by the Rev. Preston Moore

A sermon given August 3, 2008

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon 

            Recently I found myself with a little time to kill, sitting in the entry area of a restaurant waiting for Jennifer, my wife and co-minister, to join me for dinner.  She was attending an installation ceremony for a new minister in town.  The event was running nearly an hour late.  I’m sure the delay had nothing to do with long-windedness on the part of the clergy conducting the ceremony. 

I was entertaining myself by watching the restaurant’s large video display panel when an advertisement for Dentyne chewing gum came along.  A shimmering piece of Dentyne gum appeared.  An animated frog at the bottom of the screen projected his long tongue toward the gum and reeled it in.  He was immediately transformed into a handsome animated prince, who was then joined by a beautiful animated princess.  The cartoon prince and princess promptly morphed into an equally dreamy real-life couple, embracing on a balcony overlooking a magnificent cityscape.  A sexy voice over capped off this theologically fascinating commercial with the words “icy fresh breath changes everything.”

Commercials have a way of skillfully targeting some widespread longing or fear.  At or near the top of the list of commercially targeted longings and fears are those that have to do with love – and with the things we so often chase after in a misguided effort to get it.

We long for love, but fear intervenes.  We fear that we will fare poorly in life because we are not beautiful enough, smart enough, or strong enough, or something.  Such fears can drive us to seek the missing virtues in a Magical Other – a prince or princess.  And naturally, anyone who enters this market for Magical Others must himself try to come across as much like a Magical Other as he can.  This is likely to mean keeping in shadow the parts of himself that he judges to be unlovable.

This emotional marketing strategy virtually guarantees that we will not find love.  Love is an attitude or posture toward life, and particularly toward other people.  It is a posture of willingness to see others and be seen by them – to be seen for the truth we are.  And if love is seeing and being seen, then seeing and being seen fully – a seeing that extends even to the shadowy innermost parts of us – is truly a love supreme.  This is what it means to have an intimate relationship.  It is one in which innermost things are revealed and accepted.

What might those innermost things be?  I say, usually they are experiences of wounding and shame, in which we hurt others badly or were hurt badly by them.  They are the feelings of fear, anger, sadness, and even grief that are wrapped around these experiences.  I say this with confidence because we all have these experiences and feelings.  We put them in the darkest, innermost place possible – some closet or basement that we ourselves visit rarely if ever – because the world has sent us strong messages that it does not want to see such things.  “Give us more of this,” the world is forever saying about what it likes, “but that other stuff, that negativity and ugliness, those scars – keep that stuff to yourself.”  And to get along in the world, we do.

Intimate love is about going to those dark places and turning on the lights and saying to each other, take me as I am, including all of this; and getting a response that goes something like “there is nothing about you that I don’t want to know.”  This is the highest regard humans can have for each other.

Intimate relationships are governed by a few basic truths and paradoxes.  A paradox, incidentally, is just the truth standing on its head to get your attention.  The first truth is that our relationships with others will never be any more loving than our relationships with ourselves.  Growth in our seeing and acceptance of ourselves and growth in our seeing and acceptance of others must go hand in hand.

Another basic truth is that intimacy is not possible unless each person lets the other be truly other.  This is the wisdom of the poet Rilke’s conception of love as “two solitudes that border, greet, and protect each other.”[1]  This may sound cold or isolated; but it captures well the paradox that human life has an immensely solitary quality, along with the possibility of a closeness that can go very deep.  There is much intimacy to be had in bordering and greeting and protecting each other.

I think the most important word in Rilke’s aphorism is “border.”  Intimacy moves us toward love not by erasing the borders between two people, but rather, by sharpening them.  Intimate love is possible only if the line across which the seeing and being seen must happen is clear and distinct.  Otherwise, either the wounding that always comes with intimate relationships will be greatly compounded; or, in order to avoid that, the two people will establish a kind of buffer zone between them – nullifying the intimacy they were seeking.  Paradoxically, without a clear boundary between them, two people can’t get close.  Intimacy is grounded in separateness.

One of my congregants in Williamsburg, named Margaret, stood up in church recently to tell a personal story about these truths and paradoxes.  She related a conversation she had with her husband Tom, shortly after they got married.  Both of them had been married before.  Margaret had raised three daughters pretty much on her own.  The conversation was about an ordinary subject – which long distance company to sign up for.  Tom wanted to bundle the phone, internet, and cable TV services with one provider.  Margaret wanted to keep the long distance company she had had for many years – one she chose because it had particularly low international calling rates.  Her daughters were living overseas, and it was important to her to stay connected with them.   But she had to be careful about money.

When she explained this to Tom, he did some research and found a long distance company that would be compatible with the internet and cable provider and had even cheaper international calling rates.  To his surprise, Margaret didn’t react positively to that.  She dug in her heels and became agitated.   After a few minutes of this, Tom looked at her and said, gently, “Margaret, what’s really upsetting you?”

It becomes clear to Tom that for Margaret, the conversation is about something other than long distance telephoning.  He finds it in himself to let Margaret be other, to let her have her own history.  In fact he wants to know about it, inviting her to allow herself to be seen and accepted for the truth she is – as other.

What’s happening here?  Something is shifting, putting the conversation in a much larger context.  Even though it seems like Margaret is being unfair to him, Tom manages to see that there are things at stake here more fundamental than mere fairness.   Like ... love.  To get to that, though, he has to put aside concerns about justice.  He can’t say “you’re being unfair, illogical, and unreasonable.”

And really now, does it ever work to tell someone who we think is being unreasonable that he is being unreasonable?  To hear that message, which is based on reasoning, the other person would need to be able to be ... reasonable.  But at that particular moment, the other person apparently isn’t able to do that.

So Tom waives his justice claim and asks the all-important question:  “What’s really upsetting you?”  This is risky.  Margaret’s reaction might be something like, “I’m upset about this long distance thing, and don’t you condescend by trying to psychoanalyze me.”  But fortunately Margaret hears the real message Tom is sending.  The subtext of his question is “I want to see you more deeply, more clearly.”  And underneath that is the message, “I love you,” which means, “I want to get close enough to see the whole truth about you, with nothing left out, your whole story, including the wounds and scars.”

When Tom asks his question, Margaret, or at least a part of Margaret, is far away in a dark wood, confronting old fears activated by this innocuous conversation about telephoning.  The fears are about the experience of raising three children as a single parent – about marriage and independence, trust and abandonment.  She is still fighting the last war, but she hears, and is brought back to the present.  She realizes what’s really bothering her and is able to talk freely about it with Tom.  An ancient Chinese proverb says, “When the right word is spoken, it will be heard a thousand miles away.”

Tom’s message is not about psychotherapy.  It’s not about fixing Margaret.  He isn’t asking her to be more reasonable or “well-adjusted.”  It is about seeing her, knowing her, with nothing added and nothing left out.  The wounds Margaret carries from her first marriage are a fact in her life, a fait accompli, but nothing more.  Tom isn’t setting out to erase or amend that fact.  He is saying, simply and profoundly, “I want to know about this fact in your life, and I want to be with you as you decide what to do with it now, in the present.”

When she told this story in church, Margaret acknowledged that not every edgy conversation between Tom and her has had an immediate happy ending.   Some conversations do more wounding than healing.  Everyone carries unhealed wounds submerged in unconsciousness but still very sensitive.  The unconscious psyche has no sense of time – and a perfect memory.  If the right button is pushed by a seemingly trivial but symbolic event in the present, this can transport us right back to the time and circumstance of that early wounding.

The wounds that come with intimacy are openings into a deep understanding of the person who suffered them.   They are valuable chances to move toward that love supreme, that seeing and being seen fully.  Over time, with enough choosing of love over justice, trust accumulates.  Self-revelation gets easier.  But trust has to be earned, and it is a slow expertise – truly a spiritual practice.  A risky one that will entail some wounding along the way, some not getting it right.  Reflecting on spiritual risk-taking, my favorite theologian, James Carse, observes that:

            “Most matters in the realm of the spirit are paradoxical.  In        worldly affairs, where we          calculate our risks, relying on paradox would bring us to certain ruin.  We might invest                        money in a long-shot business venture if it also offers the possibility of very high payoff.          We might be ruined by doing     so, but there is a certain amount of reason for taking such                  action.  It seems like a smart gamble.  But there is no gambling in the spirit.  One does            not risk oneself spiritually in the hope of a profitable outcome. The risk itself is the    outcome.”[2] 

Once Tom took a chance and invited Margaret to say what was really bothering her,  even if she had refused he had still would have done his own heart a world of good – simply by being willing to see whatever she might choose to reveal.  When Margaret did share with Tom what her feelings were really about, she had done her heart a world of good that didn’t depend on how Tom chose to respond.

I have to say, I think my first wife and I failed to appreciate all this.  I think we struck one of those bargains in which each of us supplied qualities the other felt inadequate about.  A bargain that enabled us to keep those inadequacies in shadow – basically the opposite of the kind of seeing each other fully that is at the core of intimate love.

I guess we thought this was a good division of labor and would minimize conflict.  Couples do make divisions of labor – like “you troubleshoot all the gadgets we depend on, and I’ll pay the bills and balance the checkbook.”  But it’s quite another story when those divisions involve major aspects of personality and character, like “You be competent out in the world – for both of us, and I’ll hold the moral compass – for both of us.”

Neither of us asked, “What am I asking my mate to do that I should be doing for myself?”  We both actually had healthy capacities for competence AND moral navigation.   Eventually, though, the parts of each of us that were kept in shadow resented the confinement, demanded expression in the world.  Our division of labor assured that the resentment would continue to build until it finally erupted in divorce.

Our division of labor left out the most important work of all – the work of healing.  We tend to think of healing as putting things back as they were before the wounding.  In spiritual terms, this doesn’t happen.  Wounds don’t go away, because we don’t really forget them.  What we call healing is actually spiritual growth, which comes through an enlargement of the self.  We make our wounds seem smaller by making our selves exponentially larger. 

The most important agent of this expansive spiritual growth is love.  When I see another fully, I see both sameness and difference.  The sameness confirms that I belong to the whole, as I look at the other person and say, “I am that too.”  The difference confirms that I am only one part of that whole among many, enabling me to say, “let me be me and let the other person be other.”  This moves me toward wholeness -- toward being a part of, rather than apart from, that with which I belong:  my own deep self, other humans, nature, and the domain beyond the finite, however named.  My heart gets bigger.  There is no greater healing. 

Beginning this movement with the one who is closest is the first step toward healing a broken world, in which suspicion, hostility, and defensiveness are the order of the day.  “A ridiculously difficult world where traffic doesn’t stop for a woman crying in her car, clutching the steering wheel hard with both hands,” as this morning’s poet wrote.   A world full of hearts corrupted by old wounds that still engulf; that are not held within the big-heartedness that comes with spiritual growth.  As Stephen Mitchell observes, “a corrupted heart is like a cluttered room in which the owner sits behind a locked door, with a loaded gun.”[3]  And we know what happens when someone with a heart like that walks out of a room like that and aims his gun at someone.

I guess freshening your breath could conceivably make some difference in your romantic fortunes.  But if you really want to change everything, border and greet and protect each other.  Get close by being separate.  Choose love over justice.  See wound as opportunity.  And before you “mount the leopard of your anger and ride all night,” take a long look at your beloved – the one saying “I wish you could know what it means to be me.”  Take a long look and consider asking “what’s really upsetting you?”

Amen.

Copyright 2008, Rev. Preston Moore. All rights reserved.