A time to check our R-values
Brrr! It’s getting cold outside. For some of us, frigid temps are an unwelcome intruder into lives that would much prefer to go about in shorts and T-shirts year-round. Not to worry, however. With 90s and 100s the new summer norm we’ll all have more than enough of those days to enjoy in the coming years. I say this with some regret, however. My youthful enjoyment of long, hot summers no longer appeals to me as much as the rush of a winter day with its crisp, clean air, frozen ponds and crystalline snow flakes blanketing the landscape.
Even if it isn’t your favorite season, winter serves as our annual wake-up call to a reality that can be as harsh as it is beautiful. For me, the sweaters, coats, gloves, scarves and hats I’ll be wearing the next four months are welcome accouterments of a season I’ve learned to appreciate. While none of these external wraps adds any heat to our bodies, they nonetheless ensure our comfort to the degree they shut out the wind and falling temperatures outside. In other words they are portable insulators we gladly wear when the weather outside is frightful.
But as the saying goes, man does not live by clothing alone. Nor does woman. Hence we require huts, igloos, apartments and houses in which we can be shielded from the worst that winter may throw at us. I guess we should thank our long-ago ancestors for discovering that animal hides, straw, mud, tree branches—even dung and ice blocks--can provide us with shelter sufficient to allow us to live, year-round, in regions where winter presents such a formidable challenge. Over time these coverings gave way to stone, logs and boards, brick, stucco, concrete and a host of synthetic materials—from asbestos to fiberglass to cellulose to spray foams to Tyvek wrap—improving our ability to keep heat or cool inside regardless of the fluctuations of the temperature outside. While we don’t usually make much of this, insulation is one of the most vital necessities of our existence, no matter out latitudinal location. In fact it is difficult to imagine living without it.
The building trade has a term for the quality and effectiveness of the materials used in insulating the structures in which we live and work. It is called the R-value or R-rating. R stands for resistance to the loss of heat through windows and walls, or conversely, to heat penetration through these same structures when air conditioners keep us cool in side. Now I don’t pretend to be very knowledgeable about how this is calculated. But I do know that that the higher the R number, the more efficient and effective is the insulation, whether blown into attics, laid between walls, or trapped in the air between panes of window glass.
R-values have been on my mind since hearing a very clever sermon a few weeks back that described Jesus as the great de-insulator. The preacher’s allusion to R-values sent me down a rabbit hole from which this essay’s metaphor slowly came into focus. Jesus demonstrated an openness to and acceptance of people that was both unusual and threatening. He broke bread with the orthodox as well as with Gentiles, while rubbing shoulders with sinners and outcasts. He had access to the wealthy and moved among the poor as a brother who understood their plight. He extended his hands to embrace, comfort and heal those of both high and low estate, whether they were crazed like demons or afflicted by physical conditions that made them loathsome or untouchable. At the same time his inclusivity threatened those who had insulated themselves from the contamination of the spiritually unclean. If an R-value of resistance to contamination could be assigned to him, it would probably be so low as to be immeasurable. We who profess to follow in his footsteps should find this as troubling as it is inspirational, for we rarely embrace or demonstrate the same qualities of openness and acceptance.
I suspect most of us, whether we claim to follow Jesus or not, have an R-value much higher than his. As a matter of tradition, preference and survival we tend to insulate ourselves from people, ideas, and lifestyles that we find disagreeable, repugnant, or dangerous. To varying degrees they pose threats to our well being by disturbing our views of right and wrong, good and evil, and what is reasonable or foolish. So we work hard insulating ourselves from having to see, hear, or contend with what makes us uncomfortable or arouses our disgust and rage. I suspect our ability to do this varies with the particular issue or people whom we want to prevent from entering those comfort zones in which we prefer to live. In other words, our R-values change depending on what we can tolerate and what we can’t, what we will and will not permit to permeate into that house of “me” in which our thoughts and feelings reside.
The image below is my attempt to offer a way we might visualize how our insulation, both mental and emotional, helps provide us with a sanctuary in which we find comfort. It is based on my belief that we are invariably caught in crosswinds of ideologies and lifestyles that, to some degree or other, we find either tolerable or intolerable. And in that turbulence of people, customs, and ideas that permeate those psychological membranes in which our identity is enclosed, we are forced to make choices about how much, or how little insulation we want and need.
As in houses, our personal insulation is layered in levels. The first level involves the subconscious and conscious judgments we hold, reinforced by the viewpoints and habits of those with whom we grew up or have greatest influence upon us. These are the voices of that inner monologue in which we decide what we should allow or resist and what we approve of or reject. In other words we determine the degree with which we choose to insulate ourselves from ideas, viewpoints, lifestyles—even people—that are trying to gain entry into our thoughts and feelings. How we decide from among conflicting alternatives determines whether we give our approval or rejection to a new person or idea. If it or they lack credibility or feel wrong in some way, we will probably stand firm in our opposition. Skepticism, bias and prejudice—which all of us carry as evolutionary survival adaptations--live at this first R-value level as interior attitudes that may or may not find expression in how we speak or what we do.
At this point we may decide to add or remove insulation by crossing that thin and sometimes cautionary line that separates our inclinations from our actions. Our tolerance or intolerance acquires some force when our opinions and values find expression through our words, writings, and behaviors. We don’t merely allow, approve and accept, we endorse. We don’t only resist, reject and oppose, we prohibit. This is where public activism often finds expression in marches, boycotts, protests and the like, announcing to the world how much we endorse the ideas, policies and people representing them –OR-- how much we seek to limit or prohibit them from becoming normative. The many –isms against which we now rail and for which many are called out seem to me a product of this second R-value level of our insulation.
If our convictions extend beyond our own ideas to societal and national reforms or restorations, we will likely be inspired to cross another line to the third R-value level. It is a step, a big step, that compels us to get behind political change to enact or repeal laws designed to mandate compliance at a local, state or national level. These initiatives may appear to open doors to tolerance for who can marry whom, what gender means in its physical and social manifestations, who may and can become a citizen, how we may or should live as a multi-racial society, what are the rights and opportunities to which women are entitled. Or they may add layers of insulation to strengthen 1st and 2nd amendment rights while shoring up restrictions to open borders and abortion. Yet in their codification they can’t help but also restrict and prevent others, ironically serving as added insulation within those who embrace and support them.
The final level of insulation, R-value IV, is reached when individuals or groups decide that mandates are not enough to open the floodgates of tolerance or batten down the hatches guarding the fortresses of intolerance. So they cross a line of violence that neither protects nor corrects. Perhaps as lone operators whose hinges seem to have slipped, or in bands of zealots determined to fix things once and for all, they resort to weapons and fire and explosions to protect their individual and collective houses. Tragically, in doing so they negate any pretenses and principles they may have once held about being tolerant or defending individual rights and freedoms. America now wears too many scars from too many individuals who, in seeking to insulate and protect themselves from real or imagined threats, have, inadvertently, left others wounded, violated and exposed.
I’d like to believe that most Americans can and do live comfortably with R-values that never reach beyond or exceed the third R-value level of insulation. In fact, most of us seem quite comfortable with R-values of I or II in which can live peacefully with one another, agreeing to disagree over most things, yet always willing to join in common cause when someone is in need. So as I write this, anticipating another winter with its assortment of teeth-chattering and bone-chilling storms and fronts, I am not only counting on the comforts of a well-insulated house to keep me warm and safe. I am also planning on reexamining the many R-values that enclose my mind and heart, so that, in this season of joy, hope and love, I might better understand how and where I need to adjust my own insulation. For the attitudes that help me trap those verities I seek to hold onto and possess, may also serve to block the truth and love that God reveals in myriad ways during every season of the year—and especially in the winter.
