“Love, the Problem”
The Reverend Cecilia Kingman Miller, Interim Minister
Edmonds Unitarian Universalist Church
February 10, 2008
Readings
From Rainer Maria Rilke:
There is scarcely anything more difficult than to love one another. That it is work, day labor, day labor, God knows there is no other word for it. And look, added to this is the fact that young people are not prepared for such difficult loving; for convention has tried to make this most complicated and ultimate relationship into something easy and frivolous, has given it the appearance of everyone’s being able to do it. It is not so.
[…]
Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure were more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work. So whoever loves must try to act as if he had a great work; he must be much alone and go into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself; he must work; he must become something!
For believe me, the more one is, the richer is all that one experiences. And whoever wants to have a deep love in his life must collect and save for it and gather honey.
From Carlos Almarán, The History of Love
Always you were the reason for my existence,
To adore you was for me religion…
It is the story of a love
Like unto which there is no equal.
Which made me understand
All that is good, all that is bad;
That gave light to my life…
Margaret Atwood’s
“Variation on the Word Sleep”
I would like to watch you sleeping.
I would like to watch you,
Sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head
and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun and three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear
I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway again and become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in
I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
and that necessary
Sermon
Last night was the annual Winter Formal dance at my children’s high school in Portland, and I had the privilege of playing host to six teenagers as they got ready for the dance. There were three rather cavalier junior boys, my son’s friends, and three oh-so-excited freshman girls. The girls were convinced that tonight would be a most magical night, that they would finally get to dance with a real boy, and I got the feeling that he would look an awful lot like the Prince in all those Disney movies.
It made me think of an experience I had last fall in one of our partner churches in Transylvania. On Thanksgiving Sunday, in this particular village, the community honors those couples who have been married for 50 years. It was incredible to see these couples and to imagine the wisdom gained in being married for so long to one person.
And as I watched these young people last night, particularly the girls, but the boys, too, I couldn’t help but wish that they could have just a glimpse of the wisdom of these older couples. It’s not possible, and probably not even a good idea, but I wanted it.
This coming week is Valentine’s Day, a day that has transformed the patron saint of beekeepers into that of hearts, flowers, and candlelit dinners. Our culture is gaga over romance: it’s sold to us at every turn. And yet so many seem to struggle with our intimate relationships. When we struggle, our culture advises: Put the romance back in. Go out to a nice dinner, wear some fancy underpants, and try a few new tricks in the bedroom. That’s all it will take, the magazines promise, to bring back the sizzle.
But what if relationships are not built on sizzle? What if romance is not a secure foundation for a life partnership? Where is the real guidance on how to create and sustain deeply meaningful marriages?
Let’s look at how most relationships begin: The event of “falling in love.” This is the moment most promoted and revered in our culture. Think about our most loved novels, not to mention most Hollywood movies: at the center is a love story—usually a tormented one!
According to Robert Johnson, a Jungian analyst who has written widely on this subject, romantic love “has supplanted religion as the arena in which men and women seek meaning, transcendence, wholeness and ecstasy.”
“As a mass phenomenon,” he writes, “romantic love is peculiar to the West. We are so accustomed to living with the beliefs and assumptions of romantic love that we think it is the only form of ‘love’ on which marriage or love relationships can be based. We think it is the only ‘true love.’ But there is much that we can learn from the East about this. In Eastern cultures, like those of India or Japan, we find that married couples love each other with great warmth, often with a stability and devotion that puts us to shame. But their love is not ‘romantic love’ as we know it. They don’t impose such ideals on their relationships, nor do they impose such impossible demands and expectations on each other as we do.”1
According to Johnson, the ideal of romantic love first appeared in the Middle Ages. It arose out of the concept of courtly love, an “ecstatic adoration of a man or woman who carries […], the image of perfection.” The first of these stories is the myth of Tristan and Iseult, and Johnson tells us that this myth exploded into Western consciousness, transforming all our beliefs about love.
In the story, a Cornish knight and an Irish princess fall madly in love after mistakenly drinking a love potion. Their passion causes them to betray those who love them and ultimately ruins not only themselves, dying in grief, but nearly destroys two nations. This myth is the basis for the Arthurian legend, and it set the standard for love stories every since.
The love between Tristan and Iseult is so ecstatic that it approaches madness. Their love is not based in a knowing of the other; in fact, it is involuntary. In one version, Iseult hates Tristan prior to drinking the potion. But love possesses them and is irresistible. How often have we seen people in the throes of this madness? This is what happens when we say people fall in love “at first sight,” with complete and total strangers.
I myself have fallen in love like this, once. Before, I had always said that love at first sight was a ridiculous and dangerous myth. But it was a moment I will never forget—seeing someone across a crowded room, just like the song says, and feeling that sense of recognition, that impression that here is what I was waiting for all of my life—without ever having heard them say a word...dangerous, indeed.
Many relationships which begin that way last a lifetime. I have met many older couples who tell me that they met the first day of junior high and knew that they were going to get married. But to do so, we must shift from the ideal to the real. Two people must move out of that state of dizzy, giddy madness and onto surer footing.
By the way, our great romantic stories—Romeo and Juliet, or the more recent English Patient, can seem almost unreal to us, but look what we had in our headlines last year—someone who drove hours to kill a romantic rival. This is indeed the madness of love. The fervor is great because the longing is so strong—the so-human longing which arises out of our deep loneliness and separation from one another. Remember that this ideal includes union with an image of perfection. Romantic love tells us that we will be made whole in our relationship with this perfect one. We believe that the ultimate of human experience will come in our union.
When we first fall into this kind of love, we believe we “are finally completed, that we have found the missing parts of ourselves. Life suddenly seems to have a wholeness, a superhuman intensity that lifts us high above the ordinary plane of existence. For us, these are the sure signs of ‘true love’…” and they come with an implicit, unspoken assumption and demand that our partner will always provide us with these feelings of intensity and ecstasy.2
So two people fall in love—with all these assumptions and arousals—and now neurobiologists tell us that this heightened state lasts for eighteen months. No more…we are psychologically capable of sustaining this sensation of being in love for eighteen months. And when these highly aroused, passionate feelings fade, as they always do, what happens? One of two things: Usually we question the foundation of the relationship, because we believe that this state is the only form of “true love.” All too often we blame the other person for no longer providing us with that heady mix of completion, ecstasy, and ultimacy. Marriages end, because we are disappointed with the reality of daily life. The other outcome is to create a cycle of drama that will reignite the passion of the ultimate. We see this in relationships which are always in turmoil; as two people retract and reissue their intimacy, keeping one another in a constant state of anxiety. This is the dance that leads to tragedy both in myth and in real life.
Perhaps there is another way to love. Perhaps our cultural mania for romance is faulty at its root. Perhaps we need to mature as a society in our understanding of love. “Look around us,” the philosopher Jacob Needleman writes. “Who is happy—over the long haul—in their relationships, their loves? The broken heart is almost everywhere. We need new gods in our lives and in our loving. Or perhaps the old gods with new names.”
Needleman, in his new book The Wisdom of Love, presents a model of loving that transcends the romantic ideal. Like Johnson, he examines the origin of romantic love in the medieval idea of courtly love and reminds us that courtly love “was itself intended to mean spiritual love, the yearning for the growth of the soul.” Needleman calls romantic love a “degeneration” of that ideal.
Perhaps, he says, “in the inexplicable passion of love there is a vibration from a higher level of human consciousness which is mixed with both the impulses of the body and the socially conditioned emotions, both the animal instincts and the fears and cravings of the ego. Perhaps what we know of sexual love is tinged with an element of the striving toward the One that is the main evolving force of the universe.”3
I believe Needleman is right: our union with another is a glimpse of our union with the Divine. But we err when we mistake that glimpse with the real thing, when we adore, worship, give ultimate worth to a person instead of seeking that which is truly ultimate.
If romantic love is but an ideal, one that will eventually disappoint, then what is a sturdy and worthy foundation for a lifetime together? The truth lies in the ideal, actually. If what we are seeking, when falling in love, is union with the divine, then perhaps two people can so seek together. If love between two people is to be a holy covenant, what is holy in it?4
Needleman points us to the great spiritual traditions for the answer to this question. He describes a possible form of love between two people which we might call spiritual companioning and he calls intentional love. He describes a love in which both people are practicing together the spiritual values of non-violence, non-attachment, selflessness, and service. A relationship in which, like the poet Charles Simic writes, “we can take the arm of another when we begin to wander.”
A love like this does not put the relationship itself at the center as some kind of idolatry. Nor does it center on our feelings, those oh-so-transitory emotional states which the Buddhists warn us against. It doesn’t even center on the goal of longevity in the relationship—making commitment the false idol. Instead, at the center of the relationship, the core principle is the spiritual development of each person. Two people can make this their highest goal and value their own spiritual growth. “A relationship is like a little world and can be like a tiny fragment of a ‘spiritual community’…” Needleman calls this kind of love “intentional love.”
Our culture emphasizes happiness and personal gratification over and against enlightenment. “We yearn,” Needleman says, “for success, beauty, material security, recognition, sexual passion, and we each […] imagine that one or more of these goals will bring us happiness. The life and culture around us strengthens this belief. […]” But these things do not bring happiness in themselves.
In intentional love, two people can work to free themselves of these attachments and lift themselves to higher goals while at the same time providing those very real human needs for “normal appreciation, normal encouragement, normal tenderness,” normal comfort. We can be both of the world and transcending the world in partnership with another.
“The struggle of love,” as Needleman reminds us, as the great traditions teach us, “is the struggle against making the other [person] into the ‘world,’ compelling the other to give what the ‘world’ […] promises but can never really give: absolute safety, unearned loyalty and fidelity, fantastical power, ever-ready pleasure…If life itself cannot give these things […] then we have no right to try to get them from [one another].”
What we seek can only be found in our higher selves, in seeking the ultimate, in what some might call union with God.
Some lessons from the great traditions will point us on our way in this intentional loving. Here’s just a sampling:
From the Jewish tradition, an ethic of love based on the ultimate:
Do not turn to what is less than God for that which can be given only by God. Turn to the source, not to that which mimics the source.
From the Christian tradition, we have the ideal of love which transcends one’s own kin and clan. And we have Paul’s advice on love: Love never seeks its own way; love is kind; love builds up, does not tear down; love seeks truth.
From the Buddhists, we have the wisdom of non-attachment—understanding that our transitory emotions do not define us. And we have the practice of greeting the divine within one another.
From the Islamic tradition, we have the embrace of Eros, the rejoicing in the pleasure of one another, because it points us toward God. We hear it in the rich images of the Sufi mystics and the description of God as Beloved.
Each of these traditions places love between humans in the context of a larger search for enlightenment and ultimate meaning. Intentional love, the work of love, presupposes “the wish for awakening in the other.” We cannot put that wish into another nor will it there. But we can base our loving in the recognition that the other person is seeking the truth, is “harboring within what the Buddhists call ‘the holy wish.’”
This regard for one another, this assumption, will carry us through those sticky points in relationship. Think about the moment in an argument when one person stops long enough to reflect upon their own motivations and attachments. When they say, “I’m feeling frightened now. I don’t want to act like this, but something in me is afraid, and I’m reacting.” Most of us, nearly all of us, are aroused to compassion in that moment and respond with kindness. Both parties remember together what they are ultimately seeking.
Think too about those times when we are dissatisfied, when perhaps the spark of physical attraction is not there. But we know that physical attraction arises in Eros, in creative energy. When two people are working together, sharing the search for the sacred, the basis of their passion becomes rooted in something more powerful than appearance, more enduring than the exterior.
“In the midst of all that two people must face and live through together, the work of love silently acknowledges in the other the wish to become free from illusion, fear, egoism, false imagination, self-deception, tension and violence; […] and free FOR the contact with another quality of being in oneself, a conscious energy that is meant to penetrate the mind, heart, and body of every human being.”5
There is a danger here, as there always is. In order to love intentionally, we must not see each other as the guardian of another’s spiritual journey, for that could lead us to pay more attention to their journey than to our own. I might concern myself too much with how you are doing rather than how I am growing. Instead we must be witnesses, standing by and rejoicing with our lover as they make their triumphs, comforting them as they fail, remembering together what it is that we are seeking.
Ultimately, this form of loving extends to all around us: to meet another and presuppose that holy wish within; to greet another by greeting the divine within; to see that each of us has a spark of the Divine, and move in love and compassion towards all.
May it be so for all of us.
AMEN.
