by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given on Sunday, May 28, 2000

at First Unitarian Church, Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning! Welcome to this community of faith. Here you may bring your sadness, your joy, your searching for truth, your longing for love. Come, and let us worship together.

I would like to begin this morning by telling you a story. This story was recounted by writer Patricia Hampl in her book I Could Tell You Stories, and I will tell the story in her words.

"Years ago, in another life, I woke to look out the smeared window of a Greyhound bus I had been riding all night, and in the still dark morning of a small Missouri river town where the driver had made a scheduled stop at a grimy diner, I saw below me a stout middle-aged woman in a flowered housedress turn and kiss full on the mouth a godlike young man with golden curls. But I’ve got that wrong: he was kissing her. Passionately, without regard for the world and its incomprehension. He had abandoned himself to his love, and she, stolid, matronly, received his adoration with simple grandeur, like a socialist-realist statue of a woman taking up sheaves of wheat.

"Their ages dictated that he must be her son, but I had just come out of the cramped, ruinous half sleep of a night on a Greyhound and I was clairvoyant: This was that thing called love. The morning light cracked blood red along the river.

"Of course, when she lumbered onto the bus a moment later, lurching forward with her two bulging bags, she chose the empty aisle seat next to me as her own. She pitched one bag onto the overhead rack, and then heaved herself into the seat as if she were used to hoisting sacks of potatoes onto the flatbed of a pick-up. She held the other bag on her lap, and leaned toward the window. The beautiful boy was blowing kisses. He couldn’t see where she was in the dark interior, so he blew kisses up and down the side of the bus, gazing ardently at the blank windows. ‘Pardon me,’ the woman said without looking at me, and leaned over, bag and all, to rap the glass. Her beautiful boy ran back to our window and kissed and kissed, and finally hugged himself, shutting his eyes in an ecstatic pantomime of love-sweet-love. She smiled and waved back.

"Then the bus was moving. She slumped back in her seat, and I turned to her. I suppose I looked transfixed. As our eyes met she said, ‘Everybody thinks he’s my son. But he’s not. He’s my husband.’ She let that sink in. She was a farm woman with hands that could have been a man’s; I was a university student, hair down to my waist. It was long ago, as I said, in another life. It was even another life for the country. The Vietnam war was the time we were living through, and I was traveling, as I did every three weeks, to visit my boyfriend who was in a federal prison. ‘Draft dodger,’ my brother said. ‘Draft resistor,’ I piously retorted. I had never been kissed the way this woman had been kissed. I was living in a tattered corner of a romantic idyll, the one where the hero is willing to suffer for his beliefs. I was the girlfriend. I lived on pride, not love.

"My neighbor patted her short cap of hair, and settled in for the long haul as we pulled onto the highway along the river, heading south. ‘We been married five years and we’re happy.’ She said it with a penetrating satisfaction, the satisfaction that passeth understanding. ‘Oh,’ she let out a profound sigh as if she mined her truths from the bountiful, bulky earth, ‘Oh, I could tell you stories.’ She put her arms snugly around her bag, gazed off for a moment, apparently made pensive by her remark. Then she closed her eyes and fell asleep.

"I looked out the window smudged by my nose which had been pressed against it at the bus stop to see the fact of true love reveal itself. Beyond the bus the sky, instead of becoming paler with the dawn, drew itself out of a black line along the Mississippi into an alarming red flare. It was very beautiful. The old caution—red sky in morning, sailor take warning—darted through my mind and fell away. Remember this, I remember telling myself, hang on to this. I could feel it skittering away, whatever conjunction of beauty and improbability I had stumbled upon.

"It is hard to describe the indelible bittersweetness of that moment. Which is, no doubt, why it had to be remembered.

"Whether it was the unguarded face of love, or the red gash down the middle of the warring country I was traveling through or this exhausted farm woman’s promise of untold tales that bewitched me, I couldn’t say. Over it rose and remains only the injunction to remember."

Remember. Remember the unguarded face of love. It’s the unguarded part that’s difficult. You see, we run from love in all its forms. Why, I’ve asked myself. Why do we do that? Here are some common things we tell ourselves, perhaps not even at the conscious level:

We may say to ourselves:

What if I give my heart away, and then I lose this love? You will, in one way or another, at one time or another, lose love. You cannot guarantee that friendship or devotion will last. If in no other way, you will lose your love through death. An alternative question: Life is about loss. Will the promise of future loss keep you from precious moments in the present?

Or we may think:

Maybe I’m not worthy of being loved, and I’ll be found out. Go back in your mind’s eye to the time when you were a little child. Remember that child’s unguarded face of love. An alternative question: Who told that child he wasn’t worthy? Do we have to earn the right to be loved? Is there anyone on this earth who doesn’t deserve love, including you?

Another thought:

If I take this love in, I may change. No, it’s not "I may change, but I will change." We cannot be in the presence of love without changing. An alternative question: In what way does this love call me to change?

And another thought:

I wonder if I’m even capable of love. Loving is a built-in capability in the human being. This power to love can be damaged, but never destroyed. One can always choose to love. An alternative question: Will I make the choice to love?

And still another thought:

I don’t need love. I’m fine alone. This is a lie we tell ourselves, and that lie is grounded in fear. There is no one alive who doesn’t need love, and need it badly. An alternative question: When are you lonely? When do you know you need others? Can you sit with the pain of wanting?

We know from medical studies what happens when children don’t receive the love and affection they need. In the 1940’s psychoanalyst Rene Spitz described what happened to orphaned children reared in institutions, as well as babies separated from young mothers in prisons. Institutional babies were fed and clothed, and kept warm and clean, but they were not played with, handled, or held. Human contact, it was thought, would risk exposing the children to infection and disease. Spitz found that while the physical needs of the children were met, they inevitably became withdrawn and sickly, and lost weight. A good many of them died. Ironically, the babies became highly vulnerable to the same infections that their isolation was meant to guard against. "The worst offenders," Spitz wrote, "were the best equipped and the most hygienic institutions." Death rates at the so-called sterile nurseries near the turn of the century were routinely above 75 per cent. A lack of human interaction—handling, cooing, stroking, play—is fatal to infants.

Children aren’t the only ones whose bodies suffer in response to loss of human contact: cardiovascular function, hormone levels, and immune processes are disturbed in adults who are subject to prolonged separation. Illness, or sometimes, even death follows the end of a marriage or the death of a spouse. One study found that social isolation tripled the death rate following a heart attack. Another found that going to group therapy doubled the postsurgical lifespan of women with breast cancer. Do we need one another? Our very life depends upon human connection.

Victor Frankl speaks of what kept him alive during his time in a Nazi concentration camp. He says that sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain—and many of them in fact were of a delicate constitution—but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings, he says, to an inner life of spiritual freedom. Remembering the shouted commands of a prison march, he writes: "We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, the guards shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor’s arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: ‘If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.’

"That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image . . . . I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

"A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets—the truth that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which <we> can aspire. <Our salvation> is through love and in love. ‘Stop!’ We had arrived at our work site. Everybody rushed into the dark hut in the hope of getting a fairly decent tool. Each prisoner got a spade or a pickaxe.

"’Can’t you hurry up, you pigs!’ Soon we had resumed the previous day’s positions in the ditch. . . . . The men were silent, their brains numb. My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn’t even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing—love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in the <beloved’s> spiritual being. . . . . I did not know whether my wife was alive, and I had no means of finding out, but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, my image of my beloved. ‘Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.’"

The great longing in us is to connect, to be close to someone who can really be present with us. Though drawing near puts us at some risk, to be sure—and we should not open ourselves casually, before some trust is established--it is in the touching of one with another that we become most fully ourselves. The need for love is a thirst that is just as real as our thirst for water, a hunger just as strong as our need for bread. The Persian poet Hafiz puts it this way:

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them,

"Love me."

Of course you do not do this out loud;

Otherwise,

Someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this,

This great pull in us

to connect.

Why not become the one

Who lives with a full moon in each eye

That is always saying,

With that sweet moon

Language,

What every other eye in this world

Is dying to

hear.

But how do we thaw out a cold and icy heart? How can we become "the one who lives with a full moon in each eye?" Paradoxically, suffering can help in developing a deep capacity to love. Sometimes people can seem awfully shallow and self-serving until they come up against something they can’t control, something that threatens them to the core. Such is the case of Mayor Giuliani, who recently dropped out of the Senate race in New York, citing "personal reasons." Giuliani has been known as a kind of merciless crusader, ridding New York streets of jaywalkers, homeless people, welfare moms, and even squeegee-bearing youngsters who ask to wash your windshield. Arrogance was his middle name. And insensitivity—his wife learned through a media announcement that he was separating from her. But something is changing, perhaps. He is battling prostate cancer, and his wife has just hired a very, very good divorce lawyer. When he announced his decision to step down from the Senate race, his sharpness and arrogance seemed to crumble. Before now he has been unsympathetic to the vulnerable and to the frightened, and now he himself is vulnerable and frightened. "I think I understand myself a lot better," he said, and he made it clear that he didn’t like everything he saw. He vowed to make himself a "better mayor" and a "better person," and he dedicated his last 18 months in office to bridging the city’s racial divide, saying that he wanted to overcome "some of the barriers that maybe I placed there." Maybe we have to experience our own pain, our own mortality, before we realize that all of us human beings are ultimately on a level playing field—we’re going to live, we’re going to lose, and we’re going to die. It’s how we love along the way that really matters.

Another thing that keeps us from love is our pride. Excessive pride is a huge spiritual problem—and I believe it is the greatest spiritual problem for us self-sufficient, bright, achieving Unitarian Universalists. Pride smothers thanksgiving in a blanket of self-righteousness. Pride causes us to feel superior, to be judgmental, and these attitudes of course separate us from those we consider—well, not as evolved as we are. And pride causes us to believe we have no need of others, keeps us from asking for help. Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist monk, tells us that if we really love someone, we have to be fully present for that person, present in our joy and also present in our need. He suggests a series of mantras to say to one you wish to love. The last of these is the hardest of all for some of us, and it goes like this: "Beloved, I am suffering. Please help." Only six little words, but sometimes they stick in our throat because of pride, especially if it was the person we love who we believe caused us to suffer. Because it was this person, we are deeply hurt. We want to withdraw. But if we really love this person, we have to overcome our pride and ask for help. Beloved, I am suffering. Please help.

I am reminded of a time when I was a young wife, and I did not ask for what I needed. My husband Frank and I were living in Liverpool, England, where he was doing a pediatric surgery residency, and it became time for our first child to be born. I was frightened, as is any woman giving birth for the first time. And this was a strange country, where I had not a single friend. My husband took me to the hospital, where I was prepped and then taken into the labor room. As I lay there, with the labor pains slowly increasing in intensity, he came to my bedside and said, "Well, it looks like this is going to take all night, and I have to do rounds in the morning, so I’d better go home and get some sleep." I was deeply hurt by his words, but I wouldn’t say so. I just said to myself, I just said in my own mind, "Well, the baby and I can do this alone." Because I had grown up in a family where my needs were largely ignored, I didn’t think I had the right to ask anything of him. And yet in that moment, it was as though a wall came between us--and that wall never came down. I never fully trusted that he loved me after that. Oh, I knew he wanted me. But I didn’t believe he knew how to love me.

Now I’ve learned to say, "I need." I’ve learned to say, "I want." Had I known what I know now, that hospital scene would have been very different. Instead of withdrawing, I would have said, "Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. I am having your baby, your first child, and you are going to leave me in pain, in fear, all night long while you get some rest? I don’t think so. You are going to stay right here. With me. All night. As long as it takes. Until the baby is born." Not quite your gentle Buddhist approach—but it would have worked. And he would have stayed. And who knows how that might have changed things.

Love is where you find it. But you have to want it. It’s like shopping for a new fridge. Before you need a new fridge, you never notice ads for refrigerators. But once the old one breaks down, starts leaking, all of a sudden there are fridge ads everywhere. You seem to be surrounded by fridge ads. Just pick one you like. I know a man who says he wants to get married. He has been saying that since I’ve known him, which is about 25 years. He is now 67 and has never been married. Recently I heard him say again, "I would like to get married." That’s his mantra. Then he added, "One reason I’ve never married is that I just can’t seem to find someone who could create with me the kind of marriage my parents had." This man is in his head. He’s not going after a real flesh and blood woman--he’s going after an idea, a concept. Any woman he sees he will see through the lens of this concept, and she will never be sufficient. But I hate to tell him: a concept is cold comfort in bed at night.

Love is where you find it. And if you want to, you can find it everywhere—the universe is replete with love. Don’t try to limit the power and presence of love. Don’t try to define it or circumscribe it. Don’t say, "Well, it’s this, but not that." You’re looking for brains, and you get brawn. You’re looking for blond, and you get brunette. You’re looking for Catholic, and you get Jewish. You think of course he will be white, that’s a given, and he’s Hispanic. Is it erotic, or platonic, or altruistic, or some combination of the above? It’s a man loving another man; it’s street person loving another street person; it’s short loving tall, and old loving young. It’s being in love with the world itself, and with life—in love with the full moon, the roses blooming in your neighbor’s yard, the laundry billowing on the line.

Love is where you find it. It’s a nose smudged on a greyhound bus window. It’s beside the hospital bed. It’s on the teacher’s face on the last day of school. It’s the strong hand of one who stood with you in time of trouble. It’s the morning light cracking blood red in the sky. It’s in the promise of spring. Year after year after year. Inviting you. Saying you are worthy of love. Saying I love you. Over and over and over again.

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Beloved, we are thankful for all the manifestations of your love that surround us each day. We know we too often turn away because of fear and mistrust, and then we complain about the emptiness of our lives. Help us to open our eyes and see what is waiting there for us. Help us to understand the true longings of our heart. Help us to say, "I want" and then to open ourselves to receive. So be it. Amen.

BENEDICTION

May the blessings of those who love fall upon you. Go in love and go in peace. Amen.

Copyright 2000, by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.