Loneliness, Love, and Legend 

Rev. Ron Sala

Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford

February 10, 2002 

 

Things were so simple back in the Garden of Eden. For instance, one day Eve whispered in Adam’s ear, “Do you love me?” Adam replied, “Who else?”

Indeed, wouldn’t it be nice to spend life walking through a beautiful, clothing-optional garden spot with a partner made for you personally by God? But, according to the Bible, things didn’t stay that way. Adam started to blame Eve for his own decisions, they had to move to a less posh neighborhood, and things went downhill for the human race after that.

Certainly, love and sex would never be as simple. C.S. Lewis once wrote something to the effect that if sex weren’t so messy in our lives, people would hardly have put so much time and energy into suppressing and repressing it. After all, love and sex have been implicated in such unpleasant things as loneliness, divorce, rivalry, bad songs, and generally making a fool of yourself.

Nevertheless, all that hasn’t seemed to have dampened our taste for them. I would be interested in the types of numbers a person would come up with if they counted the number of times they had heart romantic love mentioned in the coming week. He or she would have to consider songs on the radio, the rack of romance novels in the local drug store, articles in the magazines, emails from friends, favorite shows on TV, the current roster of Broadway shows.

Pacific Northwest poet Gary Snyder speculates in his book, The Earth Household that the Western World dotes so much on romantic love because it has lost so much in the areas of culture and spirituality.

We long for a love to come into our lives, sweep us off our feet, and make our troubles go away for the rest of our lives. I don’t think it ever happens quite that way, though. Some of us must wait a long time for someone to love; none of us find that our troubles go away. Some of us are cut off too soon from our lovers by death or separation.

It’s been said that love at first sight is often cured by a second look. Sadly, that second look isn’t taken until we’re well into a relationship. Yes, love certainly can be complicated. Complicated even in our language. We have but one word to denote the relationship of parent and child, brother and sister, friend and friend, lover and lover. We have made so much art and poetry and music trying to capture the form of this beautiful experience, yet just what love is remains elusive. Is it chemistry? Biology? Psychology? Religion? Or maybe it is the fire behind the stars? When two people speak of love, they may have very different things in mind. To one, it is a synonym for lust. To another, it is tenderness and longing. To still another, it is commitment and stability.

Perhaps we can think of the evolution of a love relationship like a rocket blasting into space. At first, there is great fire and a rapidly accelerating trajectory toward the heavens. Even this early, there might be problems. The rocket could explode on the launch pad or it could malfunction and come crashing back to earth. And then successive sections of the rocket fall away as it climbs higher and higher. We begin to regard the rocket’s flight as on-target. Eventually, if all goes well, the craft will sail through the silent vacuum. There is no need for fire at this point, except for course corrections. But what the pod lacks in fire, it has in abundance in both altitude and velocity. By this time, each astronaut knows that the course had better be correct or the ship will be lost in space or come crashing down to earth.

To speak more directly, the relationship begins with attraction and passion. Excitement mounts as barrier after barrier of our personal defenses melts away in the presence of this amazing near-stranger. Some people never get beyond this stage. Some get bored and move on to a new supplier when the drug of romance has begun to lose its potency. Others get scared and sabotage or otherwise end the relationship before their excitement can turn to terror of being with the wrong person or getting too close to the right one.

But then, there are some who can ride out the storms and form a deep and enduring love, a love based on friendship, mutual respect, and commitment. They have found someone they enjoy being with and are basically happy with the relationship. The length of the relationship has a lot to do with both partners being committed to keeping on course through the changes and dangers of life.

This is the difference between romantic and mature love. Thankfully, they’re not mutually exclusive. We all enjoy a thrill at being with someone we love. And really, one of the best defenses a relationship can have is a continuing romance within it.

But many people mistake romance for the entirety of love. As a result, they deprive themselves of the joys of a love that can prove itself come what may. Author and feminist Beverley Jones said, “Romance, like the rabbit at the dog track, is the elusive, fake, and never attained reward, which, for the benefit and amusement of our masters, keeps us running and thinking in safe circles.”

As for mature love, nothing beats love at first sight except love with insight. That is, we constantly discover more of who our partner is and who we are we with them. It demands us to bring our very selves to the other person. As Beethoven once said, “Love demands all, and has a right to do it.”

Even though we have this need for love, there seem to be so many things that can keep us from it: Not meeting the right person, character traits and habits that alienate us from others, social attitudes that try to make us look down on ourselves for being attracted to a person of the quote-unquote “wrong” color, religion, or gender.

Tomorrow, I will go to Hartford to do something about this last barrier to love. I will testify before the State Assembly on the issue of same gender marriage. This is what I plan to say:

Good morning! I’m the Rev. Ron Sala, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford. As you know, this is the week of Valentine’s Day. As I was preparing for the sermon I preached yesterday to honor the holiday, I was struck with an unsettling bit of irony. As I researched, I discovered that there was more than one saint named Valentine, but the legend of one of these men seemed to me especially relevant today.

The saint was a Christian priest under the reign of one of the latter Roman emperors, by the name of Claudius II. The emperor was also known by the epithet “Claudius the Cruel.” And his name was well deserved. Claudius, seeing that men would rather stay at home with their wives than go out with his legions, decided to eliminate the distractions of domestic life by outlawing marriage!

Valentine, believing marriage to be ordained of God, continued to perform weddings in secret. Eventually, he was discovered and executed. Many years later, the Church would recognize Valentine as a suitable saint for a day honoring romantic love.

How odd, I thought to myself, that all these centuries later, we are confronted by a similar situation. I remembered my brave colleagues in other denominations who continue to risk, if not their lives then certainly their careers, in following their consciences by performing services of union for same sex couples. I am lucky enough to serve in a denomination that has not only allowed but, encouraged its ministers to perform such ceremonies since it passed a resolution on the subject in 1984. But any same sex service of union, or, as I prefer to say, wedding, I perform no more enjoys the approval of the state than St. Valentine’s weddings did. And perhaps the denial of marriage to same gender couples today is even more tragic than its denial to the couples in St. Valentine’s legend. Marriage in ancient times was primarily a business contract, with love and affection, if it developed, an afterthought. Today, we tend to marry for love and regard the legal provisions that come with marriage as courtesies we extend to each other as members of a civilized society.

This is an issue about which religious people disagree. But it’s not the job of the state to decide religious questions. The bill before you regards civil marriage and equality before the law regardless of sexual orientation. If the state can find no compelling reason to deny the right of marriage to same sex couples (and I do not believe it can) then that denial is arbitrary and, indeed, cruel. That some people are uncomfortable with the recognition of the human rights of others is no reason for those rights to be withheld.

Therefore, I urge the Assembly to support an act legalizing same sex marriage.

Thank you.

I’m going to Hartford because I feel this world is lonely enough already without excluding people because of their sexual orientation or any other factor that shouldn’t matter in our recognition of them as people. This world is lonely enough already.

To turn once again to C.S. Lewis, “We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually. We need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.” Our culture’s cult of the individual has increased the loneliness many of us feel as people turn away from gathering together as families and communities and toward private pursuits. The late Mother Teresa claimed, “The spiritual poverty of the Western world is much greater than the physical poverty of our people. You in the West have millions of people who suffer such terrible loneliness and emptiness.”

The German philosopher Schopenhauer bitterly likened the human race to a bunch of porcupines huddling together on a cold winter's night. He said, "The colder it gets outside, the more we huddle together for warmth; but the closer we get to one another, the more we hurt one another with our sharp quills. And in the lonely night of earth's winter eventually we begin to drift apart and wander out on our own and freeze to death in our loneliness."

Are those our two alternatives? To be torn apart by pain or freeze to death from loneliness?

No, there is another. That alternative is called love.

Easy enough to say, you might think. Love is for those who can find it and hold on to it. That’s not me now, you might say. Or, That may not be me in the future. Or, That’s not me, period.

But, I tell you, love is everywhere!

The reason we don’t realize that is that we regard so little of the love sent our way as love. We give so little of the love that is ours to give. We shrink our consciousness down to romantic visions that have neither reality nor duration. We leave out the love of family and friends, perhaps even of strangers. We leave out the love we can give to ourselves. We forget that the Universe itself is tied together with a kind of love, from the proverbial birds and bees to the ubiquitous attraction of gravity to the gentle waves of wind through the grain.

We forget that hidden dimension that some call spirit or soul. That prophet of Liberal Religion, Ralph Waldo Emerson, spoke of that hidden dimension in his essay “The Over-Soul.” Please forgive the non-gender-inclusive language of the nineteenth century. Emerson writes:

[T]he soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie, - an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. A man is the façade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love.

As we come to know this soul-love that binds us to ourselves, each other, and the planet, we see that it is not a substitute for romantic love but rather the basis by which romantic love can grow into mature love. This soul-love is always present and available. And the more we give, the more we have.

To feel soul-love:

Go to the mirror and tell yourself, “I love you!”

Send a card to a sick friend.

Sit quietly and let the calm which passes understanding envelop you.

Throw a Frisbee with your dog.

Watch your nephew for an afternoon.

Remember fondly your first kiss.

Forgive someone who hurt you badly—not only for their sake but for your own.

I’m sure you can come up with a few thousand other ways.

I am well acquainted, myself, with the pangs of loneliness. By nature a shy person, I found the dating scene difficult. And plagued by low self-esteem, I didn’t think I was worthy of someone who could love me fully and completely and sometimes settled for relationships that fell short of what I really needed. I once mused out loud to a friend how my last name was the beginning of the word “solitude.” She thought I was just making a bad joke. It was no joke to me. But as I began to find the courage to reach out beyond myself, to love myself no matter what, to find myself more at home in the world, I did begin a relationship that has grown and nurtured me ever since. In my pocket I carry a little bag with a heart and the word “love” in it. ReBecca gave it to me to remind me that her heart and her love always go with me. If my way through life has been hard in some ways, that difficulty has made our love all the sweeter for me.

Life may hold out to you the type of relationship you dreamed out. It may not. Maybe you found that love and he or she has passed. Maybe you are one of those rare people who find their greatest fulfillment being single. But each of us, no matter our circumstances, can be in love with life. And life will return our affections.

I will conclude with an example of a man caught between love lost and the courage to love again. His name is Raymond L. Aaron, and he writes:

My wife and I separated in late December and, as you might expect, I had a very difficult January. During a therapy session to help me handle the emotional turmoil stirred up by the split, I asked my therapist to give me something to help me in my new life. I had no idea whether she would agree and, if she did, I had no idea what she might offer.

I was happy that she immediately did agree and, as I expected, she gave me something totally unexpected! She handed me a heart, a small handmade Play-Doh® heart, brightly and lovingly painted. It had been given to her by a previous male client who had also gone through a divorce and who, like myself, had difficulty accessing his feelings. She added that it was not for me to keep, but only to hold onto until I got my own heart. Then I must return it to her. I understood that she was giving me a physical heart as a visual goal or as some kind of material representation of my own quest for a richer emotional life. I accepted it with anticipation of deeper emotional life. I accepted it with anticipation of deeper emotional connections to come.

Little did I realize how quickly that wonderful gift would actually start to work.

After the session, I placed the heart carefully on the dash of my car and drove excitedly to pick up my daughter Juli-Ann, for this was the first night that she would be sleeping over at my new home. As she got into the car, she was immediately drawn to the heart, picking it up, examining it and asking me what it was. I was unsure whether I should explain the full psychological background because, after all, she was still a child. But I decided that I would tell her.

“It’s a present from my therapist to help me through this difficult time and it is not for me to keep, but only to have till I get my own heart,” I explained. Juli-Ann made no comment. I wonder again if I should have told her. At 11 years old, could she understand? What possible idea could she have of the huge chasm I was attempting to bridge to break my old patterns and develop deeper, richer loving connections with people?

Weeks later, when my daughter was again at my home, she handed me my Valentine’s Day present early: a small box that she had painted red, tied daintily with a gold band, topped by a chocolate that we shared. With anticipation, I reached into the pretty little box. To my surprise, I pulled out a Play-Doh® heart that she had made for me and painted. I looked quizzically at her, wondering what it meant. Why was she giving me a replica of what my therapist had given me?

Then she slowly handed me a card she had made. She was embarrassed about the card but then finally allowed me to open it and read it. It was a poem far beyond her years. She had understood totally the meaning of the gift from my therapist. Juli-Ann had written me the most touching and loving poem I have ever read. Tears flooded my eyes and my heart burst open:

For My Dad 

Here is a heart

For you to keep

For the big leap

You’re trying to take. 

Have fun on your journey.

It might be blurry. 

But when you get there,

Learn to care. 

Happy Valentine’s Day

Love, Your Daughter, Juli-Ann

Above all my material wealth, I count this poem as my most sacred treasure.

I wish for you each to find your heart this Valentine’s Day—if not in Eden, then in Stamford, Connecticut.

Amen.

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