by Rev. Robert Schaibly, Summer Minister

A sermon given August 5, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

At the beginning of the movie “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen comes on screen and says, “There’s an old joke.  Two women are at the Catskills mountain resort and one of them says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is terrible.’  ‘Yeah,’ the other says, ‘and such small portions.’  He goes on, “Well that’s essentially how I feel about life: full of loneliness and suffering and misery and unhappiness, and it’s over much too quickly.”

Yes, and it’s also full of love and pleasure and great satisfaction.  And even the people in neighboring churches who are certain that heaven is their ultimate destination seem to want to go to doctors to stop any disease that might expedite their plans!  So we love to live and try to live with wisdom.

The teachings of Jesus on human relations are tantalizing but difficult.  They are so radical in their socialism and in their demand for love that you can rapidly understand why it is easier to worship Jesus than it is to do as Jesus taught!  

“Love one another; love your neighbor as yourself.”[Mark 22 and Luke 10]  When Jesus was asked what the great commandment is, he replied, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart,” and a second is like it, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  This is cited as the essence of the message of Jesus, and since you know Jesus was a Jew, you will not surprised to discover that the teaching originates in the Torah [in Leviticus 19].  What is surprising is that in the Torah, the word for neighbor is also the word for lover and for friend; as well as for one who lives nearby.  Jesus extends the concept to include the foreign-born, to one’s enemies and to those who hate us.  In the parable of the Good Samaritan you recall that the victim of a mugging was aided by a Samaritan.  The people Jesus spoke to would have found that extraordinary behavior; it’s as if an American had been mugged and was being cared for by a Taliban fighter; imagine instead of Good Samaritan Hospital having Good Taliban Hospital—boy, that’d wake up the world to the stereotyping we all do! 

For some it is enough that God’s will is that we should love one another as God loves us; for some we love because love brings us to life; for some it is self-expression, that is, it is the stance we wish to take vis a vis the world!

Many commentators have noted the connection of loving the neighbor as oneself.  The implication is that it’s easy to love oneself, as if just following one’s vested interests suffices to prove that we can love ourselves.  You don’t need a quid pro quo; you don’t need to love only those who love you first.  Selfishness cannot be equated with self-love.  When we are alienated from our awareness of being loved, we often turn to tangible things to feed our neediness.  What I like about the James Agee reading that Kathryn did is the way it captures the feeling of being loved in images that may be nearly universal: quilts on the lawn in the summertime; the voices of those I love surrounding me; being lifted and carried into bed. 

This evokes my own summertime experience as a little boy, in the morning eating breakfast on the back porch, in the Midwest in the hot summertime.  I am dawdling with no place to go today and am still coming out of sleep.  I eat cornflakes and blueberries.  My mother passes by and gently takes some used dishes, and before leaving, pushes the bowl of blueberries toward my bowl, as if to say, “Here, you might want some more.”  And I might, or might not, but I feel so loved by the silent offer.  That in turn brings to mind the saying, as I am about to venture forth away from home, “Remember, you are loved.”  To hear this makes one feel cozier and more secure.  It also counsels prudence, as if to say, “Don’t blow it!  Don’t ever be caught dead sitting on your unfastened seatbelt.”  We’re invested in you. 

Such acts of love that had meaning in childhood remind us that we have a repertoire of loving acts to draw upon.  That doesn’t mean we have the confidence to tap that resource.  We live with fear of rejection or inadequacy.

You probably read The Diary of Anne Frank.  Anne Frank was a Jewish adolescent who went into hiding with her family and a few others in Amsterdam when the Nazis occupied Holland during World War II.  You can visit the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, and I highly recommend it.  Reading from Anne Frank’s diary: “My longing to talk to someone became so intense I took it in my head to talk to Peter [the other family’s adolescent son]. [In the next sentence she puts herself down.]  I was afraid he might think me a bore.  [But things change; she empathizes:]  I noticed his shy manner and it made me feel very gentle.  I almost beseeched him: oh, tell me what is going on inside of you, oh, can’t you look beyond this ridiculous chatter?  I have made up my mind to go and sit with Peter more often and get him talking somehow or other.”  Some of our loneliness has at its base the wish to be loved without letting ourselves be known.  We may fail to disclose ourselves because we wish so much to be loved.  When we are inside this conundrum, love has no future!  I share with you the result of my own hours and hours on the analyst’s couch:  You do not need to be loved by everyone.  And your life will be richly satisfying if you can love all others regardless of how they feel about you! 

Sometimes people say “no” to possibilities for love for reasons that are not immediately observable.  I was startled by an insight from a sociologist named Irving Goffman.  He wrote a book called The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.  There are things about ourselves we may not want to present to others, and we may hide these.  What we hide is a stigma, and because it is hidden it allows a terrible psychological event to occur: self-betrayal.  For example, it is a stigma to be Jewish, African-American, an effeminate gay man or a woman.  (Yes, I know women are the majority but they are treated as a minority.)  But most of these people deal regularly with their stigmas because they must.  But there are African Americans who are white skinned and may pass; there are Jews who pass as WASP—such as, the ultimate arbiter of WASP taste, Ralph Lauren—and there are masculine gay men who pass, such as garage mechanics and football players—they’re not all florists and ministers!  Now we don’t have to tell everyone everything about ourselves—that’s not the issue—but sharing those things that are significant to us with those we love or even care about is part of loving them.  Furthermore it is Goffman’s insight that when we carry a hidden stigma and we pass, we lie and we betray ourselves, thereby imagining ourselves unlovable, devaluing ourselves, increasing fear and reducing our ability to love.  It’s a variant of Groucho Marx’s line, “I wouldn’t want to join any club that would have me as a member.”  And it is related to T. S. Eliot’s lines, “I prepare a face to meet the faces my face meets.” 

We’re not always aware of the ways we sabotage ourselves.  Goffman’s insight may be something to look at if you feel limited in your ability to love.  I’ve been a Unitarian minister for so long that I have met church people who do not tell their relatives they are Unitarian, or liberal, and church members of other denominations who say their beliefs are really Unitarian.  Many of us have known gay people who for reasons of fear do not come out to their families when the family almost surely knows.  This creates “something we cannot talk about,” a situation certain to restrict our ability to love one another because love depends on trust and openness.  When fear is felt, the love that liberates us will not rise.  We lose those “wings [that will] set me free” that we sing about each Sunday.  Maintaining the two dimensions of a paper doll cutout is doable, but why?  The openhearted person shares what is real and develops a dimension that is depth and brings a love that has depth.  I like that line from our responsive reading this morning: “Live as though you like yourself and it may happen!”

In my own life my stigma was visible.  I had throat cancer which was treated with radiation that left my neck burned.  At the heaviest time of treatment a stranger asked me, “How did you get such terrible sunburn on just your neck?”  After the radiation came surgery and this is my scar.  It used to be more prominent.  I once caught a little child staring at it with fear on her face.  I told her, “This is not going to happen to you; I had a bad disease but most people don’t get it.” 

As a preface to my next point I want to say that I don’t think romantic love is for everyone and that solitude has much to be said for it for many of us.  Having said that, I tell you how love broke into my life.  I first met the man who became my partner, Steven Storla, in 1985 at the first ever Unitarian Universalist gay-lesbian convocation.  He was then living in Austin working on his Ph.D. and I was Senior Minister at First Church Houston where the conference was being held.  We became acquaintances and friends who exchanged Christmas cards and letters for several years.  Each of us planned to attend the 1991 UU gay and lesbian convocation and there our friendship became a romance.  A particular turning point came when I told him about my cancer treatment and shared my doubts that I would ever find a partner.  With his permission I tell you that he kissed the scar on my neck.  What that gives is acceptance and reassurance and asserts that “Nothing like that can scare me.” 

A friend who asked how we met and what she might do for herself.  I said it may be that you already know the person who might become your life partner, but the only rule I can deduce from Steven’s and my experience is, “Never take anyone off your Christmas card list.” 

A dear colleague had cancer and one breast was removed.  She said her only real fear was how the mastectomy would affect her husband.  She said he liked to come into the kitchen when she was cooking dinner and stand behind her and put his hands around her and cup her breasts.  And he continued to do that, and the first time was filled with emotion for both of them because he said he didn’t want to hurt her where she had had surgery, but “Please don’t deny me this.” 

How!  How!  How do we become more loving?  

The Unitarian minister who was my mentor used to meditate every morning and one of the things he looked at and held was a framed photograph of him, his wife, and their family, including grandchildren.  He would say the name of each person and think about their well-being.  That’s like saying a prayer for them.  The Vietnamese Zen master I studied with is from a culture that puts photographs or paintings or even the names of ancestors on a shrine, often with flowers, sometimes with fruit stacked in a pyramid, occasionally with incense, usually with a votive candle.  The ancestors are not being worshipped, but recalled and honored.  What is remembered is their gift of life to us, of gratitude to our mother for having carried us for nine months, and caring for us for decades (always hoping for signs of improvement of course) and the gift of their love and yes, their material support.  For the same reason some of us do not erase or cross out of our address books the names of those who have died.  No, no, we won’t be sending them birthday cards, but it’s just nice to see the names!

We help the process of loving others along by separating loving from liking, or rather loving from disliking.  We do not stop loving a child who does something we do not like.  And, well, we are all children, at the very least all God’s children, and even if you don’t believe in God you can believe that!  When we cannot love someone, such as an abusive adult, we may nonetheless draw upon compassion, thereby moving ourselves in the right direction.

Empathy does the same thing and our world abounds in examples to keep alive in us that capacity.  Huckleberry Finn—yes, from Mark Twain’s novel—reveals that he is troubled by having learned in Sunday School that a person who lets slaves go free will go to Hell.  This means Huck should turn Jim in.  He thinks about their friendship and warmth, “the day and nighttime, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a’floatin along, talking and singing and laughing.”  Jim’s humanity supersedes his being a slave and then and there Huckleberry Finn decides, “Alright, then, I’ll go to hell.”  They don’t call it the great American novel for nothing! 

A few people are destined to cultivate a stance of love toward the world.  Our best chance to reach this point is to allow ourselves to be loved, to take it in, and because of my inability to forgive sometimes I have not always been able to do that.  Forgiveness does not just allow us to love that person; it allows us to be loved by that person, such as me and my dad. 

My parents married young and dad went off to the army.  He was badly wounded and returned home changed.  He became the father of two and employed fulltime and a fulltime college student thanks to the GI Bill.  He was very unhappy at home.  He met his second wife, who believed in him, brought him to life with her dreams of a farm, a family, travel plans to see America and Europe.  It took many years after the divorce before I was willing to visit my dad and his wife.  I liked her and through her I got to like him.  He was a very friendly fellow; you would have liked him.  Toward him I was cordial, but toward me he was loving. 

And then one day I surrendered and let myself be loved.  We were out walking on the farm and suddenly it got quite cold.  I was 22 years old, young and healthy, but suddenly I was shivering visibly, and my father offered to take off his coat and give it to me.  I started to say something my mother would have said, “No, no, why should you be cold instead of me?”  But he offered again, and I took it, I immediately put it on, and it had such great body heat in it!  My father had such tremendous life force in him!  And I can never forget that moment: I healed, we healed, the relationship healed, healing occurred.  And I could love my dad and love myself, do what was best for me and for him, give up my anger and love my parents regardless of their limitations, each of them. 

“Love one another.”  This becomes focused when we remember acts of love from childhood, and when we bring to mind the stories from the lives of persons whose capacity for love inspires ours.  How good life is with loving acts to leaven it!  Shared moments with opportunities to alleviate human pain, to touch, to be loyal to one self and in so doing, to be loyal to the human race.

PRAYER

Great God in whom we live and move and have our being:  Teach us to be great lovers in a world that needs them.  Amen.

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Copyright 2007, Rev. Robert Schaibly. All rights reserved.