would expose us as weak and vulnerable, like the junky in need of his fix.  When I ask my parents for help I am a child again.  When I seek aid from my husband I feel my status as the nurturer and caregiver, the woman of the house, threatened.  Oh no I think, I'm not perfect, I can't do everything.  And these feelings radiate outward through even my tangential relations, like the rings from a pebble tossed in a pond.  Don’t ask a girlfriend to listen to my relationship problems.  She wants someone strong as a friend, not someone needy.  Don't ask my sister to bring a dish to Thanksgiving dinner.  She'll know I'm not Martha Stewart.  Don’t ask another paralegal to advise me about this problem I have, it would betray my professional incompetence.   

If only the sole impediment to asking were fear of façade busting.  For each time we ask for something we create the possibility that someone may say no.  Rejection hurts, and we may hear “I’m busy this week” as, “Why would I ever want to meet with you?”

And for some of us the prospect of acceptance may be just as threatening.  We may say to ourselves, “They agreed to work with me; I hope I can live up to their expectations.”  I can’t tell you how often I have worked as a committee of one.  Or if we try to forge any new relationship and things go well we may wonder, “Am I really worthy of all this positive attention?”  How long can I keep fooling them?

It’s a shame that our self and societal delusions interfere with our asking, for the truth is that we appreciate being asked.  It’s flattering when one of the attorneys in the office calls me with a problem, he acknowledges my competence.  I feel connected when someone asks me to dinner, he enjoys my company.  It is deeply satisfying when someone confides in me.  By doing so she demonstrates that she finds me trustworthy.  And I love being asked for directions.

I’m sitting in Soldier Field, enjoying a Bears game.  It’s a beautiful sunny October afternoon.  In the aisle ahead of me beers are passed from hand to hand in a bucket brigade for quenching thirst, not fire.  On the field the players huddle, setting their assignments for the next series.  The usual planes are buzzing low in the cloud dappled sky, towing their advertising banners out over the lake.  Go to this bar, "Visit Berwinfest," "Bridget will you marry me Scott?" 

The play on the field is over and there is a timeout.  The scoreboard display focuses on a young man and woman in one of the lower, shade side sections.  Bridget and Scott I assume.  The man points up; the woman’s hands go to her face, the crowd cheers.  We see Scott produce a ring box, the crowd chants “Yes, Yes, Yes,” the woman hugs the man, the crowd cheers again.  I assume she said yes.

Poor Scott.  Was he so afraid of rejection that he orchestrated all this so that Bridget couldn’t possibly say no?  And poor Bridget.  Will she have to have eight bridesmaids, will her first child have to be born at  12:01 am on January first?  Will everything in her future have to be larger than life? 

Asking is an intimate and very personal thing.  A request that is granted draws people closer together.  Strangers become acquaintances and acquaintances may become friends.  We each have circles of intimacy surrounding us and who we can ask for what is determined by how from the center is that person.  We may ask a stranger for directions, but we would never ask him to watch our child.  A neighbor may watch our child, but we wouldn’t discuss our financial woes with her.  In the inner circle we find friends and family.  Sometimes family is closer, sometimes friends.  For there are some things that you can discuss with friends, but not with family.

But there are barriers to asking with even with our most intimate relations.  Habits of the Heart again, “…kinship relations…provide both a support and a constraint to individuals.  In our individualistic society, we are ambivalent about kinship.  We tend to value family highly as one of the few contexts within which one can count on others nearly unconditionally.  (As Robert Frost said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.”)  Yet we are wary of the restraints on our individual decision making that kinship involvements imply.  Thus we tend to choose those we especially cultivate even among blood relations.”

In other words we may choose to treat some family members as friends while maintaining a distance from others.  For those whom we choose to treat as friends must share certain essential components of friendship.  The traditional notion of friendship, espoused by Cicero and Aristotle required that friends enjoy one’s company, that they be useful to each other, and they share a common moral commitment to the good. 

Friendship demands that we move beyond our own self interest.  It requires that we empathize with the other and be in touch with ourselves.  For only when we can cast away our fears of appearing foolish or needy or our fear of being rejected will we be able to accurately discover and express our needs to another.  The touchstone of friendship is the ability to tell the other just what we need.

This may never have been simple, but our ability to identify and communicate our real needs is complicated by modern culture, quoting Matthew Kelly from his book, The Seven Levels of Intimacy, “Modern popular culture sends the message, ‘Go out and get what you want from life!’ This message is pressed upon us subtly and not so subtly every day of our lives, and we are encouraged to apply it to relationships along with everything else….The get-what-you-want philosophy cannot give birth to any form of significant or satisfying relationship for two people…The reason is that all genuine relationships are based on giving and receiving….Relationships are not about getting what you want…Relationships are about helping each other to become the best version of ourselves.  Wants play a very small role.  Needs, on the other hand, are of paramount importance.”

Unfortunately most of us aren’t very good at identifying our true needs and even if we do we have difficulty expressing those needs.  Even more perversely, when someone offers to meet our needs we may find it difficult to receive that gift, deeming ourselves somehow unworthy. 

To be a solid, true friend to another, to be able to complete the circle of giving, getting, and gratitude with another, we must first be friendly to ourselves.  Do we enjoy our own company?  Do we push ourselves to become better people?  Are we committed to improving society?  If we don’t aspire to those attributes what we ask of others will be in service of our selfish wants, not our legitimate mutual needs.  Synergy comes when our concerted actions allow us to accomplish things impossible by ourselves.  There is no synergy if the sole purpose of the committee is to make me look better or to make my job easier.   On the other hand, a committed group working on behalf of a mutual goal can work miracles.

When I discussed the lack of good terms for asking, entreating, plying, solicitation and the like, I intentionally avoided the word “praying,” Being an atheist, this is not a word I feel particularly comfortable with, although being a paralegal I use the word daily, as in, “Prayer for relief,” or “Plaintiff prays as follows.”  I know that prayer is exceedingly comforting and that prayer to a deity is the essence of asking.  I sometimes wonder would I be tempted to pray if I were in a foxhole.

As one asking for help, the pray-er seeks a connection with the deity.  She expresses her vulnerability and her need.  By praying she comes to terms with her problem.  The act of praying is solace itself.  In her appeal to a higher power the pray-er looks for an affirmation that she is not alone and she seeks a nonjudgmental presence that will tell her, “It’s OK, nobody’s perfect.  I’ll help make it right.”

 This from On Being a Friend by Eugene Kennedy, “Suppose God were as understanding as the most understanding person you ever met, the one who made you feel at ease and did not shame you, the man or woman who was able to accept your human frailty and restore hope and courage to you.  Such people exist, as we all know.  They keep the world going at those moments when it threatens to collapse; they help us to survive because they neither approve nor disapprove of our weakness, but they profoundly understand it.”

I may be an atheist, but I do have an understanding of God.  God is perfection.  God is the highest power.  God is the be-all and the end-all.  God is love. God exists in the connections between each one of us.  And every time we ask another for help we create a new connection and we expand our world.  With every entreaty we make space for God, for love.  Just ask.  It’s really that simple.  Just ask.