Sermon: The Beauty of Romance

[ previous | index | next ]

The Beauty of Romance

By Charles Rush

February 14, 2010

[ Audio (mp3, 6.3Mb) ]

day we lift up the promise of romance. For most of us, when we remember back, what is striking is often the very subtle manner in which the Muse strikes. There is the wonderful scene in ‘Romeo and Juliet' when they are both at the masked ball. Romeo is dodging about, to see who is the most eligible dancer, when Juliet turns. She is laughing and she turns aside for a moment, pulling her mask away as she smiles to herself. It is not just her beauty, although it is that. It is not just her youth, although is that too… It is a certain charisma. At any rate, who can say why The Muse strikes as it does.

I've asked couples to tell me the short version of the way that they met for thirty years now. It almost always has a very simple beginning that, in retrospect, almost defies explanation. From the outside it seems almost too pedestrian. It was an exchange. It was a glance. It was a smile.

We give chocolate in memory of whatever it was because it was most definitely a sweet time of life. And from there, the courtship is on, and I would dare say that there is none among us who wouldn't want to be wooed, pursued, at some point in our lives. And what a wonderful thing it really is.

I think of the couple in the movie “Love Actually”, Jamie and Aurelia. He is a British writer, recovering from a broken heart. He rents a house in the south of France for the summer to finish the novel that will heal him.

The caretaker for the home has hired a cleaner to pick up after the bachelor/ writer and she is from Portugal. Both of them speak only the most basic French. He speaks no Portuguese. She speaks no English. So they bump into each other on the days that she is taking care of the house. And she does nice little gestures for him, like bringing him some tea, in the middle of the day.

They try to speak to each other in French but it is pointless. Eventually, they start speaking to each other in their native tongue, despite the fact that the other can't understand it. And this habit extends over days, as they turn into weeks, so that they carry on monologues with each other. The amazing thing is that the two monologues become a dialogue across languages.

“Would you like a cookie?” she asks him in Portuguese.

“Oh, I shouldn't but just this one” he says in English.

“No, you shouldn't” she says in Portuguese. “You are working on quite a tummy already.”

“Sweets just don't seem to bother me” he says in English.

“You are kidding yourself”, she says to him in Portuguese.

We know that Jamie is sad, recovering from rejection. And there is something sad about Aurelia too that is hard to place. It is an expression in her eyes. There is a loneliness that they want to transcend. There is a longing in their exchanges and also a fear of some sort, fear perhaps that they would be rejected, fear that they are the only one in this dyad that is actually longing in quite the same way.

One day, he is out writing in the back yard, near the pond, when a wind comes up and blows several pages into the pond. Aurelia tries to grab them and ends up jumping in the water to save them. Whereupon, the hapless Jamie, feels he has to preserve chivalry and decides to jump in the water as well which turns out to be freezing. So they both make complete asses of themselves in front of each other and they exchange this back and forth in their native languages, a kind of spousal sniping that settled married couples recognize well.

“I hope this tripe of a novel is worth it” she says.

“I couldn't very well just let you dive in alone” he says.

Back and forth it goes, back and forth. And when you think about it, we don't really need to speak the same language in order to have this exchange. It is just the two would be halves of a couple screaming past each other the same way we do on any of these silly exchanges about why these dishes aren't done and who is going to change the lightbulbs.

And there is a profundity to our emotional lives also. Jamie has to drive Aurelia home. They are both driving in the car, each in their own thoughts, each filling up with desire for union of some kind. They get to their destination. They are each sitting there looking ahead. It is time to say goodbye.

Aurelia says aloud in Portuguese, “I am filled with sadness. I have nothing left to look forward to for the rest of my day.”

Jamie looks over at her and says, “Saying goodbye to you is the saddest thing I do all day.” They turn and look at each other for a long moment in silence. What is it about those silent exchanges when you just know, you just know without a word being said.

In the memorable phrase from Walker Percy, “Touching her was like rounding a corner and coming home.” It is, unquestionably, the dance of libido. It is the dolphins swimming circles around each other. It is birds strutting their stuff for each other to see. It is all that endearing call of nature, without which we might not actually deliver the next generation. It is all that and it is more…

Humans, being what they are, hope that they can actually find a compliment in the other. And that is the spiritual promise within the primal urge of nature. We want someone who listens to us, someone who is interested in us with all of our foibles. We want someone that will help us to become more, to become better in a way that understands and respects our limitations and our virtues. We want someone who gets us.

This is when the water starts getting deep. It is one thing to find a date, it is altogether another thing to find a genuine compliment. Plato said it was so difficult that God must have originally created us in pairs and then separated us at creation. Because all of our lives, it seems that we are searching for our other half and how elusive it is to find that partner.

There is a cartoon in the New Yorker this week that has a married couple embracing one another front on in a frank moment of exchange. He says to her, “I can't live without you in my life… but I can live without you in my way.” I don't care whether it is the TV, the grocery shopping, the parent-teacher conference, whatever it is that comes up in the daily running of the household, we have an uncanny manner of getting in each others way and becoming a nuisance to get around.

We want a compliment but damned if it isn't difficult to stay in complimentary coordination. Eros is a powerful inducement to a more profound relationship but we can't implement it unless we are willing to explore a spiritually richer way of love.

That is why, curiously, even though the Bible deeply believes in marriage, there is precious little advice specific to romantic love, precious little advice on how to live the married life exactly. And the main reason is that the very same qualities that make for a profounder interpersonal love with your spouse also make you a more rounded spiritual person in your families, with your friends, in your community.

To access this deeper love, you have to transcend your ego needs in trust and focus outward on other people. It is not just about others complimenting you, you have to become a compliment. So, St. Paul used to say, “have this mind which was in Christ Jesus.” And he said that because he was focused on the dimension of Jesus that blessed other people. He wasn't so worried about his own needs as meeting the needs of other people. He wasn't so worried about getting recognition as we was about making sure that others were lifted up. Reinhold Niebuhr once said that for Christians, ‘self-fulfillment is a by-product of our fulfillment of others.' It is not just about finding the right partner, it is also about becoming the right partner.

This is true in our romantic lives, it is true in our family lives, it is true in our deepest friendships, it is true in our church life, it is true in the beloved community that we are privileged to be part of. St. Paul puts it this way. “Put on compassion, kindness, patience, an honest appreciation of the virtues and limitations of ourselves and those around us, and a spirit of forgiveness that fosters growth. Above all, put on the kind of love that binds everything together in harmony.

That is what we feel when everything is clicking together, we experience a moment of harmony, of synchronicity, of complimentarity. We hope for an exchange of genuine reciprocity. And then, he says, “let peace fill your hearts” which is what happens in those moments of harmony and reciprocity.

And, finally, live in a basic disposition of gratitude. Appreciate the people around you. See your life as a blessing and be glad to be alive at this time and place and to share it with these fellow travelers. Allow yourself to express some authentic joy. Live out of the positive energy that has developed you into the person you have become and exercise that energy with each other that you might become a living blessing in your life to other people.

All of that promise draws us in. And there is the catch. Being the right person is not a simple possibility. It is not something that we actualize once and stand upon that great achievement like winning a gold medal or getting an article published in the Atlantic Monthly. It is never fixed because we are not static and our relationships are ever evolving.

Great partners, great relationships keep developing another depth of intimacy. Humans are multiply layered in emotional insulation that protects our core identity and we are expert in shielding each other and most of our adult emotional lives revolve around shielding and opening, growing and regressing, developing and stopping.

I have a friend who is married to a very powerful partner, they have a strong personality. One day, he is sharing with me a round of difficult exchanges that the two of had over how to deal with their teenager and the way that this brought up more stuff from the very different ways that the two parents were raised as children and how that was affecting the way that they saw what was at stake and what kind of parents they wanted each other to become. The left-over issues from the previous generation were having some important ramification s in the present and future generation and he was exasperated about the whole situation.

I said, “Aren't you glad you got married?” I remarked with irony.

He said, “You know, if I'd realized exactly the depth of the changes that she would put me through and how difficult that would actually be, I probably would have stayed a happy idiot in LA.”And there you have it.

Once you start down this path of love, once you open yourself to its possibilities, you pretty quickly realize that this is going to be some of the most difficult personal work you will engage in. Most of us know that we have personal issues but we don't know exactly just what issues they really are. Most of us realize that we have limitations but we aren't really interested in doing a whole, whole lot about them until we have to.

Most of us want a deeper kind of love, but the vulnerability we have to go through, the real challenge of being genuinely, honesty intimate with another person. The trust and the fall out of the breach of that trust which happens again and again and again… We are like two children, no matter what age we are, trying to grow up together, without any expert guidance, really sometimes it feels like it is just the two of you stuck on a remote island ‘for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer'.

No, this is not easy because you not only have the limitations of your spouse, you have the limitations of you to transcend. Welcome to your life. Intimacy, trust, being open, letting someone else into your inner sanctum, letting them in again after they hurt you… It is profound exploration, not easily done, and it is the quest that takes up the majority of your adult growth, it is the one thing that will simply not be complete even on the day that you die. Our lives are like that.

And you don't think about it much when you are living it. If you are lucky, your love life grows around you in that healing chaos like Nicholas Cage in ‘Family Man', the every man from Union, New Jersey who is just trying to get through the week with kids, the baby, the dogs, the cat, his wife's crazy family, their schmaltzy friends, their ridiculous suburban life. In the midst of all the ridiculousness and hilarity that is his life when you zoom out a bit, he has this moment one day when he realizes that in spite of how quirky it is, in spite of how tacky, how open-ended and chaotic it is to actually live, somehow, some way, he never really felt so alive, he never really felt so ‘at home'.

Sometimes it becomes as clear as it is difficult to articulate that, for better and worse, you have become who you have become because you were loved into being. For better and worse, this is pretty close to the best you can do. It is healing. It is life-giving. Even death cannot stop it.

I'm watching a woman. Her family has collected photos of their life together- the lake as children, a trip to Europe, family reunions, their wedding day, her husband in his uniform, a college sweater. I see her touch the photo of the two of them right after the end of the war- what a great day that was. She picks up his sweater and smells it for a moment… That pain is the price we gladly pay for the privilege of a life of love.

Profound love echoes down the corridor of time. It has an eternal ring to it that continues to heal and inspire us. It is tinged with eternity. Amen