Loving is Not Enough

Rev. Peter Friedrichs

February 14, 2010

Her name was Carol Barton and she was perfect. Tall and thin and athletic. She could run circles around most of us, and watching her move was like watching a gazelle bounding across the plains. Her long, brown hair flowed behind her like a veil. And she wasn't only beautiful. She was smart, too. She seemed to have an answer to every question. From the moment we met, I knew we were made for each other. And so, just weeks later, I proposed marriage to her. Her response was a qualified yes, but a yes nonetheless. "Yes, I will marry you," she said, "as long as you don't grow a beard or ever drink beer." I could live with that, as long as she'd be mine.

My bliss, tragically, was short-lived. Like a hawk diving down from on high to pounce on its unsuspecting prey, Mrs. Dorsey, swooped in and grabbed the notes from our hands. "What's this?" our second grade teacher asked as she interrupted our budding romance. She read the notes that we had passed between us in class. Then, to our complete horror, we watched as she walked over to the bulletin board and posted them there for all to see. With that, the spell between us was broken and my heart was crushed. Carol never forgave me for the embarrassment I'd caused her, and sometime during third grade her family moved away and I never saw her again. I'd learned a valuable lesson, in fact several valuable lessons about paying attention in class (or at least keeping my eye out for where the teacher was), about the things I should and shouldn't put in writing, and about giving away my heart so easily and so completely.

Today, of course, is Valentine's Day. A day to celebrate the intimate, romantic, erotic kind of love that is experienced between two people. There are, of course, many different kinds of love. There's the puppy love that I had for Carol when I was seven years old. Then there's what's called "filial" love, the love we share as brothers and sisters, the love we have within and for our families. Agape, or love of one's fellow beings without regard to ourselves is yet another form of love, the type of love that both springs from and leads to deep compassion for others, including those we've never met. From this pulpit I have spoken of the power of agapic love to change the way we are, to change who we are, and to change the world. But today is Valentine's Day, which made me think of all those little valentine's cards we used to give and receive from our friends in school and it made me think of Carol back in second grade,. So today, I want to stick with the romantic kind of love that this holiday celebrates. Plus, today is the thirteenth wedding anniversary of one of the couples in our church, a couple who bid on and won the "sermon topic of your choice" at the annual auction, and I'm glad to be able to preach to them and to you on their special day.

Perhaps the place to begin a discourse on the topic of romantic love is to differentiate it from lust. Not that I wouldn't have lots to say about lust. But lust is not love. In the words of Frederick Buechner, "Lust is the craving for salt of a person who is dying of thirst." In other words, lust tempts us to give over and give in to yearnings that may not be particularly healthy or wise. Lust is, as we all know, one of the seven deadly sins, and it appeals to our baser instincts. Lust draws us toward another based on superficial characteristics we might find in them, or based on unfulfilled desires and cravings we carry within ourselves. Lust can be linked with a differential of power between people and often results in the degradation or abuse of the party less powerful. There are, I'm certain, cases where lust evolves into love, but lust and love are not interchangeable.

Just as lust is not love, nor is infatuation. Infatuation is like a throttled-back lust, lust imbued, perhaps, with a touch of innocence. Infatuation is less likely than lust to lead to harm, or the exercise of power over another, but infatuation is to love as a mud puddle is to the ocean. Infatuation is a shallow emotion, subject to the whims of sun and wind, which can dry up in an instant. It has no staying power, no sustaining power. Like the word from which it is derived, "fatuous," infatuation is foolish and silly, and it's rarely based in reality. It is love of the idea of a person, perhaps, but not love of the person itself.

I would also like to dispense with the notion that being in love is the same as falling in love. I am all for falling in love, mind you. That head-over-heels feeling you get when you click with someone and they click with you. Those first few weeks or even months of racing hearts and weak knees. That moment when everything else falls away and there is only the object of our desire and affection. We can't eat, we can't sleep, we can't work. Our head spins and our heart aches. There's a reason we call it "falling in love" and use the term "love-sick." The symptoms sound dangerously close to the flu! Once we've experienced the thrill of the first pangs of romantic love, we yearn to sustain it or to repeat it, over and over again. And our culture tells us that we're entitled to it. From soap operas to movies to popular music, we're told that we can and should feel the thrill of falling in love, over and over again.

This notion that being in love is the same as falling in love, that we should and can and will always feel about our beloved the way we felt when we first met them, is a lie. We cannot sustain, nor can we often repeat, that fateful feeling of falling in love. Like the drug that it is, we ache for it and often-times we do foolish and hurtful things to get it. But like a drug it's a quick fix and a short ride with a hard landing on the other side. If by some stroke of luck we're able to rediscover that feeling after another relationship has ended, we hope, but we can only hope, for it to last. For this newness, too, will fade and the bloom will eventually fall from the rose. But here's the good news: behind the falling in love lies something even better. After the fiery burn of the falling comes a slower, steadier glow, a warmth that sustains and renews. Better than falling in love is the love and the loving that follow in its wake.

In his book The Wisdom of Love, philosopher Jacob Needleman tells us that love is "an overwhelming force, as far beyond our control as the wind, the lightning and the sea… When we are in love," he writes, "we are in a tornado of forces and all we can do is try to hold on to our chair."^[1] Needleman has a rather unique view of love. He claims that there are two halves to love. The first half is the one we see in movies and television shows, the stuff of poetry and valentine's cards. This love, he calls "the half that seeks our own pleasure, or psychological security, or the begetting of children." This half of love, he claims, the selfish half, makes our lives ultimately meaningless because it engages only half of our human power and potential. It is the other half of love that is deep, fulfilling and powerful beyond words. This half of love is the love that helps another search for truth. Let me explain:

Needleman claims that we are meaning-making, purpose-seeking creatures. Therefore, our highest calling is to support another in their quest. This is the meaningful half of love. Needleman puts it this way: "If, in essence, in the heart of our being, we are meant to search for truth; if, as the teachings of wisdom tell us, we are born incomplete, inwardly incomplete, and our possibility is to become complete through an interior struggle - then we cannot avoid asking the question of how we can support each other in this struggle. What is love between people if it does not dwell in the realm of this question?"^[2] According to Professor Needleman, when we love fully and not just halfway, we seek fulfillment not for ourselves, but for our beloved. And in so doing we create a wholeness for both ourselves and our lover, a wholeness that is far greater than the sum of its parts. To put it another way, this kind of love is what the Indigo Girls refer to in their song as "life multiplied by the power of two."^[3] This is a realm of love that I would call spiritual love, because this kind of love puts us in touch with the divine within ourselves and each other. When we share this type of love, the goddess in me meets the goddess in you, and we both gain a glimpse of heaven.

The truth is, of course, that in our loving we are always seeking to satisfy both halves of ourselves, the pleasure-seeking self and the larger, other-serving self. Love is not an "either-or" proposition. We vacillate between the two loves, sometimes putting our needs ahead of our partner's and at others sacrificing ours for theirs. We cannot sustain the self-sacrificing, other-giving love all the time. Although we carry within us a spark of the divine, we are not, after all, God. If we are, as Needleman says, truth-seeking, meaning-making creatures, only the most egotistical among us believes we can grow and thrive alone. And so we are called to find another whom we can support in their search, and who can support us in ours.

Once we find a lover with whom we can share both halves of love, the question becomes, "How do we sustain such a love?" Passions cool, eventually, and the daily grind of living injects itself into our lives. As Anne Morrow Lindbergh has written, love ebbs and flows like the tides, and we tend to "leap at the flow…and resist in terror its ebb." It is clear that simply loving each other, being in love with each other, is not enough. Cruising the self-help aisle at the local Borders bookstore, we see shelves and shelves of how-to manuals with titles like "Relationship Rescue" and "The Marriage Makeover" and "Reclaim Your Relationship" and, one of my favorite titles, "How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It." There are, of course, many, many keys to sustaining a successful long-term relationship. Communication. Trust. Making time for each other. Sharing new experiences together. But if we consider Needleman's "second half" of love, the half that calls us into sacred relationship with our lover, where we mutually support each other's search for truth and meaning, what I call the spiritual side of love, we find that maintaining our loving relationship becomes a spiritual practice. And there is, I believe, one spiritual practice that is paramount above all others: maintaining a grateful heart and expressing appreciation.

It makes sense, doesn't it? We connect with our deepest selves and with the God of our longing when we experience gratitude and offer up praise for all that is our life. If we seek to remain in touch with the deepest parts of those whom we love, shouldn't we do the same with them? The primary difference is that we can maintain a so-called "attitude of gratitude" for our own lives within the silence of our own hearts. But we can only do so with another by offering outward expressions of that gratitude, which take the form of words and deeds of appreciation. It does absolutely no good to hold our gratitude for another inside of us. As Rev. Kent Matthies told us a couple of Sundays ago, we need to spend and spread our love extravagantly and to demonstrate it daily. If love is a sacrament, then acts of appreciation are its prayer. And to maintain a healthy, fulfilling, loving relationship, we must pray out loud, long and often. Expressing appreciation to the ones we love must be our daily devotion.

There are right ways and wrong ways to express appreciation, so let me offer you some pointers. First, appreciation needs to be timely. It does no good to express appreciation long after the fact. Waiting to express appreciation dilutes and devalues it. Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but appreciation should be served up piping hot, fresh out of the oven. Expressions of appreciation must be delivered in the moment, or close to it. Second, words of appreciation need to be specific. "Thanks for being you" is, frankly, pretty lame and just barely better than saying nothing at all. What has your lover done or said that you are grateful for? Feed that back to them and your gratitude will be meaningful. It will show that you are paying attention and invested in whatever it was that your beloved did or said. Finally, appreciation should be offered constantly. Just because you expressed your gratitude yesterday doesn't mean you don't have to today. There's no such thing as a "gratitude quota," and I guarantee that your partner will never be so full of praise that he or she just can't stand one more kind word or gesture from you. Like any spiritual practice, appreciation must be constantly attempted, on a daily or more frequent basis.

You probably noticed that there was a heart-shaped paper and an envelope on your chair when you came into the Sanctuary today. I thought it would be good for us on this Valentine's Day to take a moment to offer up a prayer, to express appreciation to someone we love. It might be the person sitting next to you, or someone far away. It doesn't have to be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, but if you're in one, I'd suggest it. You can do this with a son or daughter, or a mother or father or friend if you prefer. I invite you to take a few moments before our closing hymn to express your appreciation, knowing that you are in another person's life and they are in yours to support each other in our ongoing quest to be more complete, more fulfilled beings on this planet. You can then use the envelope to send your words of appreciation to your loved one.

Unlike Mrs. Dorsey, I promise I won't snatch these love notes from you and post them on the bulletin board. Happy Valentine's Day!

Closing Words (from the Sufi poet Rumi):

^[1] Jacob Needleman, The Wisdom of Love, 7.
^[2] Needleman, 8-9
^[3] Indigo Girls, The Power of Two

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