by Vanessa Southern
Service at UUCSS on February 14, 1999
First Reading:The Book of Ruth 1:4-18
Second Reading: Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gifts from the Sea
| "When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration , on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth in fluidity -- in freedom....How can one learn to take the trough of the wave? It is easier to understand here on the beach, where the breathlessly still ebb tide reveals another life below the level which mortals usually reach. In this crystalline moment of suspense, one has a sudden revelation of the secret kingdom at the bottom of the sea... So, beautiful is the still hour of the sea's withdrawal, as beautiful as the sea's return.." |
Sermon
by Vanessa Southern
| I have a colleague who does most of the weddings that come into one of
the larger churches in our denominations, and he has for years. So, Richard
has dozens of stories of things going awry on the wedding day. He wants to
write a book and call it, "For Better or for Worse." Favorite among the stories
is Richard's tale of the service and reception that were to take place on
a boat in the East River and cruise around Manhattan. While boarding the
boat, the maid of honor lost her footing when a wave raised the boat up suddenly.
She fell in the water and to make matters worse, three groomsman dove in
after her simultaneously, since no one knew if she could swim. Needless to
say, they delayed the wedding until everyone could get back to the hotel
and change.
A colleague of mine once did a wedding in which the boy scout ring bearer was worried the rings would come loose and fall as he walked down the aisle. So, tied the rings to the pillow in one of the fiercest knots a scout knows and the wedding was delayed until a Swiss army knife could be found. My own favorite story is of the Indian bride I married to her American spouse. The families came from far and near, and by Friday all had made it in including the bride's brother who arrived from Paris with his fiancé. The fiancee was a beautiful woman, who was, in fact, to serve as the maid of honor in the wedding. We rehearsed the wedding without the organist as we usually do, and all went smoothly. On the day of the wedding the bride wore a stunning gold sari. The maid of honor wore a lovely pale pink couture gown. The wedding started. I came down the aisle and cued the processional music. Parents came down the aisle. Groomsmen and bridesmaids. The groom came down the aisle. And then there was a long, long pause. So, we waited and we waited. Finally, the best man and the maid of honor appeared. The organist seeing this French woman in her lovely pale pink gown and guided by a man in his tux, appearing as they did after a long, protracted pause, assumed they were the bride and her father and switched deftly to "here comes the bride". Well, imagine the moment. Two-hundred people facing forward and you are the only one facing back. Imagine, two-hundred people who wonder what is going on and are looking at you to see how you respond. In ministry we talk about a "non-anxious" presence. This was my test of a non-anxious presence! What did I do? I just smiled. I pretended like in Unitarian Universalist Churches practically everybody entered to "here comes the bride". Inside, of course, I was screaming some colorful language. It turned out, though we didn't know it at the time, that the bride had stepped on her sari and torn the bottom and pulled it loose from the folds and tucks that hold it in place, and that in that long pause her brother and future sister in law were rushing to put her back together.
Well, the best man and maid of honor made it down front and the music swelled
to a finish. And I turned to the organist and mouthed the words... "again".
"Again?!," he mouthed back, perplexed. "AGAIN!" I mouthed emphatically. And
he played "here comes the bride" again. This time to another beautiful woman,
this one in a gold sari, came down the aisle with an escort, her father.
And the rest, as they say, was happily ever after. In weddings, as in marriage, as in life, something is bound to go wrong. And as unromantic as that may sound at a wedding or on Valentine's day, someone should just tell you off the bat, so you can be prepared. In preparing with dozens of couples for their weddings, I ask myself again and again, "what does it take to make it work?" What does it demand of us to deal appropriately and constructively with the stuff that goes wrong, not just in marriage, but in all relationships of love, including this one here.
Let me tell you what I have come up with as my "trinity" of virtues of love.
They are: 1. Honesty; 2. Forgiveness; and 3. Devotion. There was a couple I knew and I loved very much. They were married twenty-five years and they had raised two children and created a successful business. They seemed devoted to each other from the outside. Then one day, she walked away. We'd known there had been some issues. He could be insensitive. He'd gone out with the boys a few too many times and forgotten to call. He'd never gotten around to fixing that snoring problem he had that sometimes drove the whole family into the living room to sleep. Sure, he could be a jerk, but he could be a prince too. So, why was she leaving? Well, there was no other man. She even still loved him, but there was anger and resentment in her voice that welled up in her when she spoke about it. Well, it turned out, she finally confessed, that one day she was dressing for work. He was in the room and they were talking and he looked at her and remarked that she wasn't the woman he'd married. What did he mean, she asked. "Well, the woman I married," he said, "was much fitter and skinny." That was that. She never said anything to him, she never mentioned it once. Turns out he never remembered even saying it, but she harbored it. She'd never told him how sensitive she was about the way she looked or that she needed to hear that he loved her and found her attractive. He thought she knew all that. She never asked him to apologize and go more gently with her. Not knowing he had hurt her he never did. She planted bricks around her heart and soon enough she'd made a wall so thick there was no getting through. This marriage ended. He was broadsided. He was destroyed. Turned out he adored this woman. He just didn't love her the way she wanted to be loved, and helped him figure out how to do so. I think this was a tragedy of sorts. Being able to be honest about who we are and what we need. Being able to ask each other for what we need and want. These are key. It sounds simple enough, obvious enough, but how many of us actively help the ones we love to love us better? With a dearth of mind-readers on the market of love, we need to be able to do so. To say in simple, easy ways what makes us tick, or purr, and how our loved ones can begin to nurture us better. And, as the story illustrates also, being able to forgive is key too. One thing I always liked about the story of the Garden of Eden was that it was some ancient's attempt to remind us that we humans were bound to violate covenant. I know we Unitarians think we are too good to be damned, and we are, but it doesn't mean we don't do some damned painful things to each other. We will hurt each other. We will say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, even at our low points, willfully do and say the hurtful thing. And, here's the tough part, we will do it a thousand times in our lifetimes and do it most often to the people we love. So, how do we get through this thing called love together. We pack some major forgiveness in our bags, and just as much healthy contrition.
I would like to meet the person who said, "Love is not about never having
to say ëI am sorry'". I imagine that his closest relationship must have
been with his stamp collection. Honesty. Forgiveness. Devotion. The first movie Spike Lee made for national distribution was "She's Gotta Have it". Early on there is a scene where the protagonist, Nola Darling, shows us all the pick up lines she has heard. It is one of the funniest scenes in the movie. Each man more seemingly sincere and seductive than the next. "Baby, it's got to be you and me." One says. "I know I only saw you for the first time in my life a minute ago, but I love you." Says the next. "Please, baby, baby, baby, baby, please baby, please," says a third Finally one man comes and says, without much show or pomp: "Nola, I don't want to chance not seeing you again. Whatever you want to do, I'll do. Wherever you want to go, I'll take you." She is hooked. And who wouldn't be. Here's a man to travel with wherever the road takes you. This is the same sentiment I find so marvelous, though in a different context, in the Book of Ruth. What Ruth pledges is quite extraordinary, more rich the more details of the story you know. Ruth's mother-in-law, Naomi, has lost her husband and her sons. Naomi therefore is in the worst place in her society -- the place of widows and orphans. In the bible it is these, the widows and the orphans that are named as the one's that need the temple's charity most. They are the most vulnerable, the ones with the least status or means. What's worse is that Naomi cannot even have more children by which she could provide Ruth with another husband as Jewish Law allows. So pledging to stay with Naomi dooms Ruth also to the lowest status -- to the vulnerability and poverty of a widow. Naomi encourages Ruth to leave as the other daughter-in-law did, to create a life of some means for herself. And Ruth refuses in an extraordinary pledge of committed love and says: "Wherever you go, I'll go. Your people will be my people. Your gods, my Gods." I will open my wedding service with that quote. For to me, they are the words and spirit of lifetime unions. Do Nora's love's words or Ruth's make this walk of devotion easy? Not one bit. Devotion requires a dose of perseverance and a Taoist like trust in the Way. Gwen Buehrens, wife of our UUA President, tells her couples marriage is like a rope, it has three strands woven together. Two of those strands are love and one is longevity. So, two-thirds of the time you are with the doll because you adore him and one-third of the time you are with the bastard because you were with him yesterday. This is the perseverance part. The pay off for perseverance, I think, is some personal growth and mutual transformation. Couples who have been at it a long time, know what Rilke said is true: That all dragons are princes or princesses in disguise waiting for us to act just once with love and courage. In other words, the greatest personal growth and mutual transformation is done when we face down the tough stuff with each other's support.
As for the Taoist trust in the way, Anne Morrow Lindbergh in Gift from
the Sea, captures that best for me, as she discusses the soul of what
it means to ride out the ebbs and flows of love. And anyone who knows anything
about her life, the tragic kidnapping of her first child, her husband's volatile
military career and political engagements, knows that she knew the ebbs of
married life.
Honesty, Forgiveness and Devotion -- my holy trinity of marital virtues.
It has to be more than he makes me feel good about myself, because that will
pass. It has to be about some commitment to each other's personal and spiritual
well-being, a covenant to bring the other fully into the world. And in so
doing, all loving relationships become the vehicle for what is quite
extraordinary and simply divine. In our unions of lifetime partnership, of friendship, of familial love, may we bring all that we are to bear on each other and on the fragile units we build, so that all who follow our lives with interest and affection have cause often to rejoice, not just in our happiness, but in the brave and generous living we make possible for each other. Blessed be. Amen |