by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given October 21, 2001

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning! Welcome to all of you!

We come together as people of faith,

To give thanks,

To make confession,

To remember who we are,

To restore us to the best we know and best that we might become.

When I was studying in Berkeley, I often took advantage of the wide array of speakers and writers who would visit the area. One evening I found myself in Oakland at a reading by Stephen Mitchell, who translates and edits sacred text. Mitchell was widely known throughout the Bay Area as an ardent Zen practitioner who had studied with a well-known Korean master, and so during the question-answer session, someone asked, "Could you describe your meditation practice for us?" Mitchell looked thoughtful, and then he said, "I don’t meditate anymore. I gave it up, cold turkey." An audible gasp rose in the audience. "Well, then," pressed the questioner, "what is your spiritual practice now?" And Mitchell, recently married, simply answered, "I’m pursuing marriage as path."

This was a radical new concept for me. Marriage as path? How can relationship be a spiritual path? I’m going to be speaking chiefly about intimate relationship today, but close relationships of all kinds can in fact deepen us spiritually, for in these relationships a mirror is held up to us, making us see who we really are, and calling who we are into question. Jon Cabot-Zinn has written a book about parenting as path. My grown children are always forcing me to look more deeply at my ideas, at my behavior. My accomplishments count for little with them—they see me as the flawed human being that I am, and they are, well, less than worshipful. I can count on them to love me—but also to deliver a strong dose of humility from time to time.

When we consider intimate relationship as path, we see that the powerful dimension of sexuality is part of the equation. The Bible refers to sexual relations as "knowing" a person. "Knowing" is an apt word. A sexual union is in some sense always a sacred union, for the opening and the entering go way beyond the physical. In no other relationship do we let another come so close to our soul. So much is revealed that is unconscious in both parties, and the unveiling is not just of outer garments, but of secret inner worlds of psyche and spirit. What we seek in sexual relationship is not just fleshly pleasure, but beauty and truth. Not the beauty of the cultural ideal, but the beauty of the soul, of the fully revealed partner. Such revelation is always beautiful. And we seek truth—the truth that life can be trusted, that despite the vagaries of our existence, that there is a connectedness, a meaning, that holds all things in place, a meaning in which we can rest. The orgasm is called the "little death," because it is then that we give up self so fully, that we "die into" the other. In mystical literature, this dying to one’s self is the soul’s surrender to the Sacred.

With sexual union, we are changed. Part of the transformation is a softness of spirit and a vulnerability which may not appear at any other time. In particular with men, who are acculturated to not show vulnerability, this may be the only time when some of them become truly tender. In erotic experience at its best, we are allowed to be who we really are, to become innocent and open, like a child once again, to give up the cynicism that marks so much of contemporary life, and embrace not just our partner, but to embrace hope once again.

I remember running into an old friend, a single woman in her 60’s—a very sensual person who usually had a man in her life, and she was also a woman of great spiritual depth—so in the course of the conversation, I asked her if she was involved with anyone at the moment. She said no, that she was not open to a relationship just now. She said, "I think I was looking for something else in my relationships."

"What were you looking for?" I asked her.

"Union with God," she simply said.

I think it was the poet W. H. Auden who coined the term "a wild prayer of longing." We all have that longing, and it is ultimately, I believe, a longing for God, a longing for union with the Great Mystery. The danger in pursuing relationship as path is that it is too easy to think that another person can fulfill our spiritual longing, and that is just not true. Relationship is a path to the Spirit; it is not a substitute for the Spirit. No one can be the instrument of our own salvation. Until we understand this truth, we’ll be looking for love in all the wrong places. Unless our relationship with Spirit is intact and in fact is primary, we will likely place an inordinate pressure on a personal relationship to fill that empty space. We have to be at peace, then, with ourselves before we can successfully enter a relationship. When we stop trying to grasp fulfillment out there, we can begin to experience the blessings of renunciation, giving up, giving in, which is the only way to make room for the Spirit. Renunciation is a hard concept for people who are smart, who are in control, who are sophisticated. It’s a hard concept, in other words, for Unitarian Universalists. But how else can the Spirit enter?

My younger son, Madison, is 28, and he is keen to get married. He thinks he just hasn’t met the right woman. I think he is not ready to marry, one of the many things on which we disagree. Oh, well. I will tell you what I told him, and what I have now come to understand in my own life—I said to him, "As soon as you are truly open to love, love will come." Truly open? Not frightened, not needy and grasping, not still emotionally bleeding from the last relationship, but open: able to be present in your fullness with another. When you are in this place, love will seek you out, hunt you down relentlessly, and you will be surprised how swiftly love shows up on your doorstep. The question is never, "How can I find the right person?" but rather "How ready am I to love?"

Staying single has its advantages—it’s easier to feel that you are really an exceptionally great person, since you have no measure except your own. If you refuse relationship, you will be protected from hurt, for love is surely risky for the heart. And you can decide what you want for dinner every single night. And you can eat it alone. I’m not sure how enamored I am of these advantages. And you know there are some things—important things—that we just can’t seem to learn outside of an intimate relationship.

In a close relationship, as I said earlier, we are confronted with ourselves—our vanity, our selfishness, our ego-seeking, our pettiness. This kind of confrontation is especially important for people in positions of power, including ministers, who get placed in the God-role.

When you join with another, new dimensions will emerge in both lives because of the alchemy of the two different personalities. Within a trusting relationship, one in which you feel loved and cared about, you have the impetus to grow in ways you could never have imagined. An important question to ask about any given relationship is this: do you feel larger, more expansive, more daring, when you are with this person, or do you feel diminished? You need to feel good about yourself in the relationship.

If the relationship is a committed one, it will offer constraints, constraints which ironically will bring freedom, freedom to explore a much deeper and more profound relationship than otherwise. John Welwood speaks of such a relationship as a place where a "container of trust" is built: the promise is "I will not go away." That way each partner can relax into authentic living without fearing the loss of the other. Welwood sees marriage as a "mandala," the literal meaning of which is "orderly world," a sacred context in which a couple sets boundaries, agrees on principles, and enters into covenant.

Within the confines of a committed relationship, we have an opportunity to work out our unfinished stuff—the emotional baggage from long ago that may still be dragging us down. In Harville Hendricks’ book Getting the Love You Want, the theory is that we are attracted to those people who potentially can help us heal and move us toward wholeness. Of course, both parties have to want to grow for this to work.

If we invite Spirit into the sexual relationship and understand that we are participating in a Great Mystery, something way beyond our knowing, then that relationship will be transformed—the "I" will be rooted in the "I am" of God, the One who "is." As writer Susan Griffin puts it, ". . . in love we surrender our uniqueness and become world."

All of this sounds so wonderful—so why is it so difficult to integrate the Spirit with the flesh? Last week I talked about the split between earth and spirit, and that cultural divide is difficult to cross over. We can start right there, to explain the problem. But it's more than that. To allow another to touch us so deeply, to have our hearts so open, to be so undefended is risky—yes, that’s true, it’s very risky—on the other hand, the potential for profound experience is great.

We’re fearful also because we are not sure where we’ll be taken if we follow this path. And that’s a reasonable fear, too. In his essay "Poetry and Marriage," Wendell Berry writes: "We can join one another only by joining the unknown. . . . . What you think <marriage> ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. It is going where the two of you—and marriage, time, life, history, and the world—will take it. You do not know the road; you have committed your life to a way."

But the greatest fear is perhaps our fear of the yes deep within us, which is trying to push its way out—this is the voice of the Sacred, and it will require much of us, we know. It is urging us to unfold like a rose into our mature beauty, our true form.

Deena Metzger, in her essay "Re-vamping the World" poses some valuable questions to us, questions which will help us get at our fears, if we wish to take the path of erotic love as spiritual discipline. She suggests that we ask ourselves:

--Whom do I close myself against?

--When do I not have time for love?

--When do I find eros dangerous to me?

--When do I feel guilty about eros?

--When do I abuse my body?

--When do I refuse the Divine?

Let me tell you a story. Forrester Church, minister of All Souls church in New York, said that this congregant kept coming to him for help with a decision. It seems that the man could not decide whether or not to marry the woman he had been seeing for several years. He agonized about this decision, and time after time kept coming into Forrester’s study and plopping himself down on the sofa and asking, "What should I do? What should I do?" Finally Forrester said, "Well, look at it this way. There are only four possibilities. One, you could decide not to marry her, and regret it. Two, you could decide not to marry her, and be thankful that you didn’t. Three, you could decide to marry her and regret it. Four, you could decide to marry her and be thankful that you did. Now my advice to you is ‘Be thankful.’"

If you want to love, there comes a time when you just have to choose love, that you have to be intentional. Some people have their own good reasons for being alone, of course, and there are periods in all our lives when we need to be alone—for example, to do some important work, whether that work is in the world or in our own psyche. But the give and take of intimate relationship can bring us closer to the Holy, no doubt. It is one path you can take. You may begin to love in a new way the one you’ve been with for twenty years, or if you’re not with someone, you’ll have to stand ready, with your eyes and your heart open. Be there when your partner arrives. You have to choose. That’s the way of the Spirit. It’s in your hands.

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we have our fears about loving. We’ve been there before, and we’ve been hurt. But we want to love, so we’re asking today for courage—for courage and for direction. Let us follow love to its destination, to the Holy Mystery that is the very source of all love. Keep us on the path, and when we would stray, bring us back, back to the wholeness that we seek. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Know as you leave this sanctuary today that Love is seeking you out; your part is only to say yes.

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Copyright 2001, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.