SERMON: "If We Agree in Love"
Rev. Paul Beedle
January 21, 2007
On the front page of last Tuesday's Chronicle, below the fold, was an article reprinted from the New York Times with the headline: “Majority of women now living without a husband – Trend could reshape social and workplace policies in U.S.” The headline was somewhat misleading. The article said that: “In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse ... Coupled with the fact that in 2005 married couples became a minority of all American households for the first time,” the reporter thought this was a big deal. But he also reported that a majority of women are married – 54% – and a majority of men are married – 53% are married and living with their spouse. The reasons that only 49% of women are married and living with their spouse are several: women are marrying later, both for the first time and after a divorce; more of them are living with unmarried partners, and for longer periods of time; widows are living longer; some are legally separated; some have husbands who are working out of town, or are in jail, or are deployed in the military. Bring home the relatively small number of husbands who are not living at home, and a majority of women would again be living with a husband.
But so what? These statistics aren't what makes folks worry, they're just an excuse to put the worry on the front page of the newspaper. And the worry, I think, is that folks are wondering, do we agree in love?
If the statistics were different – if a majority of households were married couples and a higher percentage of both men and women were married and living with their spouse, we might have the illusion that love is something we all understand in the same way and agree about. But the question is not so simple. In his book, The Wisdom of Love, Jacob Needleman writes: “The social and sexual revolutions of the twentieth century have shown us that relaxing marriage laws and customs ... simply replaced one sort of suffering with another. If we love who and when we want and then break our bond whenever the impulse to do so is strong, we see that it brings no happiness to our lives. Nor, or course, did it bring happiness tensely to maintain the old rules, the old customs. So the meaning of living together in love cannot lie in either direction.” [1]
Stephanie Coontz, director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, was quoted in the article saying that the statistic on women living without husbands “is yet another of the inexorable signs that there is no going back to a world where we can assume that marriage is the main institution that organizes people's lives. ... [O]n average, Americans now spend half of their adult lives outside marriage.”
“The Council on Contemporary Families,” says its website, “was formed in response to the misleading representations of family research that have flooded the media in recent years and influenced the debate over such important issues as welfare reform.” Its “goal is to identify strengths and problems in each type of family and to design practical, pragmatic solutions that meet families' needs. This task requires family researchers, family therapists, and family policy makers to devise programs that are flexible enough to deal with the myriad realities that contemporary families face.” [2] Implicit in this goal is a felt need for some institutional framework – a supplement, at least, for marriage – that will reassure us that we do agree in love.
Marriage is a symbol for how to live together in love. We all yearn to live together in love, in all our relationships: not just as married couples but as friends, as parents and children, as neighbors, as colleagues, as congregations, even as cities and states and nations. The idea that marriage is a foundation of society, that it ought to be the main institution that organizes people's lives, is bound up with our yearning for the ideal of living together in love. The statistic that less than a majority of women are living with their husbands can, irrationally, touch a nerve: are most of us striving for that ideal? It can raise the fear that we do not agree in love.
Social policy touches the exterior of marriage. My work touches the interior – when I officiate at weddings, counsel couples-to-be, and sometimes counsel married people when they have concerns or struggles in their marriages. I'm 45 and never married. What do I know? I know that a given marriage depends on the partners who are in it. And that's what I say in the wedding ceremony: “In marriage, two persons turn to each other in search of a greater fulfillment than either can achieve alone. Marriage is a going forth, a courageous step into the future; it is risking what we are for the sake of what we yet can be. Only in giving of oneself and sharing with another can the mysterious process of growth take place. Only in loyalty and devotion bestowed upon another can that which is eternal in life emerge and be known.” I remind each couple that they “will need to learn not only how to live together but how to live apart – how to be individuals as well as a couple. One of the most difficult challenges of any relationship is to give the one you love the room to be who they are so that they may become who they can be.”
This is more or less what Jacob Needleman is getting at in The Wisdom of Love. His thesis is that: “We are born for meaning ... And we are born for ... the struggle with ourselves and our illusions. We are born to overcome ourselves, and ... to find an inner condition of great harmony and being. We are born for that – we are not yet that. We are searchers ... And in love we have the possibility and the need to help each other search.” [3]
Needleman argues for an “intermediate love” that is neither the passion celebrated in American culture nor the ideal of selfless love urged in the religious counterculture. Love, he says, “is nature using our inherent mysticism to join us to the species, to the earth, to all the sensibilities of our terrestrial world.” [4] The answer he offers to the question of how to live together in love, is to cultivate “one's wish to honor the other's search for inner freedom and truth, and ... the practical understanding of how this search may be supported amid the details of living, amid the exquisite passion and tenderness, the joys and sorrows and fears, the tensions, the work and play, the distractions and pressures, the boredom and excitement of the round of ordinary life in this ordinary world.” [5] He says that “there are two fundamental loves within the human heart, one that draws us to the great forces of the earth, and the other that calls us [inward] to search for our selves.” The challenge of our ordinary life, he says, is twofold: “first, to see these two loves in all their separateness and even opposition; and then, to work for a way to bring them toward each other – to make each love serve the other.” [6]
Since “we experience love as the mixture of egoism and care for the other,” we are tempted to discount even genuine care when we perceive its egoistic element. Needleman writes: “If, when the chips are down, I choose my own welfare over yours, that may only mean that my care for you is weaker than my self-involvement. But to be weak does not mean to be ... false.” [7] “No sooner do we begin to know other people,” he says, “than we discover their broken heart. Their pain in matters of love. Or their fear, their isolation from love. Or their deadness to love; the sad peace they have accepted in the life of love. The bourgeois compromises or the tense and fragile `happiness' which one holds on to with all the self-deception that the personality can create. ... When we are in love, we touch moments of pure presence ... we taste a condition of freedom ... from all that drains and enervates our life, freedom from tensions, anxieties, moods, paranoia, unnecessary emotions of all kinds; freedom from scheming and cunning, from manipulating or exploiting the other.” [8] And what Needleman argues is that, instead of discounting another's care when we see a trace of egoism or weakness in it, we take it as evidence of the other's striving toward that sense of presence and freedom that we all strive toward. Let it be to us a manifestation of the sacred core of human nature, the searcher after truth and inner freedom that is our common denominator of inherent worth and dignity, and we may sustain our love through doubt and disappointment – without denying that we doubt or feel disappointed. “Such love,” Needleman writes, “is a ... capacity that lies within every human being's power. It is love of the human struggle, of that in ourselves which wrestles with ourselves. It is not love of virtue: it is the love of the struggle for virtue. It is not love of strength; it is the love of the struggle to confront weakness.” [9]
On Friday I went to a luncheon hosted by SEARCH, the organization that provides services to homeless people in Harris County. The guest speaker was Robert Fuller, who works as a consultant to help organizations create a culture where abuse of power – or as he puts it, abuse of rank – is discouraged. His main message is that whatever one's rank or responsibilities in an organization, one should always treat others in ways that respect their inherent dignity. He praised SEARCH because of its emphasis on respecting the dignity of its homeless clients. And the way he talked about respecting others' dignity was similar to what Needleman is saying to married couples about how to love. Fuller talked about “ending rankism” but he might as easily have talked about how to agree in love, because that's really what he asks folks to do in his work. And like Needleman, he's comfortable with the mixture of egoism and care that we always experience when we love. He said that when he goes to a company like Microsoft, he starts his talk differently: he begins by asking, “wouldn't you like your company to make more profit?” And then he goes on to talk about how abuse of rank and not regarding the dignity of others throws up barriers to that goal because we distract ourselves and burn up so much energy in feeling hurt and revenging ourselves for those hurts. And if your motive for respecting another person's dignity is to earn profit or further your career, that's OK with him. A weak motive doesn't make a false intention.
“If we agree in love,” our tradition says, “there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good. Let us endeavor to keep the unity of the spirit in the bonds of peace.” [10] May it be so. And may this congregation be a place where we practice seeing the universal human search for truth and inner freedom in one another. Amen.
[1] Jacob Needleman, The Wisdom of Love (Sandpoint ID: Morning Light Press, 2005), p. 5.
[2] www.contemporaryfamilies.org
[3] Needleman, p. 5.
[4] ibid., p. 6.
[5] ibid., pp. 112-113.
[6] ibid., p. 7.
[7] ibid., p. 9.
[8] ibid., p. 11.
[9] ibid., p. 16.
[10] Hosea Ballou (SLT #705)