by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

Good morning!

We give thanks this day for the first flowers of spring,

For the glorious sunshine

For our church community

And the love and companionship we share.

Come let us worship together!

Well, Valentine’s Day is coming up, and I was thinking the other day about the first Valentines I gave and received.  That would be in elementary school.  We bought packages of Valentines, $1.00 for 25 or so, and then sent Valentines to our little classmates.  Even then sending Valentines was risky.  Should I send him one saying “Be Mine”?  No, no, too forward.  Will he even send me one at all?  And how many Valentines will I get?  Will I get as many as the other kids?  Maybe not.  Why does love have to be so problematic—even when you’re seven years old?

Valentine’s Day is a big business now—the total amount of money that will be spent before this February 14 passes is $13 billion.  It is the third-biggest retailing holiday now, trailing behind only Christmas and Father’s Day.  Men will outspend women almost three to one—which is as it should be.  On an average, a man will spend $92, a woman $34.  And 70% of you guys will have already purchased your gifts by tomorrow. 

Best Life magazine advises its male readers that love is expensive—the publication added up the cost of love for men over 50 years of marriage, and that came to $590,400.  Among the figures quoted were $300 a year for flowers; $700 for “expensive dinners to apologize”; $421 for gifts; and they threw in $1,000 a year for haircuts and “grooming products” which men use only for us women.  I’m not sure what all is included there.

The cute little Cupids that you see this season on everything from boxes of candy to boxer shorts are, of course, a much-degraded version of Eros, God of Love.  In Greek mythology, Eros was a gorgeous winged youth, armed with a bow and arrows, the son of Aphrodite and Ares.  One of the oldest of the Gods, he was born out of chaos, but personified harmony. 

Now the words eros and erotic are threatening words to us—hence, our retreat to Cupid—because we connect them with sexuality, or even worse, sheer lust.  Erotic power is connected with sexuality, yes, because sex is biologically the source of life, but the meaning of eros is much broader than that—it is élan vitale, the joy of living.  It emerges from the heart, from some place of mystery and passion within us.  It is a positive, connecting, dynamic energy.

I believe it exists here in this church.  This is a “heartful” church.  Although I’m trained as an academic, I preach from the heart.  And so does Tom Disrud.  Mark’s musicians sing and play to us from their hearts to our hearts.  You are a congregation of feeling, heartful people.  When we sing “Spirit of Life,” many of you weep.  You are connecting, heart to heart.  You yearn (and yearn is a heartful word) you yearn to live in a just world, you yearn for wings that set you free.  So when people ask me, “Why has your church grown so much?”  You know, they want techniques, they want approaches to membership assimilation, advertising suggestions—and I just say, “Well, the short answer is, it’s the erotic energy.”

Eros is about feeling deeply.  Though exciting, it can be scary.  Hear the words of Audre Lorde from her monograph “Use of the Erotic”:

 “. . . one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, <is that> when we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our lives pursuits . . . in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.  Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing ourselves to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.  And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”

More and more, in my own life, I’ve learned to trust heart messages.  When I depend on my cognitive faculties and ignore the heart center, I can come forth with a logical answer to a dilemma, but logic is not always the best route to an answer.  The heart will not contradict the best of my intellectual life, I’ve found—but it surely helps with the mind’s leaning toward subterfuge.  The mind can blame, can rationalize, can justify, can disregard, but if I allow the verbal gymnastics in my brain to quiet, and I just honestly listen to my heart—in time, I’ll come round right.

Now how does this work?  Well, I’m not entirely sure.  But first of all, we have an intuitive power that synthesizes all kinds of knowing in an instant—knowing from your own history, from the collective unconscious, and probably we now think from the genes of your ancestors.  For example, the police say, when you feel a red flag go up, you are in danger.  Pay attention to that feeling.  The best-selling book Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, explores this whole notion of intuition and hunches pretty persuasively.

I’ve told you all about my job interview when I was a single mom raising two little boys.  When the executive director of this non-profit asked me how I felt about this position I was applying for—I think the job was program director—well, there I was, desperate for money at the time—I looked her straight in the eye, with my heart screaming no, and lied through my teeth.  I said, “I would love to have this job.”  At that very moment a light bulb fell out of the ceiling, landed on my head, and broke into a thousand pieces.  I took the job, and it was the worst job I’ve ever had.

Was the voice within just intuition, or something more?  I think maybe something more.  I believe there is a kind of knowing that is connected with the best that is within us, that is connected with that divine spark in each one of us.  This is the spiritual dimension.  But we have to be willing to trust in our own goodness.  And we have to stop thinking.  We have to empty ourselves.  We have to know nothing.  Then we can receive.

Sometimes we give ourselves to our body’s wisdom, our heart’s direction, because our intellect is absolutely failing us, and we feel stripped naked of any alternative.  James Carse, professor of religion at New York University, relates such an experience—it occurred in his junior year of high school.  The incident taught him how to do this deep listening of body and spirit in his adult life.  I’ll tell the story in his own words. 

Carse writes:  “At the beginning of the wrestling season in my junior year, Coach Weaver walked me over to the schedule attached to the wall of the wrestling room.  Stabbing the schedule with a thick forefinger, he drew my attention to a date seven weeks off—our annual match with a powerhouse team in south Milwaukee.  ‘Growler Grashevski,’ he said with an unmistakable note of warning in his voice.

“I didn’t need the warning.  Growler was already a legend as a football player.  He got his name from the animal sounds he made while attacking the opposing team.  He was most famous for his diving leaps, which carried all 265 of his tightly-muscled pounds over the blockers to seize the runner whom he would take to the ground with another roar of triumph.

 “During those seven weeks of practice, I exercised, drilled, and fought with only one person in mind, no matter who was on the mat.  Coach Weaver would yell at me, ‘Don’t think, Carse!  This is wrestling.  Thinking is for philosophy.’  During the matches, his ‘Don’t think’ became a mantra he tirelessly chanted at me.

“Despite my prayerful wish for a disabling injury, I found myself sitting next to Coach Weaver as he drove us to the match in Milwaukee.  It wasn’t a highway I saw stretching before us but a shining ribbon of fear.

“Growler made his entrance into the gymnasium walking on his hands.  When he reached the edge of the mat, he sprang to his feet in a graceful half flip, popping a bicep at a crowd now frantic with joy.  I retreated as quickly as I could to my end of our team bench.

“Staring across at this remarkable specimen, I reflected on the genetic unfairness at work here.  While my slender Celtic forbears were doing funny dances on their toes, probably drunk, his were pulling oak trees out of the forests of northern Europe with their bare hands, no doubt eating the bark as well.

“I stood up, slipped off my jersey, and stepped to the edge of the mat.  My joints were made of ice.  I took the standard opening stance and looked across at Growler, who was on all fours, pawing the earth and beginning his famous roar.

“Growler exploded in my direction.  I quickly backed and turned, bolted off the mat and across the gym in the direction of our bench.  I found myself looking down at Coach Weaver.  His face was expressionless, even as he molded his lips to form two silent words:  ‘Don’t think.’

“This time Growler stepped back, crouched, and came at me in a long, soaring arc.  My memory of what happened in the next three or four seconds is frozen into a series of photographic stills.  Growler is airborne, about six feet above the mat.  My hands are on his shoulders.  I am falling backward with his momentum but my feet are still square on the mat.  His body does not resist the rotating pressure of my hands; it turns like a loose propeller.  My feet leave the mat.  He is now under me, my chest square on his.  I ride him to the earth.  When we hit he takes my full weight on his rib cage.  There is an inhuman sound as all the air blows out of his lungs.  The referee slams down his hand.  There is a resounding crack.  The match is over.  The crowd is motionless and silent.  Someone is lifting me by the shoulder.  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Coach Weaver says.  I turn as we leave the gymnasium.  Growler is now standing, though still sucking wildly for air, holding his hands up as though begging for an explanation of what happened.

“During the ride home, no one said a word for miles.  I finally looked over at the coach and asked, ‘Well, I did win, didn’t I?’

“Without taking his eyes off the road, he said in a tired and solemn voice, ‘Don’t think, boy.  Don’t think win, don’t think lose.  Just don’t think.’”

The mysterious place of knowing within, the place of the soul, is not adversarial.  It is connected to the infinite, and therefore sees no separation.  With our minds, with our controlling egos, we plan, we divide, we judge, we rearrange, we improve.  And there is a place for that.  But it is limited.  “I won, didn’t I?”  Irrelevant question to the soul.  The soul wants presence.  It wants to join us with something inseparable.  It wants to move from chaos and division into harmony. This is eros!  This is the path to love, to connection. 

We want to send Valentines every day, to so many people, don’t we?  We want to send messages like those on the little candy hearts that are given on Valentine’s day, little two-word messages, messages like “Be Mine” or “Hug Me” or “You’re Cute” or “I Love You.”  Connecting messages.  But so often we send other messages—two-word messages like “I’m Right” and “My Way” and “No Time.”

To become heartful, we must connect with our own suffering.  Paradoxically, when you feel deep grief, feel brokenhearted, that is when you can be most deeply present with another.  I see that phenomenon all the time when someone comes into my office and shares with me their suffering, their pain. The pain may be sad, but the authentic presence of the person is always beautiful.  We are both humbled and softened by our suffering, and through our suffering, we feel connected with all others, because we acknowledge that this is the human condition.  No one escapes grief and loss.  It is when we try to escape the pain of living, to deny it, that the real pain, which is separation from others, begins.  The softened heart is the resilient heart.  The softened heart allows the pain, but then also is able to make room for the joy.

When you begin to be in touch with your heart, or let your heart be touched, old fears may spring up.  In fact, they probably will.  That’s okay.  Let the fear be there.  Let fear be your companion. You’ll soon discover that your heart is vast, limitless.  Your world will begin to feel more inviting, and you’ll feel less territorial.  Yes, there will be hurt and sadness, because terrible things are always happening in the larger world, and personal losses, as well.  But you won’t have to shut down and close off.  Strangely enough, along with this sadness, there will be exquisite tenderness and a sense of well being.  You’ll find yourself wanting to be there for a friend in trouble, and you may well find yourself longing to do your part in healing our troubled world.

This sense of joy and well-being I speak of will have little to do with your particular circumstances—with how much money you have or what kind of house you live in—it won’t have anything to do with your good reputation, it won’t have anything to do with winning or losing.  There will be moments of gratitude, moments of deep pleasure.  You’ll find that your world seems warmer and more generous, more spacious and roomy.  All of this offered to you freely, because you have dared—in spite of the danger and brokenness in this world—dared to cultivate an open heart.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, help us not to be afraid of the fullness of our lives.  The temptation is to shut down, to close in.  Let us live with all the presence we are capable of, and let us keep our hearts open and supple.  We would be your people on this earth, heartful people who will love one another and who will reach out with healing hands to a broken world.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

As you go from this place today, trust in the wisdom of your heart, for you are a good and gentle people.  Go in love and go in peace.