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Unexhausted Kindlinessby the Rev. Kerry MuellerService at UUCSS on July 30, 2000
Welcome The Lighting of the Chalice and a Uniting StatementAs we gather here for worship, Hymn: #18 "What Wondrous Love" Candles of Joys and Concerns Anthem Story for All Ages from The Little Prince
Announcements Offering Hymn: #130 "O Liberating Rose" SermonUnexhausted KindlinessRev. Kerry Mueller Do you ever find yourself brought up short by some question you haven't given any thought to? Some years ago I took an Alban Institute -- that's an Episcopalian think tank -- course on church leadership. It was a course for lay people and clergy, but it was dominated by Christian ministers, and I was the only UU lay person, feeling a little intimidated. For our get-acquainted exercise, we were asked to go around the room and say who we were and why we were here, and who was our best friend. Oh, dear. Who was my best friend? I fretted as my turn to speak moved closer and closer. As I listened to the others it seemed that almost every speaker named his or her spouse as best friend. I wondered, did this indicate a lack of imagination? Was it because the clergy all lived in the hothouse of congregational life, and could not name any one person in the church? Were their lives so constricted that they had no friends? Then, when one person finally named a same sex friend, not her husband, I began wondering what the marriage was like. What would I say? I remembered years ago reading about a sociology study using some special mapping device, in which schoolchildren were asked to name their best and other friends. There was little Susie, who named Mary as her best friend. Mary, however, hardly had Susie on her map at all. She liked Jane the best. Suppose I named someone as best friend? Suppose she would have named someone else entirely? Was I on her map? When it was my turn to speak, I named Dave. It's true enough. Dave is the best friend I ever had, reliable and challenging, loving and loyal and supportive, a person truly worthy of the name "friend." But I knew my answer was a copout. There are other kinds of friendships, valuable relationships of the highest and noblest human endeavors. A loving spouse is in a special category. And I have valued friends as well. This question was really about them. All this came back to me as I was thinking about the assignment I received at last year's service auction. Elizabeth Morrow and Pauline Vigeveno named a sermon topic -- friendship. I understood that my confusion and anxiety at the Alban Institute course was not an adequate basis for this sermon, so I decided to do some research. In the library at Wesley Theological Seminary, I opened the volume for F in the Encyclopedia of Religion. Friendship was not listed as a religious topic. I tried other theological dictionaries and reference works. Nothing. Apparently, this basic human relationship has not been considered important in theological circles. Fortunately, I remembered that our own Ralph Waldo Emerson had written an essay on Friendship. And a friend reminded me that Mary Hunt, a founder and director of WATER, the Women's Alliance for Theology Ethics and Ritual, a think tank in Silver Spring, had written a wonderful book about friendship, called Fierce Tenderness. Interestingly, both of these authors, Emerson in 1841 (70) and Hunt (9, 15) a hundred and fifty years later, note that very little has been written on the spiritual depths of friendship. They both agree that friendship is important, though only Hunt would appreciate the earthy way in which Zora Neal Hurston expresses that importance: It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it. Emerson is cited in books of quotations: "Happy is the house that shelters a friend!" "A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature." And the poem from which this sermon takes its title includes the lines about a friend feared lost: I fancied he was fled, Hunt says that "friendship is available to everyone." and that friendship "by its nature, assumes that persons live in relationships and that relationships are good." (7) Friendship has the potential to alleviate social ills, because it can link persons who are "structural enemies," people in different racial and ethnic groups. And it then motivates friends to work "to change the social structures because of their commitments to one another." (92) When a friendship works, she says, people know. "It generates something new for both the persons and for the larger community of which they are a part. Generativity is the hallmark of friendship." Friendship may generate an art project, a party, the nurture of a child, a small business. True friendship is creative. For Hunt, friendship is both "fierce and tender." Fierce in the intensity of attention paid to a friend. "We attend," she writes, "to the quality of our lives and the lives and the lives of those we love. That is sufficient spirituality for me." Tenderness, she says, is "what only those who love us can give.... It is the quality of care and nurture that only friends share." (22) It is loving the color of the wheat fields because we have been tamed by a Little Prince who is unique in all the world. Although Emerson and Hunt are rooted in different times and different cultural assumptions, much of what they say about the nature of friendship is overlapping. Emerson speaks of two essential characteristics of friendship: the first is truth. A friend is someone with whom you can be utterly sincere, without beating around the bush or falling into polite little lies. He even calls a friend a "beautiful enemy" -- someone important, a challenge, not a trivial convenience. How interesting that both Emerson and Hunt lift up the searing power of giving one's whole attention -- he calls is truth and she, fierceness. Emerson goes on to name the other half of friendship, which like Hunt, he names as tenderness. How interesting that they both use that sweet and delicate word, "tenderness" to convey the wide spectrum love between friends. Have you every experienced with Emerson that overwhelming excitement? "A new person is to me a great event, and often hinders me from sleep." He even speaks of friends as "lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths." (67) Hunt pictures fierce tenderness for us: imagine a baby furiously gulping down her mother's milk while tenderly patting the breast with her little hand; remember the first flush of attraction as you find connection after connection with a friend; recall the anger when love fails. (24) Fierce Tenderness, says Hunt, is the model of friendship as "right relationship." In her model, there are four essential elements to friendship, elements which all relate to each other: love, power, embodiment, and spirituality. Before we look at each of these in turn, let me share a story with you. Elizabeth recently told me about four friends who looked after one another as they aged. They visited a lot, went to museums and had parties together, gave each other little presents, phoned to inquire after one another. Finally, one of them, Marian, became seriously ill. First she was in the hospital and then a nursing home. The others continued to visit her as best they could, but without a car it was a difficult journey. Caroline remained very faithful, however. She wasn't so young herself, but again and again she descended to the subway system and climbed onto busses, travelling long distances with flowers and presents to see her friend, as Marian faded. When Marian finally died, it turned out that in her will she had left her money to the other two friends, one portion one and two to the other. She did not mean to slight Caroline, but she gave in proportion to what she perceived to be their financial need. This arrangement was a bit of a shock to the faithful Caroline, but it made a certain sense because her need was less. Her other friends, however, valued her friendship and loyalty and care. They knew that Marian, and they, and the world were better off because Caroline was willing to inconvenience herself, week after week, for a dying friend's sake. They came to a decision: the one who had received a double portion split her inheritance in two and gave half to Caroline. So all ended up with the same financial reward, but each received an infinity of friendship. It sounds like a parable, doesn't it? What is this story about? Is it about unfairness? Or grace? Or unexhausted kindliness? Mary Hunt would see it as fierce tenderness. Each of her four elements of friendship is to be found among these friends. 1. Love is Hunt's first element. Love [she says] is an orientation toward the world as if my friend and I were more united than separated, more at one among the many than separate and alone....Love is the intent to deepen the unity without losing the uniqueness of the individuals. I think of my friend, Franny, who showed me love with "unexhausted kindliness" after a long hiatus. This was well over twenty years ago. I had been away in England for a year, when my then husband was on sabbatical. During that year my marriage pretty much fell apart, and I returned home in a sad and desperate state, uncertain and anxious about my future. A few days later, in the produce section of the A&P, I spotted my friend, Franny. After that awful year away, there she was, like an angel of kindness. And right there amid the cabbages and bananas I just flung myself into her arms and burst into tears. Franny didn't seem to mind who might be staring at this spectacle. She didn't press me for the story. She just hugged me and soothed me, and stood by me over the next difficult months. There was love between us, and I bless her to this day. 2. Power is Hunt's second element. Power is one of those words that makes us uneasy, as Mary Hunt readily agrees. But she defines power in friendship simply as "the ability to make choices for ourselves, for our dependent children, and with our community." (102) Power exists in every relationship, both between the individuals and arising from their places in the world. So many things influence their power: social standing, intelligence, wealth, age, sex, strength of character, charisma. Friends may empower one another -- or they may reach such an imbalance of power that the relationship crumbles under the unequal weight. Hunt cites feminist author Letty Pogrebin: "...friendship requires equality. Unlike love, it cannot be unilateral or unrequited. Unlike sex it cannot be imposed. Friendship must be mutual. (92) Our friend Emerson also agrees. He says: "I ought to be equal to every relation." (68) And he understands that true equality in friends requires that each friend feel free to be who he or she truly is, not some insincere mask trying to create a false similarity. In his antique and flowery (and sexist) language he puts it this way: Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party....I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine. (72) The not mine is mine. We must give room to our friend, and respect the differences between us, or else there is only one, not two in the relationship. I think of E. M. Forster's novel, Howard's End, a taped version of which has been my car companion for the last few weeks. Two characters, Meg and Helen Schlegel are independently wealthy young women. The sisters befriend a poor and ill-educated young man, a clerk in an insurance company. They are intrigued by him, he seems so exotic to them. But they do not see him as a real and independent person, only as someone to study and to help from their lofty position. They mean to do him good, and to do so responsibly. Early on Helen says that "one must not play at friendship." Yet this turns out to be exactly what they do. The relationship at its depths is lacking equality. The imbalance of power pushes inexorably on to tragedy for the young man. Power is always present in a relationship. It is well for us to recognize that power and respond to it appropriately. 3. Embodiment is Hunt's third element By embodiment, Hunt means to remind us that "virtually everything we do and who we are is mediated by our bodies." Embodiment in friendship ranges from the very intimate to the societal: from the sexuality explicit in some friendships to society's allocation of the goods of the world such as nutrition, shelter, health care, rest, leisure. As embodied beings, we touch our friends -- with pats, hugs, roughhousing, the braiding of hair, caring for the sick, kisses. We realize we must accommodate our friend's limitations. Sometimes we must create access for the disabled. We celebrate and nurture our friends as we share meals, give and receive gifts, work and play, and do everything else, in a physical way. (102) Emerson, however, departs from Hunt here. He can't imagine mixing up friendship with worldly things such as bodies, money, or even a lot of visiting. He sees friendship, and spirituality, in other worldly terms and rejects the mundane world: Why should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding upon them? Why insist on rash personal relations with your friend? Why go to his house or know his mother or brother or sister? ... Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him I want, but not news, nor pottage. (72) I have to side with Hunt on this. After all, it is common knowledge that Emerson left the ministry because he couldn't stand making pastoral visits, and getting so involved in people's lives. With Hunt, I believe that friendship, and spirituality, are deeply embedded with the business of living as embodied persons in a real material world. I think of a simple act of physical generosity -- across the then deep divide of cultural differences -- that caused my father, Fred, to remember his friend Frank for over 75 years. Frank was "an Italian boy" as Fred put it; Fred was the son of German immigrants. What was important to them, however, was that they were boys together in third grade, at PS 13, in Brooklyn, a school with a very strict dress code. Boys were expected to wear ties to school. One morning as they lined up in the schoolyard, Frank said, "Hey Fred, you forgot to put on your tie this morning!" Fred was in trouble. But Frank had a ready solution. He just took off his own tie, pulled out his penknife and cut his tie in two. Each of them managed to tuck his half into the top of his shirt. This wasn't a big deal to Frank -- though I wonder what his none-too-wealthy parents thought about his coming home with half a tie! It was just embodied love, a story remembered and told and retold over a lifetime. 4. Spirituality is Hunt's fourth element of friendship. Unlike Emerson, Hunt does not take an ethereal view of spirituality. He believes that friendship should be spiritual, but by that he means that it should be rare and precious, above the cares of the world, lofty and beyond the risks of dependency. "I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them." (74) In Hunt's model, spirituality is also important, but it is much closer to home. She says spirituality means making choices about the quality of life for oneself and for one's community. This expresses Hunt's conviction that the religious impulse towards meaning and value is expressed in very concrete ways. It is attention to quality, not quantity. It includes choices within the community, such as support for the arts, celebrating our life passages together, working together for religiously based social change, attention to the world and community in ways that enhance people's lives. (105) It was this spiritual quality of friendship that inspired Unitarian minister James Reeb to answer Martin Luther King's call in 1965. Dr. King needed hundreds of clergy and other committed people to come to Selma, to demonstrate with African Americans of every sort for their civil rights. The Rev. Reeb, along with many others, dropped everything and flew to Alabama. He did it to be with his friends, to support the cause that would change the world in the way in which their faith demanded. He did not know that as he walked to supper at Brown's restaurant that night that he would be attacked by four white thugs with baseball bats. He did not know that he would die by violence, and become the symbol which inspired the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He did not know what would happen, but he went because friendship demanded that he take that risk. That is what Jesus meant when he said to his disciples," Greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13) Love, power, embodiment, spirituality. As in all these stories, Elizabeth's friends lived out their friendship in real and heartfelt ways, ways both fierce and tender. And so may it be for each of us. May our friendships glow with unexhausted kindliness. May they partake of love and power and embodiment and spirituality. May we be wholly attentive to our friends. May we tame and be tamed by them. And may we share with them a fierce tenderness. Amen Hymn: #346 "Come Sing a Song With Me" Closing WordsA Friend Along the Way Congregational Circle |