Sermon: In the Name of Love

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In the Name of Love

By Charles Rush

February 19, 2006

[ Audio (mp3, 4.4Mb) ]

til recently, I think it is fair to say that the church has provided little positive direction for our romantic lives. I know from my youth the story that is told about Winston Churchill being seated next to the Methodist Bishop from Calgary was pretty typical of the clergy of that day. The Methodist Bishop was notoriously uptight and Churchill was decidedly not. Churchill was at a reception and sighed when he saw that he was seated next to the Bishop.

After a bit, a pretty young woman appeared with a tray of sherry. Churchill took his and the young lady offered one to the Bishop who didn't drink for religious reasons. As she stood there, the Bishop said to her. "No thank you. Young lady, I'd rather commit adultery than take a drink of intoxicating beverage." Hearing this Churchhill called the young lady back and handed her his sherry glass, saying "Please take this back… I didn't realize we had a choice."

That pretty much sums up the religious spirit of the era: uptight, humorless, big target for the witty, with nothing constructive to say about one of the areas people are most concerned about, their love life.

A few of days ago, we celebrated Valentine's Day. In honor of that, and to celebrate the sweetness of romance, I've asked our ushers to pass out chocolate kisses.

Today, of course, Valentine's Day is quite a commercial enterprise. I learned from Wikipedia that the Greeting card association estimates that nearly 1 billion valentines cards were sent in the past few days. I was somewhat chagrin to learn that they also estimate that women buy 85% of the cards sent. Gentlemen, I'm hoping that this means we are way past something as small as a card because it is probably also an indication of our continuing gender-challenged ability to actually verbalize our feelings. When it comes to the moment of actually speaking the words, as group we seem to have the oratorical flair of George Bush. We start off with a thought and mid-sentence it just gets all mis-under-combobulated.

This year, I hope you can say and show it. Valentine's Day is actually named after an early Saint of the Church but in 1969, the Catholic Church dropped Saint Valentine with a number of other saints about whom too little was known.

Reportedly, St. Valentine was a priest in Rome during the reign of Emperor Claudius II. The lore that grew up around St. Valentine involved the Emperor who apparently issued an edict banning marriage briefly. He was having difficulty recruiting soldiers in the Army and thought single men would be easier to persuade. And we think we have loose screws in office? At any rate, St. Valentine kept performing marriages in defiance of the Emperor was arrested, jailed, and healed the jailers daughter of a blindness that she had. In gratitude, she faithfully visited him. No romantic connection has ever been established but reportedly he sent her a note just before his death that concluded "from your Valentine". And that is where we get that expression today.

Like most of these holidays that don't seem to quite fit in the Christian realm, they don't because they aren't. They harken back to an earlier era when we were all pagans. Interestingly, from the Bronze age, as far as I can tell nearly every culture practiced a religion that had a primary fertility piece to it. Like today, I suspect that 3000 years ago 85% of the women were in charge of getting the love holiday going.

February is named for the Roman god Februus, the god of purification. In the middle of the month in ancient Rome, they celebrated a festival called Lupercalia, to honor the fertility god Lupercus. You have seen images of the god Lupercus. He is traditionally depicted as half human, half goat. In the ritual for the feast day, the priests, after the consumption of wine, would take goat skins through the streets, making contact with everyone they saw on the streets. Young women especially would touch the skins because popular custom held that it would make them fertile and give them an easy labor.

Something like that also existed in other European religions of that era. In France and England, February was picked out for the celebration of romantic love because of the observation by peasants that it was during February that birds began pairing up for the spring. So we have a line from Chaucer's Parlement of Fowles that says "For this was on St. Valentine's Day/ When every fowl cometh there to choose his mate. (l. 309) Following that custom, there were a number of European traditions that sprang up during February to encourage romance. In France, it was the custom on one day for the young women to gather in a house on one side of a village road and the men to gather in a house opposite. They would then call out names of their intended love and run down to the street to see if their invitation was answered or not. If it was they paired off happily for the day. But for those whose invitation was unrequited, and this strikes me as so French, a bonfire was lit at the close of the day, and spurned lovers gathered to burn images of whoever rejected them, hurling abuses on their names as well. Reportedly, this practice got so out of control that eventually the government had to ban the practice all together.[i]

On the positive side, however, the men of France started an annual tradition, at least in the intellectual circles, of writing beautiful poetry evoking the love for the beloved called the Cour Amereuse. And this tradition remains to the present.

You probably know that the tradition of romantic love is not very old, probably only dating back to the Middle Ages. Before that marriages were essentially arranged and that is still the case for a large percentage of the world's population. There was still romance in arranged marriages to be sure, but the primary ethic was family loyalty, and the structure for romance was more pronounced.

And who can say which is better. My wife's friends from high school went to elaborate lengths to get one of my children to meet they had known for years. All these ladies had known both of these young adults since they were born and had spent a lot of time around them. When they told about this elaborate plot, I said, 'ladies, this is how women become witches.' Not deterred in the least, one of them said, "Chuck, you know that we know them better than they know themselves." And that is probably also true.

But in the late Middle Ages, we stopped arranging marriages, at least overtly. That change was so is right beneath the surface plot in the King Arthur tales. King Arthur is married to Gwenivere. They have great respect and admiration for one another. Gwenivere is much younger than Arthur. At some point in their marriage, Gwenivere meets the greatest knight in the realm Lancelot, who is appointed to be her personal knight. In the many versions of the tale both Gwenivere and Lancelot struggle internally. They are romantically attracted to one another but both loyal to Arthur. This tension, personified in these two, represents the change in attitudes in Europe. Romantic love has now found it's place. It doesn't excuse adultery, but the story is written in such a way that you identify with those longings of the heart.

And how wonderful they really are. I love asking older couples like Pete Moran, how they met. Almost invariably, before they actually speak, they get this wistful grin like they can still see her walking across the room. It is like the line that Romeo has when he sees Juliet come out on the balcony at the end of the first night that he laid eyes on her. He says, "What light in yon window glows? Tis the East and Juliet is the Sun."

He is absolutely taken with her. In Franco Zeferelli's wonderful film on Romeo and Juliet, Zeferelli has their first embrace so passionate with kissing that they literally have to come up for air. Olivia Hussey, who played Juliet, captured so well that rapture of being swept up in a joy that overwhelmed her, a surprising new found power that makes her giddy with youthful exuberance.

No question, falling in love is wonderful. I love the scene in the movie Shakespeare in Love, after their first night of romance. The character played by Gweneth Paltrow is awakened by the maid who says to her, "Madam it's a new day." She responds with this full faced smile, "No it's a whole new world." What a wonderful thing to live.

Of course, that first blush of romance cannot last as we are just not wired to live swept away. But researchers have found that they can measure our connectedness and contentedness by looking at the levels of the hormone Oxytocin. Oxytocin promotes bonding and what a difference it makes.

Researchers compared two different species of Prairie voles, one that has Oxytocin and the other that does not. The prairie voles that lack oxytocin are not monogamous and tend to change partners every year. This has important consequences for their family structure. Their families are not connected and the young experience a much greater incidence of anxiety from being on their own. They have increased difficulty caring for their young.

The species of Prarie voles that have Oxytocin are monogamous and tend to mate for life. They have strong extended families and live in connected compounds of holes. Couples spend most of their free time sitting next to one another, shoulder to shoulder.

You can stimulate the Oxytocin levels in one another and not surprisingly, this does not require advanced psychological insight. Most of it is rather basic, doing for one another. Giving each other massages. It is having a caring and reciprocal sensual life together.

I read an interesting article this week on Love in National Geographic that details a couple of these items.[ii] The author and her husband attended a kissing school in Manhattan. You are probably thinking that you don't really need a class on kissing, but maybe you do. The teacher of the class focuses on all the chakra's (or energy centers) that are good kissing entails. She has all the participants in the class begin their kissing by first giving each other a foot rub. As she takes them through the exercises, what she is actually getting them to do is to deploy all of their senses- the touch, the smell, the whisper- she gets all the senses deployed so that they can be present to one another.

Arthur Aron, a psychologist at SUNY has done a simple experiment that shows how important it is to be present with one another. He takes random couples and puts them in pairs. In the experiment, they are asked to do things together, each of them has to give direction to the other in turn. In addition, they have to share some important personal information with each other. Finally, he has them stop and look into one anothers eyes for a full two minutes. Two minutes is a long time to look at each other. What do you think he finds? He finds that a high percentage of these total strangers report feelings of attraction to one another.[iii] Try it at home, not with a stranger, but with your spouse and let us know. This is not rocket science but we have to be intentional about paying attention to one another. It is like Arnold Schwarzenagger says about body building, "You have to put in the time."

One other note from Helen Fisher, another psychologist, do something novel together. It turns out novelty also triggers dopamine in the brain and that promotes attraction and good feeling. Spiritually speaking, we might say that it also promotes growth and creativity which are vital for long-term health in any relationship.

Finally, I close with this little insight for first time daters which is interesting. It turns out that you are more likely to find other people attractive when dopamine is released in the brain. Dopamine is released after vigorous exercise. It is released after enduring a challenge. It is released after nerve-wracking activity. So for your first date, rather than playing it safe with bowling, you can up the ante sharing a scary ride at Great Adventure together or kayaking down the Delaware.

Like so many things in scripture, the Bible tells us that marriage is a good idea but it doesn't tell us much that is helpful about how to keep it healthy. The bible tells us that love is good but not what that means for our romantic selves. The bible tells us that we should be with each other, for each other, and that reciprocal relationships, where each partner is thinking about the needs and hopes of the other, are the ideal. We have every interest in supporting strong relationships and strong families.

Because, as you know, great relationships help us bloom as people. They give us the confidence and acceptance to find our dreams and live them. I just happened across one example that I had no idea about, the great baseball player Jackie Robinson. His wife Rachel and he had a profound love life together and they raised three children as well.

Jackie Robinson was a terrific athlete and an important role model in American history as the first black baseball player in the major leagues. Jackie Robinson had to endure not only the insults and humiliation that was hurled against him at the time, he was always on stage, always in the public eye. And there were some people that were waiting for him to fall. No matter how much you love the game, that is a lot of spiritual pressure to live under.

And Jackie had the pressure that generation of black leaders had to go through of being the first at this, the first at that. He couldn't just be ordinary. I'm sure he internalized a standard of excellence just knowing that so much was on the line for his people as well as himself.

Rachel gave him the confidence and the courage to endure and become all that he became. He once wrote of her, "Strong, loving, gentle and brave, never afraid to either criticize or comfort." Great relationships are like that. They are a team effort. Jackie might have been the one that had his name on the marquee but when you talk to the Robinson kids it was a team effort. There wasn't Jackie without Rachel.

Mo Vaughn, the first baseman for the Boston Red Sox, wore #42 on his jersey in honor of Jackie Robinson, once said "Jackie Robinson couldn't have been Jackie Robinson if it wasn't for Rachel Robinson… He wanted to quit. She wouldn't let him." That is what we hope, that we will be an inspiration for each other, a quiet confidence that blooms each other.

Happy Valentine's Day in advance. May you find yourself able to be fully present to your beloved this season. Amen.

[i] See www.stvalentines.net/frenchvalentines.htm

[ii] Lauren Slater, National Geographic (February, 2006) pp. 32-49.

[iii] Ibid. p. 48-49.