LOVE AND LOVING
by Jan Carlsson-Bull
February 29, 2004
Last Sunday evening I presided at a wedding. I believe it was my 50th . Now this doesn't quite compare to the wedding ripeness of my colleague Richard Leonard. As of this morning, Dick has performed 3,904 weddings. As of this afternoon, it will be 3,905. Dick is a walking archive of wedding ceremonies, wedding stories, and yes, wedding mishaps that make weddings so humanly memorable. No, I can't compete with Dick's tally, but I share with him the relishing of each opportunity to get to know a couple about to embark on a journey together, a journey that is like no other.
It's frequently the case that I don't know beforehand the couple who approaches me with the request to preside at their wedding. At our first meeting, I have a number of questions for them. "Tell me a bit about yourself," I say, nodding to each in turn. "How did you meet?" I wonder aloud. And then, further into our conversation, I always ask, "What would you like you and your guests to most remember about your wedding?" Now the couple whom I wed last Sunday needed some time to think about this question that I had raised in our first meeting. Their reply came a few days later by e-mail. "What do I want our guests to remember most from our wedding? What do we want to remember most from our wedding? LOVE—that's all I want us to remember, LOVE."
That's all. Just love.
Now those of us who were here last week heard Forrest speak eloquently on the meanings of marriage and the eruption of this topic in a national debate catalyzed by the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision that would permit civil marriage for same-sex couples and the threat of amendments to the Constitutions of that state and of our United States that would define marriage as consisting solely of the union of a man and a woman. Forrest focused this topic in the context of our nation's historic commitment to the principle of church-state separation.
My purpose this morning is to back up from the discussion of marriage as a civil institution and a sacramental rite and consider what leads us to marriage in the first place. Some say it's "temporary madness." Others say it's love. I'm intrigued by the difference, but for the time being I'll opt for love.
I can imagine that each of you here in this sanctuary has spent some time musing over this crazy-quilt notion of love. I can imagine that a few weeks ago you even spent more than a few dollars on flowers and chocolate. And that's a good thing. Most of us will accept flowers or chocolate any time of year. Late February, even the latest of the longest of February's, isn't too late, because flowers and chocolate celebrate a relationship and with not surprising frequency help redeem a fall from grace.
But love? Love has been perplexing us all for centuries—poets and philosophers, scholars and sages, ministers and mothers and fathers and children, and lovers of all persuasions. We're still perplexed, however important, however central we imagine love to be in our lives. We're still perplexed—even bothered and bewildered. So please don't think I'm about to stand here and say at some point this morning, "Now THIS is love. This is what it's really about!" Oh no, I have too much respect, far too much respect and wonder at the immensity and complexity of this kaleidoscopic thing we call love. Even love's synonyms fall at the mercy of love itself. Yet love has countless commentators.
It was the first century of the Common Era. Paul and others had begun to spread the good news of who Jesus was and what he had been about. In his first letter to the church of Corinth, Paul was challenged to address a community whose members were quarreling among themselves. They couldn't agree on anything. Do you suppose they were training to be Americans, or maybe even Unitarian Universalists who didn't know it yet?
In the early Christian church, there were so many filters for the teachings of Jesus. It wasn't too early even then for fault lines to taint a gospel of love with the growing illusion that the truth of that gospel was singular, that there was only one filter, one path, one way to hear it, speak it, and live it. But No, said Paul to the Corinthians, Don't let these fault lines deepen. Without love, there is no gospel. Without love, nothing else matters. Nothing.
"Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful….Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."
(I Corinthians 13: 4-7)
This does not sound like a doable model. Can't we just settle for flowers and chocolate? But then Paul didn't know about flowers.com, and he probably hadn't even tasted chocolate, poor guy. What a business he could have launched in Corinth!
I wonder how these Corinthian clefts move through our congregations. I wonder how these tendencies toward quarreling and sparring and truth claiming move with such vehemence through our living rooms and our neighborhoods, our boardrooms and our courtrooms, even our Supreme Court rooms. We know they do. It's just so hard to be patient and kind. It's so hard to refrain from arrogance, to not insist on our own way as the way. The return on investment isn't at all clear, nor is the outcome ever reliable.
As feminist philosopher bell hooks reminds us in her textured essays on this formidable topic, "The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control."
Love is a high-risk enterprise.
Let me tell you about Anneliese. Anneliese Aumüller was my therapist for a few extraordinary years. She was German born and trained by Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung. During the time I knew her, Anneliese was well into her seventies, a seasoned analyst who had chosen the path of Carl Jung. I was a young woman moving through the years of an exceedingly difficult marriage. I knew that Anneliese had moved through the years of an exceedingly traumatic Second World War. I knew that she had lived in Germany, but I didn't know very much about her life then.
I arrived at her office one afternoon tired of hearing myself talk, and I asked her: "Anneliese, how is it that you can sit here week after week and listen to me, or any of your patients for that matter, having been through all you've surely been through in your life?"
She paused for awhile, then spoke:
"You know, I haven't always been able to do it, Jan. During the War, I was practicing analysis while living in Berlin. I had finished my studies at the Institute where I had been given the choice of practicing analysis according to the theories of Freud or Adler or Jung. It wasn't an option to be eclectic then. You know I chose Jung. He understood the human heart so well.
I had given my heart to a young doctor. We were very much in love. He was a brain surgeon and practiced in the horrendous conditions of the war, during air raids and when the bombs fell. We despised Hitler. We prayed for his demise. We did what we could to save lives—my fiancé through his medical practice, I through my analytic practice.
I lived with my parents during these years. My brother had gone off to the Russian front. Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers perished on that front. Some were killed; some starved; some disappeared. After my brother left, we never saw him again. It was more than my father could bear. His heart was broken. Before the war came to an end, his heart gave out. I loved my brother dearly. I adored my father. Even with their loss, I held onto my hope for a good life with my fiancé, for surely the war wouldn't last forever. All the while, I continued to practice analysis.
Days before liberation, my fiancé was doing surgery in a bunker. It was bombed. There was nothing left, no one recovered. I lost him. Just like that, I lost him too. Somehow, I thought I had to keep going with my analysis, but it didn't work. One day, at the beginning of a session, a patient looked me in the eye and said, 'Anneliese, you don't love us anymore. I know from talking with some of your other patients. They feel the same way I do. You just don't love us anymore.'
I stopped doing analysis. I took months, many months, to do nothing but cry. Grief overwhelmed me. I didn't know I had so many tears, I grieved so hard. Then one day, I stopped. I didn't stop missing them—my brother, my father, and the love of my life. I had just cried enough, and a dear friend said, 'Anneliese, you now have a choice. You can be bitter or you can understand.' I decided to understand. I tried to understand that love has no guarantees, no guarantees at all. Understanding this allowed me to feel compassion. Our pain is relative, Jan. Your pain is as real to you as mine has been to me, and it's worth listening to."
It's all about love, this losing your heart to another—whether it's a brother, a father, a husband or wife or partner or child. Love doesn't come with guarantees. It doesn't come tightly wrapped, but if it runs deep, if it runs true, it does bear all things and endure all things—not masochistically, but with understanding, with mindfulness, with resilience that is one of love's more striking epiphanies because we surprise ourselves with just how resilient we can be.
I know from living my own life that love is knotted and gnarled, like an old tree fighting with the wind, like branches too brittle for their own good, like roots that relentlessly inform how deeply we can trust and how freely we can forgive. While I freed myself from that marriage that simply couldn't work, I remarried, and it's been almost 18 years now that I've been the wife, Mom, and Stepmom in our blended family. A blended family is not unlike a Unitarian Universalist congregation. Blended histories, blended faiths, blended approaches to doing holidays and undoing holidays, blended voices too often at the same time, blended laughter when we're doing family at our very best, and comic relief that holds up a mirror to the foibles of our vested interests in who we are and who we're not.
The sounds of a blended family and of a Unitarian Universalist congregation are not unlike the voices that ring and blur and resonate in both harmony and discord through our grand experiment in democracy where we as families however constituted seem to move like bumper cars between the secular and the sacred, the public and the private, the civil and the not so civil notions of how we might be together, how we might effectively function as a blended national family.
We are, for better and worse, woven. Our love and our loving, our civility and our lack of it, our institutions defined and redefined and emerging through the centuries with more than a few loose strands, are woven. The beauty and the resilience are in the texture. There is no single way for the threads to embrace. A solitary design is an illusion.
For example, those of us who are men and women married to a member of the opposite sex can surely testify to how challenging that kind of union can be. If we're to believe that men are from Mars and women, from Venus, then we're talking about an interplanetary union. And this is the default form? I don't think so. There is no single way for the threads to embrace.
I went to a Presbyterian Sunday school. I'm one of those Unitarian Universalists who grew up something else and leaned into what I think I always believed a few years later. I don't think I'm a lapsed Presbyterian. I think then I was a lapsed Unitarian Universalist, because the mantra that I learned in Sunday school was "God is love. God is love." Now God is about as complicated a notion as love. If they were to vie with one another in a contest of complexity, both would win. It just seems to me that there was nothing in that "God is Love" mantra about God ruling on any gender specifics, or that love is naturally confined to a particular form of gender preference. Love is too big for that. So is God. So why pass any amendments that would roll back a judicial epiphany; a landmark ruling; civic courage in San Francisco and now in New Paltz, New York; and my early theology?
We've had an extraordinary weekend here. Unitarian Universalists from 25 states and Canada converged at All Souls under the rainbow banner of Interweave to consider and organize for full acceptance and equality for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered members of our church family and our national family, our wondrously blended family. And it was all about love, all about loving.
Let's detour for a moment. Today is February 29, a resilient Sabbath if there ever was one. The next time February 29 falls on a Sunday, we'll be 28 years older, or off the calendar altogether. Emperors and theologians have wrestled with the reality that our earth takes 365 days plus an irascible five hours, 48 minutes, and 45 seconds to orbit the sun. In his dalliance with this dilemma, Julius Caesar instituted Leap Year, adding an extra day to February every four years, but this arrangement still left us with three fewer days every 400 years. Pope Gregory XII to the rescue. Leap Year, said Pope Gregory, will be eliminated in all centenary years, except those that are divisible by 400. This held except for the year 2000, when there was indeed a February 29. So much for consistency! And even the Gregorian solution left a loose end—an extra 26 seconds every 3,323 years. I'll bet there are some folks who really worry about this. I'll just bet there are.
I think it's a completely splendid loose end. Neither time nor our lives are too tightly woven. And Leap Year itself, a Leap Year Sabbath no less, can remind us that if time leaps the conventional institutions of time keeping, then even moreso does love leap the conventional institutions of marriage making.
Love leaps whatever boundaries are imposed. Love is no more tightly woven than time itself.
I stand in celebratory wonder at a couple who declares that what they most want to remember about their wedding and what they most want their guests to remember is LOVE, that's all, LOVE. I will do my part to advocate for the possibility of looking back on presiding at a thousand marriage ceremonies gay and straight and otherwise, just as my friend Dick anticipates looking back on 4,000 marriage ceremonies gay and straight and otherwise. Love comes at such a premium, who are we to say what form it must take?
"Love is … not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way," wrote Paul to another contentious community.
With "the practice of love….We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control," observed bell hooks.
"I tried to understand that love had no guarantees, no guarantees at all," comes the echo from Anneliese, who went through that painful process of losing so much and came so close to losing trust in her capacity to love altogether.
Love has a heartbeat, you know. It's irregular, decidedly and irrevocably irregular. Love marches to its own beat, and its rhythms are endless. Its drummers are forever taking us by surprise, seducing us with their magic, catapulting us across the strangest of skies, securing us with behavior that cares and caring that is constant, and confusing us when those we love we also lose, confusing us when those who love us sometimes seem to stop, confusing us when we're all stopped short by death, confusing us because it isn't love that we've lost. We never, we simply never, lose our capacity to love.
May love's heartbeat be our own, irregular creatures that we are. May we continue to be as perplexed by love as we are by God. They're both outrageously confusing. May we be as resilient as we can be in this world that isn't always informed by love. May we heed the proclamation of Rev. William Sinkford, President of our Unitarian Universalist Association, a proclamation that Bill issued this past Friday evening right here in this sanctuary at Interweave's Ingathering Service: "Unitarian Universalism stands on the side of love." It grounds the public witness of our denomination during these tempestuous times.
May we valiantly live this affirmation by gathering up our love and our loving and leap together whatever boundaries are imposed, for love and loving are interwoven in designs that burst the seams of time and convention. On this Leap Year Sunday, let us celebrate this love. Amen.
Sources:
Louis de Bernieres, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Secker & Warburg, 1994.
The Bible (Revised Standard Version)
http://www.brownielocks.com/leapyear.html
Conversation with Anneliese Aumüller, paraphrased, Jan Carlsson-Bull, ca. 1976.
bell hooks, all about love: New Visions, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 2000, First Perennial Edition, 2001, 153.
http://www.mystro.com/leap.html
Rev. William Sinkford, President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, in remarks delivered at the Interweave Ingathering Service, Unitarian Church of All Souls, February 29, 2004
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