SERMON: "Intimacy"
Rev. Paul Beedle
February 10, 2008
“It was a cold November, around three o'clock in the morning,” writes Elizabeth Gilbert. [1] “My husband was sleeping in our bed. I was hiding in the bathroom for something like the forty-seventh consecutive night, and – just as during all those nights before – I was sobbing. Sobbing so hard, in fact, that a great lake of tears ... was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable [lake] ... of all my shame and fear and confusion and grief. I don't want to be married anymore. I was trying so hard not to know this, but the truth kept insisting itself to me. I don't want to be married anymore.”
That arresting passage from Eat, Pray, Love is the beginning of a remarkable story of spiritual growth and discovery. Often it's that way. Often the pain of life becomes unbearable before we begin to address it.
“My husband was sleeping in the other room, in our bed,” she continues. “I equal parts loved him and could not stand him. I couldn't wake him to share in my distress – what would be the point? He'd already been watching me fall apart for months now, watching me behave like a madwoman (we both agreed on that word), and I only exhausted him. We both knew there was something wrong with me, and he'd been losing patience with it. We'd been fighting and crying, and we were weary in that way that only a couple whose marriage is collapsing can be weary. We had the eyes of refugees. ... [O]n this night, he was still my lighthouse and my albatross in equal measure. The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. ... But ... something was about to occur on that bathroom floor that would change forever the progression of my life... What happened was that I started to pray. You know – like, to God.”
Who do you talk to when there's no one to talk to? When I moved into my first apartment, my mother insisted on buying me a television. “You've got to have somebody to talk to,” she said. I imagine most people would think it's pretty sad when all you have to talk to is the television. But it works both ways. It's possible to be so sad that the television is a welcome companion, and seems a better one than the most well-meaning friend. Because the television can't be burdened with your sadness. It can take it. And you can't waste its time. And it doesn't mind if you ignore it to ponder your sadness. It doesn't choose to change the subject: you do. It doesn't decide how it can help: you can let it distract you, or let it chatter in the background to relieve an oppressive silence. It's even possible to get inspiring or useful information from it.
It's also possible to be filled with a sadness that shuns distraction and welcomes solitude, so that even the unflappable television is unwelcome. At three o'clock in the morning, it needs the privacy of the bathroom. Alone with shame and fear and confusion and grief, Elizabeth Gilbert was trying hard not to know a truth deep in her soul. Her marriage was collapsing and she didn't want to be in it anymore. She couldn't talk to her husband about it. “We both knew there was something wrong with me,” she writes, “and he'd been losing patience with it.” Who do you talk to when there's no one to talk to?
“In the middle of that dark November crisis ... I was not interested in formulating my views on theology,” she writes. “I was interested only in saving my life. I had finally noticed that I seemed to have reached a state of hopeless and life-threatening despair, and it occured to me that sometimes people in this state will approach God for help. I think I'd read that in a book somewhere.”
One such book is called Primary Speech. “Prayer,” say authors Ann and Barry Ulanov, “...is primary speech. It is that primordial discourse in which we assert, however clumsily or eloquently, our own being. If we are ever honest with ourselves, it is here that we must be, though we are often not sure about who it is that we are talking to or how well we are talking or that we are even talking. Sometimes the honesty comes because we are confident that nobody can overhear us, not the God in whom we have such shaky faith or no faith at all, not anybody we know, perhaps not even ourselves as we grunt or moan or shout or sob our prayers. Sometimes the honesty comes because we do know who it is that is listening, because we feel sure that there is a listener somewhere in us or outside us, because we know from experience that what we have said in prayer, or not quite said but somehow expressed, has been heard. ... Prayer ... is a matter of taking what is there, taking ourselves, taking our world, and making what we can of both ... That means seeing what is positive, as well as what is not, in our reality. That means accepting our reality and it means accepting and making full use of ... our primary speech.” [2]
Elizabeth Gilbert describes her first prayer: “What I said to God through my gasping sobs was something like this: `Hello, God. How are you? I'm Liz. It's nice to meet you.' That's right – I was speaking ... as though we'd just been introduced at a cocktail party. But we work with what we know in this life, and these are the words I always use at the beginning of a relationship. ... `I'm sorry to bother you so late at night,' I continued, `But I'm in serious trouble. And I'm sorry I haven't ever spoken directly to you before, but I do hope I have always expressed ample gratitude for all the blessings ... in my life.' This thought caused me to sob even harder. God waited me out. I pulled myself together enough to go on: `I am not an expert at praying, as you know. But can you please help me? I am in desperate need of help. I don't know what to do. I need an answer. Please tell me what to do. Please tell me what to do. Please tell me what to do....' And so the prayer narrowed itself down to that simple entreaty – Please tell me what to do – repeated again and again. I don't know how many times I begged. I only know that I begged like someone who was pleading for her life. And the crying went on forever. Until – quite abruptly – it stopped. ... I'd stopped crying, in fact, in mid-sob. My misery had been completely vacuumed out of me. I lifted my forehead off the floor and sat up in surprise, wondering if I would see now some Great Being who had taken my weeping away. But nobody was there. I was just alone. But not really alone, either. I was surrounded by something I can only describe as a little pocket of silence. ... I don't know when I'd ever felt such stillness. Then I heard a voice. ... This was my voice, but perfectly wise, calm and compassionate. ... Go back to bed, Liz.”
I know that kind of prayer, and maybe you do, too. I prayed it when I was eleven years old, walking out of the church after my grandfather's funeral. I prayed it when my mother died, and when other significant relationships were ending, or I thought or feared they were. I cried long and hard, and asked no one in particular an agonized, “Why?” Such primary speech, uttered through the pain of loss, asserted and affirmed what would endure in me afterward, that part of my being that was shaped or touched by another. There was more to come and more to do, echoes of loss and refrains of prayer and adjustments in life. But that first prayer opened the channel, started the flow, made my inner experience present to me and to others.
“Go back to bed, Liz.” Gilbert continues: “I exhaled. It was so immediately clear that this was the only thing to do. I would not have accepted any other answer. ... True wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment, and that night, going back to bed was the only possible answer. Go back to bed, said this omniscient interior voice, because you don't need to know the final answer right now ... Go back to bed, because I love you. Go back to bed, because the only thing you need to do for now is get some rest and take good care of yourself until you do know the answer. Go back to bed so that, when the tempest comes, you'll be strong enough to deal with it.”
This is a whole different level of finding your voice. It is finding the voice that asserts your being. Elizabeth Gilbert reflects: “I would not say that this was a religious conversion for me ... Instead, I would call what happened that night the beginning of a religious conversation. The first words of an open and exploratory dialogue that would, ultimately, bring me very close to God, indeed.” Bring her very close. Surround her with a little pocket of silent stillness. In dialogue, it is possible to provide such closeness and comfort to another person. It is, ideally, one of the comforts of marriage. Dr. Joyce Brothers has said that marriage is a conversation: “sometimes it's serious, sometimes it's silly, sometimes it's silent.” Each partner is fully present to the other, each able to assert their being in the other's presence. Gilbert didn't find such conversation in her marriage. “We both knew there was something wrong with me,” she writes, “and he'd been losing patience with it.” A richer conversation between them, filled with open and exploratory dialogue, might have resulted in more nurturing interactions to heal what was wrong with both of them (because whenever we long to grow, there's something that feels wrong and something else that feels right – something to refuse, and something to assert). A richer intimacy between them, capable of holding each of their pain in a pocket of silent stillness, might have allowed them each to grow as they grew old together. Intimacy provides protected space for our sensitivities and vulnerabilities, tenders tenderness to our tenderest places. But that was not their experience together.
Intimacy also requires time apart. It requires time apart because we need to call upon our best selves to create that protected shared space of tenderness together. Sometimes silence serves the purpose of time apart – loving silence spent together. One or the other might use that shared silence for reflection or meditation or all-out prayer. How better to cry than to be held while crying? We continue the conversation when we're ready. But sometimes one or the other needs solitude, and in solitude takes a measure of reflection or meditation or primary speech in some form. How do you practice primary speech? How do you pray?
Elizabeth Gilbert keeps a notebook next to her bed. “Here, in this most private notebook, is where I talk to myself. I talk to that same voice I met that night on my bathroom floor when I first prayed to God in tears for help, when something (or somebody) had said, `Go back to bed, Liz.' In the years since then, I've ... learned that the best way for me to reach it is written conversation. ... So tonight I reach for the voice again. ... What I write in my journal tonight is that I am weak and full of fear. ... In response, somewhere from within me, rises a now-familiar presence, offering me [what] I have always wished another person would say to me when I was troubled. ... I'm here. I love you. I don't care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. ... There's nothing you can ever do to lose my love. ... Tonight, this strange interior gesture of friendship – the lending of a hand from me to myself when nobody else is around to offer solace – reminds me of something that happened to me once in New York City. I walked into an office building one afternoon in a hurry, dashed into the waiting elevator. As I rushed in, I caught an unexpected glimpse of myself in a security mirror's reflection. In that moment my brain did an odd thing – it fired off this split-second message: `Hey! You know her! That's a friend of yours!' And I actually ran forward toward my own reflection with a smile, ready to welcome that girl whose name I had lost but whose face was so familiar. In a flash instant, of course, I realized my mistake and laughed in embarrassment at my almost doglike confusion over how a mirror works. But for some reason that incident comes to mind again during my sadness...and I find myself writing this comforting reminder at the bottom of the page: Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend.”
Each of us longs for that sacred message: “I'm here. I love you. I don't care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. There's nothing you can ever do to lose my love.” It's good when it comes from another, or from ourselves, or from God, because it's something we need deep down. That message – spoken or unspoken – maintains the protective shared space we call intimacy, where we tender our tenderness to heal the tenderest bruises in our friend's soul. To continue to offer such steadfast love to another, we must be able to receive it from ourselves. To continue to offer it to ourselves, we must be able to receive it from another. To create and sustain it together in serious and silly and silent conversation, we must take time together and apart for reflection and meditation and primary speech.
May each of us find and cultivate the blessings of intimacy – that protective space of tenderness within ourselves or shared with another. May we receive in due measure the assurance of steadfast love that sustains us and holds us in those times we take for reflection or meditation, wordless primary speech or fully-voiced all-out prayer. And may we give and receive the kindness that heals our tenderest places with tenderness. So may it be. Amen.
[1] Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. (New York: Penguin Books, 2006)
[2] Ann & Barry Ulanov, Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer. (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982)