|
 ove
has never come easy for me. I am a 6 on the Enneagram personality scale,
meaning I have a fear based personality. The thought of laying myself on
the line for love is terrifying at the deepest unconscious level for me.
That fear almost made me lose my life partner, Amanda, because I was
afraid to risk making the commitment of marriage. The commitment of
love. I have told you this story before, but want to repeat a part of it
today because it fits this sermon so well.
She and I had been living together for about three years. Her biological
clock was ticking loudly and she wanted to start the process of having a
baby. And, she wanted to be married before that happened. You know, to
give the baby a family name and identity. To make things right. Well,
though I loved her deeply and also sort of kind of wanted to have a
baby, I waffled, and waffled, and waffled. Three times the wedding date
was set, and I backed out. Three times. Finally Amanda came to me and
said, in effect, either we go forward with a wedding or we need to part.
“The next date we set must be the real thing or I’m, reluctantly,
leaving.” Trapped! In a blind corner with no exits anywhere, not even a
tiny one. Oh my. I was completely into the fear of a lifetime. How could
I make such a commitment to love? How could I take such a risk? I had
risked before, and when that relationship, my first marriage had ended,
I had been terribly hurt. How could I do it again?
Some of you know what happened next that brought me to sanity. That gave
me the courage to risk love. It is not something that happens to
everyone.
Story of the eagles. (This is a story of the time when two eagles
came to me while I sat in prayer, two actual, circling eagles. Mates. I
had asked in my prayer to be given a sign, something to tell me whether
to marry was the right path. The bald eagles circled low, then went back
up to catch the thermals, and flew away. I immediately knew that my
prayer had been answered. I felt blessed. I went home immediately, asked
Amanda to marry, and 15 years and one 13 year old daughter later we are
still going strong.)
At that moment, you see, I did not need to be encouraged to love…..I
deeply loved Amanda. I needed to be encouraged to take a risk, to jump
off a cliff. As Annie Dillard is quoted as saying, “ To love, you've got
to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”
I would not have married Amanda if the eagles had not come to me that
day. Through the sheer miraculous intervention of their presence they
pushed me off the cliff and I was given their wings. The experience
remains one of the spiritual highlights of my life. One of the few
miracles I have yet experienced. I will never forget the feeling of
blessing, that I was being blessed. From the moment the eagles left I
had none of my previous fears about marriage and children … and they
never returned.
In the famous quote from First Corinthians that we shared as the
responsive reading, Paul says, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of
angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” And,
“if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am
nothing.” “Love is patient and kind, love is not jealous or boastful, it
is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way, it is not
irritable or resentful” That is a prescription for vulnerability and
risk if ever I read it.
We know how easy it is to charm. To convince the world and our partner
that they are wrong and we are right. To look good to others and self.
All these are ways that we defend our deeper selves, to prevent having
to be vulnerable. But what Paul is saying is, that is nothing. Being a
noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. To love, we must risk opening ourselves
up authentically. When we do not, we defend ourselves by being distant
or irritable or controlling in our love relationships. If we do not take
that risk to love, we will not be loved.
Without taking the risk of being hurt again, I would never have
experienced the great joy of living with and loving Amanda. And Hannah
Joy would not exist. That takes my breath away. For me to have prevented
her from walking on this earth because I was afraid to risk love, risk
being hurt again, would have been a profound sin. I am grateful that is
not how it turned out.
Let me describe another form of risking to love.
Usually we think of love in terms of long term committed couples. Sexual
love as well as friendship. The Greeks talked of three kinds of love.
Eros. Filia. And Agape. Filia is like that of siblings. Agape, the love
that comes from giving of yourself. Unconditional love. Two of those
three are involved in taking the risk to love those close to us who are
not our partners. Our friends and our extended families.
When I was growing up in Fulton, Missouri with my cousins Bob and Brenda
and my sister, Nancy, I would not have described what I felt for any of
them as love of any definition. As a matter of fact, there was more
competition and indifference than anything else I can remember. With
some old fashioned hateful enmity thrown in for good measure,
particularly for my mean big sister. As we all grew up and progressed
through the stages of adult life however, things became slowly different
between us. First, a softness and forgiveness replaced the edge of the
past. As each one of the others, and myself, contracted our various
forms of cancer, concern and feelings of closeness evolved. During the
year that my sister was dying, I felt an deepening love for her. During
visits we more and more spoke of our love. It felt VERY risky to do
so…….we never really had. By the time of her death, I felt a great loss.
Had I not risked being close to her during her dying, I would not have
felt so much sadness. A risk for love.
As my cousin, Bob, and I spent time together two weeks ago, there was a
warmth and connectedness that was not normal for two Bloom men. Our
father’s had been very stiff. No touchy feely stuff for them. Two boys
who needed that affection had to find it in other ways. But we did
learn. And by this end point in Bob’s life, as we went to a Washington
State basketball game and hung out at his beautiful home we felt a warm
bond that was loving in its quality. Then as I read him a poem that I
had written for him, and again as I prepared to leave, we exchanged long
hugs which could best be described as embraces. Loving embraces that
reflected the deep love we had for each other here at the end of his
life. Within a week of those embraces, Bob was dead. And the emptiness
was deep in me, because the love had become deep. The risk of love. Had
I not taken the risk to travel to his Washington home and be with him as
his life was closing, it would not have been so deep. As the poet Rumi
said, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find
all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
Fear builds strong barriers to an open heart.
Someone in the congregation who shall remain nameless, Frances Blizard,
called me this week and told me that she was concerned that I was giving
another of these Valentine’s Day sermons on love. She said, “what if you
were a single girl in the congregation and heard all this good stuff
about love, and you didn’t have a partner, you’d just want to go out and
end it all.” She asked if I wasn’t concerned that I would cause folks
pain who fit that description. I said, no, I wasn’t concerned because
there are so many opportunities to love every day that the failure to do
so does not come from lack of opportunity, but from the fear of taking a
risk. I was speaking of love in its larger context at that moment. Many
of us have felt like helpless victims at various times in our lives. I
know I certainly have. (Let me caution that I know that there ARE indeed
helpless victims of poverty, war, crime, and violence….but it is not
them of which I speak.) The helpless victim FEELING is what I speak of.
The illusion that when I am alone in the world, I am unloved. Nothing
could be further from the truth. The way we find out how much love is
out there is to take the risk of loving, of reaching out, ourselves. To
our neighbors, our friends, our families, fellow workers or students, as
well as those to whom we are attracted through eros. To practice agape
until eros shows up. Through unconditional giving, we receive love in
return. It is a flawless, perfect formula if we would but practice it.
Take the risk to give love, it will be returned to you, usually many
times over. In other words, we convince ourselves we are unlovable and
unloved until we act lovingly toward others and receive their love in
return.
Now, I am as aware as anyone of the many spiritual, emotional, and
physical limitations that plague us as humans. That keep us from taking
the risk of loving. Yet I know that, at some level of consciousness, it
is a choice. To take the heart thumping, sweat producing shaky step of
loving another unconditionally is a choice that we can choose to make
one moment at a time. The outcome, when we so choose, is healing to our
soul. “Love cures people, both the ones who give it and the ones who
receive it.” --Dr. Karl Menninger. What Dr. Menninger and I are
referring to is taking a wider risk than just loving one other human
being, but to take the risk to open your heart to the world. Listen to
the great Russian writer Dostoyevski.
“Love all of God's creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand in
it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love
the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive
the divine mystery in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin
to comprehend it better every day, and you will come at last to love the
world with an all-embracing love.”
Think of how wide open each of us would need to hold ourselves in the
world to do what he is asking. It would mean taking daily risks of
looking the fool beyond our imagining. It also means opening our hearts
to the love of God and her/his creation, whatever you conceive God, or
not God, to be. That, too, is a risk. As a Unitarian Universalist, to
follow what Fyodor is asking you to do may mean risking behaving
differently than some of those around you. Even though we present
ourselves to the world as a place where everyone is encouraged to
believe exactly as they believe, that they are safe and nurtured here in
having those beliefs and practices, the dark side of us lies in our
intolerance for practices that make us personally uncomfortable, mainly
those that don’t fit the spiritual beliefs and practices of the greatest
number of people. That is a natural human response. Therefore, it takes
a risk to love God and practice that love if many around you do not.
Let’s return to romantic love, the real stuff of Valentine’s Day. In
Harville Hendrix’s life long work to bring clarity to the dynamics of
love relationships, he insists that we are drawn to our future partners
because, unconsciously, almost mystically, we see that that person is an
accurate reflective amalgam of the caretakers by whom we were raised.
They are familiar. In mate selection, he says, familiar is a lot more
important than whether those past experiences were good or bad. In that
first wave of attraction, the boundaries go down and there is a blending
of the two. The romantic stage of relationship. It goes on for weeks,
months, or years. At some point, however, it ends. It is supposed to end
if the relationship is to mature. That ending point is the beginning of
what he calls the power struggle. Suddenly you see the dark side of your
mate as well as the light side. There is sometimes a sense of, who are
you and where have you hidden my partner, when the criticism,
irritability, emotional unavailability, and reactivity begin to flow.
What happened? According to Hendrix, as that familiar person to whom we
were initially drawn is familiar because they are so like our
caretakers, they become a screen on which we play our emotional scars
that we received from our caretakers. The hurts and angers get
transferred from the actual caretakers to this new surrogate caretaker
if you will. So your partner says something that strikes you to be
powerfully like what your controlling dad used to say, or do. Your
partner tries to comfort you and you pull away, in part because of the
smothering mother you never could get adequate distance from. And so on.
This is all unconscious, understand. It is not what is in our active
mind at the time it happens.
If this theory is true, do you have a sense of how much risk it takes to
confront these unconscious truths from the past. It is so much easier to
just blame your partner for bad behavior and be done with it. How
difficult to think that the reason I may be reacting in such an angry
way to something Amanda has said or done has to do with my past, with
old wounds that I am still trying to work out from my upbringing is
unsettling. It means I have to look inside me, find what it is that is
creating the reactivity, and work that out so it doesn’t get dumped on
her. Well, who wants to take responsibility for that?? For those who
sincerely confront the shadows of childhood and their legacy, in order
to love their here and now partners more freely, more fully, a special
award should be given. The honest risk award. A willingness to be
vulnerable and real and follow the journey back to discover why the
patterns of response to their partner are what they are. A deep risk for
love.
So, is it worth it? To risk to love? A quote from Erica Jong:
"Love is
everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical
about it...It really is worth fighting for, risking everything for.
And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even
more." - Erica Jong
If you don’t
risk everything, you risk even more. The loss of not having
authentically, deeply loved and been loved is profound. May every one
who is in this sanctuary find that love through taking the risk of
loving. It is one of life’s grand adventures.
But keep your
sense of humor. As Woody Allen says about love and risk:
"To love is
to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one
suffers from not loving. Therefore to love is to suffer, not to love
is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be
happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore,
to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too
much happiness. I hope you're getting this down."
Go out into the
world and jump off a cliff for love. You’ll build your wings all the way
down.
Amen
|
