Dear Members and Friends,
On Valentine’s Day in 1847, a woman living in Worcester, Massachusetts, by the name of Esther Howland received a lovely note adorned with fancy colored paper. She was so delighted by the delicate creation, she convinced her father to buy fine papers, laces, and trimmings from which she designed her own and sold them in her father’s store. The business grew quickly. Her Valentines were beautifully crafted endearments expressive in their ornate form as well as their words.
The custom of sending endearments to a loved one was nothing new. On February 14th, love-struck folks had been sending notes and love letters for centuries, dating back to the pagan festival of Lupercalia. One example from early 19th century is this Valentine message:
It is with greatest fear that I now take up my pen to address you upon the subject of ‘Love.’ My feelings toward you are such as I hope yours are towards me. I cannot describe them, but if you have ever felt the first feelings of Love, you can imagine them better than I can describe them. Oh, do not reject this letter. Dearest Lavinia, write to me immediately, give one word of hope. From your Valentine, Henry Moreland.
The woman wrote back: “I don’t know you, but I am sorry you feel so bad. L.”
Robert Fulghum shares a more contemporary note from a child. A second-grade schoolteacher intercepted a love letter and passed it on to a parent who passed it on to Fulghum who would perform the wedding:
Dear Billy, if you dont say you love me and walk to the bus top with me I will kill myself and beet you up. I love you and wan to marry you soon. Susy
The little girl was eight at the time. The parent showed Fulghum the letter when the girl was twenty-four. At a rehearsal dinner–the day before Susy married Billy. During the service, Fulghum shared the letter with the guests and, in her vows, had Susy repeat after him, “I, Susy, promise you, Billy, never to kill myself or beat you up.”
Robert Fulghum tells this story, in his collection called True Love and says:
“It’s easy to smile at the puppy love story of the eight-year-old who was so desperate to have her love reciprocated that she would threaten violence and suicide. Love—or I will kill myself and beet you up, she declared. But she wasn’t smiling. She hurt. Hers was the unbearably sweet pain of deep longing. Unrequited love arouses desperation. Such feelings shouldn’t be dismissed as the cute foolishness of a child. Such feelings are the heart and soul of great literature, high tragedy, and grand opera. The eight-year-old just got an early-warning call from the scary Sphinx that comes bearing two of the Great Mysteries of Life: “How can I love someone so much and they not love me?” and “How can I both love and loath the same person?”
“As the glow of love’s inward fire increases,” the poet Gottfried wrote, “so the frenzy of the lover’s suit. But this pain is so full of love, this anguish so enheartening, that no noble heart would dispense with it, once having been so heartened.” I will never forget the time several decades ago when I found my own heart so “enheartened.” I told one of my good friends, who responded, “You know what love stands for? L is for the Lake of eternal longing, O is for the Ocean of despair, V is for the Valley of sorrow…” I was livid, and I shut him up before he could tell me what E stands for. And then a little later, I was even more upset with him, when I found out his words held a good bit of truth!
M. Scott Peck, the author of the Road Less Traveled doesn’t mince words: “To put it in a rather crass way, falling in love is a trick that our genes pull on our otherwise perceptive mind to hoodwink or trap us into marriage. Without this trick, this illusory and inevitably temporary regression to infantile merging and omnipotence, many of us who are happily or unhappily married today would have retreated in wholehearted terror from the realism of the marriage vows.” And he says, “The myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. …As a psychiatrist, I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters.”
Our culture promotes an idealization of what relationships ought to be and expresses them in consumer terms, but these idealizations are fictitious. Worse, seeking to keep up the fantasy often precludes an authentic relationship from developing and viewing relationships as something you can dispense with ends up hurting everyone involved. W.H. Auden ends one poem with a line that has long stuck in my memory: “Apparently we have never learned to distinguish between hunger and love.”
It seems that most of us human beings are hardwired to idealize others. First its our parents, then our friends, often a religious community, maybe a teacher or a coach, and then a partner. I’m stumped how easy it is to do this as a mature adult and then to find myself disappointed when I realize a friend or colleague is just as human as I am. There isn’t a problem with idealization when we are children or in a teaching or counseling relationship, however, growing up means coming to accept that our parents aren’t who we wished them to be, that our friends sometimes hurt and disappoint us, that our religious community has its flaws and shortcomings, that our teacher and coach are human beings like us, and that the person we have fallen in love with has warts and weaknesses that somehow had once been overlooked. One of my former ministers used to say, “Reality can be a real downer, but once you plumb the depths of what is real, nothing can stop you from being truly loving.” I would add that when we look others through the lens of our own humanity, it is only then that the opportunity of truly loving reveals itself.
Today is Valentine’s Day, my least favorite cultural celebration–until I had kids. (Now I celebrate it with a dinner of homemade cheese fondue and chocolate fondue!) This “holiday” has always struck me as reinforcing fantasy and consumerist perspectives toward relationships. However, I have come to seek to turn the day of sentimentality upside down. I suggest to take this time that comes a month and half into the year to reflect upon what you have come to accept in the people and communities you love, and do what is right for you to re-affirm your commitment. It is an apt time to take stock of your relationships, with friends, with your communities, and if partnered, with your partner. Turn away from the consumer society that urges you to dwell on what you are able to get and derive from others and instead note what undercurrents of meaning have come from your commitments.
To what are you truly committed? To what are you devoted?
I am inspired by the commitment that people here have made to this congregation. Some of you have been here for dozens of years. You’ve seen this congregation at its best and its worst. You’ve been greatly uplifted at times and greatly disappointed at others. And those that have carried on have reaped the benefits.
So on this day of expressing love for others, I readily want to share the deep affection that has emerged in my own heart for you all. I’ve been with you long enough that many of you know my own limitations and annoying idiosyncracies—and despite them, you invite me into honest relationship. For this I am grateful.
Have a meaningful day and week–and I will see you Sunday!
Alan
First Reading: from Song of Songs (of the Hebrew Scriptures)
I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem,
by the gazelles and hinds of the field,
Do not arouse, do not stir up love before its own time.
I came down to the nut garden to look at the fresh growth of the valley,
To see if the vines were in bloom, if the pomegranates had blossomed.
Before I knew it, my heart had made me the blessed of my kinswomen.
I belong to my lover and for me he yearns.
Come, my lover, let us go forth to the fields
and spend the night among the villages.
Let us go early to the vineyards, and see if the vines are in bloom,
If the buds have opened, if the pomegranates have blossomed.
Set me as a seal on your heart as a seal on your arm;
For stern as death is love,
relentless as the nether world is devotion;
its flames are a blazing fire.
Deep waters cannot quench love, nor floods sweep it away.
Were one to offer all he owns to purchase love,
he would be roundly mocked.
Second Reading: from M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled
Just as reality intrudes upon the two-year-old’s fantasy of omnipotence so does reality intrude upon the fantastic unity of the couple who have fallen in love. Sooner or later, in response to the problems of daily living, individual will reasserts itself. He wants to have sex; she doesn’t. She wants to go to the movies; he doesn’t. She wants to talk about her job; he wants to talk about his. She doesn’t like his friends; he doesn’t like hers. So both of them, in the privacy of their hearts, begin to come to the sickening realization that they are not one with the beloved, that the beloved has and will continue to have his or her own desires, tastes, prejudices and timing different from the other’s. Gradually or suddenly, they fall out of love. Once again they are two separate individuals. At this point they begin either to dissolve the ties of their relationship or to initiate the work of real loving.
By the word ‘real’ I imply that the belief that we are loving when we fall in love is false. It is when a couple falls out of love they may begin to really love. Real love does not have its roots in a feeling of love. To the contrary, real love often occurs in a context in which the feeling of love is lacking, when we act lovingly despite the fact that we don’t feel loving.
Real love takes effort. Falling in love is effortless. Real love involves extending the limits and boundaries of one’s identity. Real love requires one to grow. Falling in love is not an extension of one’s limits or boundaries; it is a partial and temporary collapse of them. Lazy and undisciplined individuals are as likely to fall in love as energetic and dedicated ones. Once the precious moment of falling in love has passed and the boundaries have snapped back into place, the individual may be disillusioned, but is usually none the larger for the experience. When limits are extended or stretched, however, they tend to stay stretched. Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience. Falling in love is not.
