by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We come here this day

To ask for forgiveness,

To reach for courage,

And to prepare our hearts

To love ever more fully.

Come now, and let us worship together!

I don’t have many regrets in my life.  That is, when I review the decisions I have made, the paths I have taken, by and large I’m okay with those.  It’s not that I think I’ve never hurt anyone—oh, no, I think I’ve come to understand that we cannot live in this world and escape hurting others, no matter how hard we try.  People—even people we dearly love—sometimes want us to be other than we are, want us to believe differently, or marry differently, or work differently, or pray differently.  Sometimes we have to leave when others want us to stay.  No, regret is something different.  In my own life it generally has to do with words left unsaid, words which for whatever reason, I could not bring myself to speak.

As I began to reflect on what I would say to you this morning, I began to think, “What are the most difficult words for people to say?”  And I came up with four things.  You may have a different list.  This is mine:  First, “I need” (or its corollary, “I hurt”); second, “I’m sorry”; third, “I love you”; and fourth—and this one goes from the personal to the public witness—the fourth is speaking truth to power—it’s saying “you know, that’s wrong, that’s an injustice.”  I need; I’m sorry; I love you; and that’s just plain wrong.

As I reflected on my own life, I went back in time to a seminal moment, a turning point, in my marriage.  My husband and I were living in Liverpool, England, at the time, where he was doing a residency in pediatric surgery.  I was about to birth our first child.  On the very day the baby was due, I went into labor and Frank, my husband, took me to the hospital.  I remember being draped and prepped and then lying there on a cot in a small room surrounded by stainless steel, hurting and afraid.  When you’re about to have a baby, your body is really out of your control—it’s going to do what it needs to do, and that is scary.  Frank came in, looked over the scene, and said, “Well, this is going to take all night, and I have to do rounds in the morning, so I’m going to go home and get some sleep.”  Now, let me say this—he was not the stereotypical self-centered, ego-driven surgeon—he was and is a kind and gentle man.  It’s just that in terms of relationships with adult women, he was kind of—how should I put this—a real space cadet.

But never mind him.  The question here is how did I respond?  What were the words left unsaid?  I remember the time well: I just nodded my head in acquiescence, and said to myself, “Well, okay, the baby and I can do this alone.”  Why did I not speak to my husband?  I had grown up having my needs pretty much ignored, and so I didn’t understand that I could ask for anything for myself.  It was that simple.  But in that moment, when I said, “The baby and I can do this alone,” I felt a veil go down between my husband and me, and there came a distance between us that was never spoken and that was never mended.

I wish I had an instant replay of that scene, you know, so I could do it all over again, differently.  I can imagine that now—after about 25 years of therapy, having gained more confidence—the scene might have gone like this:  he comes into the room and says, “Blah, blah, blah, I’m going to go home and get some sleep.”  And then I say:  “Wait a minute.  Let me get this straight.  I’m having our first child, in a strange country, where I know no one, have no friends or family, and you’re going to go home and sleep, leaving me scared and alone, in pain, trying to birth your baby?  I don’t think so!” 

I had to learn to say, “I need.”  I had to understand that it was okay to say, “That hurts.”  I think saying these things is difficult for both men and women.  For women it is difficult to speak to our own needs because we are acculturated to meet the needs of others, in ways large and small, from taking most of the responsibility for the house and children—even when we work full-time—to sending out the thank-you notes and giving the birthday parties.  Sometimes, in all of the doing for others, we ourselves get lost.  We bury the “I need” deep down inside, and then sometimes it erupts in very unpredictable ways.  And then men are acculturated to not admit that they are uncertain and afraid.  For them to say, “I need” is perhaps to feel unmanly, and so the silence builds.  Not infrequently, the unspoken messages of the heart end up damaging the actual heart itself.

And then the second difficult expression:  “I’m sorry.”  Why is it so hard to say I’m sorry?  We rationalize, well, the other person is at fault, too, and they didn’t say they were sorry.  We are afraid we will feel exposed, vulnerable.  We are afraid that others will think we are weak.  Actually, it takes a great deal of strength to own one’s fault and to say, “I’m sorry.”  I’ve found that whether or not the other party admits fault, it’s important for me to own my piece in the hurtful situation.  It takes the burden of guilt and resentment from my shoulders, softens my heart, and opens me to the possibility of new relationship with the other party. 

Let me share with you a story recounted by Amy Tan, the Chinese-American author.  As with many second-generation immigrant children, she found herself in a cultural bind with her parents.  In particular, Amy had terrible difficulty with her mother.  She reports saying to her mother the most hateful words she ever said to another human being.  She was sixteen and the words, as she put it, “rose from a storm in <her> chest.” She said, “I hate you.  I wish you were dead.”

Amy’s mother was emotionally unstable and actually tried to kill herself by running into the street and even holding a knife to her throat.  “She, too, had storms in her chest,” writes Amy.  Her mother criticized her, humiliated her before others.  For days at a time, following arguments, Amy’s mother would not speak to her.  Amy swore to herself that she would never forget these injustices.  She would store them, harden her heart, make herself as impenetrable as her mother was.

Time went on.  Amy Tan was 46, a well-known fiction writer.  She was writing a story about a mother and her daughter when the phone rang.  It was her mother.  This was a surprise, because her mother had been losing her mind to Alzheimer’s disease.  She forgot to lock her door.  Then she forgot where she lived.  She forgot people she had known for years.  “Amy—ah,” she said, and she began to speak quickly in Chinese.  “Something is wrong with my mind.  I think I am going crazy.”  Amy caught her breath.  She started to say, “Don’t worry,” but her mother went on. “I feel like I can’t remember many things.  I can’t remember what I did yesterday.  I can’t remember what happened a long time ago, what I did to you . . . .”  She said, “I know I did something to hurt you.”

“You didn’t,” Amy said.  “Don’t worry.”

“I did terrible things.  But now I can’t remember what . . . and I just want to tell you . . . I hope you can forget just as I’ve forgotten.”

“Really, don’t worry,” said Amy, hoping her mother would not notice the cracks in her voice.  After she hung up, she cried.  She was both happy and sad, she writes.  She was again the same sixteen-year-old, but the storm in her chest was gone.  Her mother died six months later, but before she died she was able to bequeath the healing words.  And Amy ends her story by saying, “Together we knew in our hearts what we should remember, what we can forget.”

And then the third difficult statement: “I love you.”  One would think those would be the easiest words to say in the world.  But they are not, for many of us, much of the time.  When we have been wounded, like Amy was, we, like her, harden our hearts, become impenetrable.  Keeping that anger and resentment close inside, we cannot make room for compassion, strangely enough, even for ourselves.  Saying “I love you” rings hollow until the heart softens and opens—only then those words can take on meaning.

And there’s another reason for our reluctance to say “I love you.”  What if we’re rejected by the other person?  What if the other person doesn’t love us?  Well, I mean, so what?  Is that so terrible?  As long as those words are said clean and free from expectation, so what?  It really shouldn’t keep us from loving, just because that love might not be reciprocated, should it?  It’s not some kind of deal, you know.  Love is a gift, has to be a gift, freely given. 

I remember once when I took Madison, my younger son, swimming one summer at the local pool.  He must have been about seven.  For some reason, his older brother Kash wasn’t with us that day, so he didn’t have anyone to play with.  The next thing I knew I heard him going up to this strange kid, and saying, “Will you be my friend?”  “Oh, my gosh,” I thought, instinctively pulling back—“No, you can’t just ask a stranger to be your friend!”  But then I noticed that they started happily playing together.  I, on the other hand, spent the afternoon alone.

This is a society in which we are encouraged to think that it’s okay to be alone—25% of us live alone.  Think about it—we’re the only country in the world in which people can afford to live alone.  We talk about self-reliance, independence as if these qualities were virtues.  Let me tell you something—it’s a big, fat lie that it’s okay to be alone—and that being independent is a good thing.  How can we even imagine that we are actually independent.  It’s not only poets and novelists who tell us that we need others—medical doctors do, too.  We have a need—not just a casual need, but a desperate need—for intimacy.  We need people who know us through and through and yet love what they know.  We need people to hold us when we are afraid and insecure, the way our mother did.  Grown-ups never out-grow the need for touch, for love, for emotional intimacy.  Our very survival depends on it.  It’s okay to say, “I want, I need,” and we have to learn to say, “I love you”—to many others.

And then the last of the four things it’s difficult to say is “That’s wrong, an injustice is being committed here.”  And why is this one so hard?  Well, such straightforward talk is not polite—it’s confrontational—it’s likely to ruffle feathers, evoke anger.  It’s especially hard if we’re speaking to power.  And so we demur and step back—after all, it’s better to keep the peace, isn’t it?  I think of the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.: “We will have to repent,” said King, “not for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

We all have power in our lives, in particular within our own sphere of influence, whether it’s with our children or our neighbors or within our profession—are you a physician, a lawyer, a teacher, a business person?—wherever we are known, and people care what we think, in those settings we can become powerful witnesses—in those settings in particular, we become accountable for, if you will, standing on the side of love.  I remember when I first came here 12 years ago Ballot Measure 9 was raging—for those of you who were not here then, that was a state ballot measure designed to deny certain civil rights to gays and lesbians.  I remember that Billy Graham came to town during that time, and I went to the rally, wanting to experience that great preacher, and hoping against hope that he would take a stand against that ballot measure.  But he refused to say anything one way or the other when asked by a reporter—he said that he did not want to “politicize” his spiritual message.  But just imagine what kind of power he would have had to change people’s minds and hearts during that terrible time—when gays and lesbians were feeling so persecuted—just think what would have happened if he had spoken out and used his great influence to tell his followers, “You know, it’s all right for everyone to love as we were made to love by a loving God.”

We are called to stand on the side of love, here in this church—look at our mission statement: the last of the four statements is “To act for social justice.”  Our Board did this in a strong way when a few weeks ago they made the decision to sign as a Board to oppose Ballot Measure 36 in the Voters’ Pamphlet, a ballot measure that would make same-sex marriages illegal in the state.  By the time we knew of this opportunity, there was no time to meet for a discussion of the matter, and so Board President Kathryn Estey initiated an e-mail conversation with Board members and led them in a rather breathless fashion to reach consensus, in order for the Board to sign on before the deadline.  As one Board member put it, sometimes you just have to act boldly, and this is one of those times. Yes, as Unitarian Universalists, we have to stand on the side of love.

There are times in all of our lives when we should have spoken, and we did not—for whatever reason.  Let us forgive ourselves and move on.  Take heart—these words are not so hard to say, once you begin.  I want.  I’m sorry.  I love you.  That’s wrong, let’s try a different way, together.  We are not alone, we are a community, holding one another against the buffetings of the storms in our lives, knowing one another and yet loving what we know, giving one another that safe place where we can grow in love and compassion, both for ourselves and for the larger world.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we confess that there are words we should have said that we did not say.  When we are afraid to ask for what we need, to say we are hurt, give us faith, give us courage.  When we pull back from saying “I’m sorry”—forgive our pride and self-righteousness.  When we tremble to say “I love you”—help us to remember that love has no reason but its own for being.  Help us to always and ever stand on the side of love.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

As you go from this place today, vow to keep your heart open, whatever the cost—and when the time comes, speak from that heart-place.  Go in love, and go in peace.