The Deeper Commited Love
By Charles rush
February 10, 2013
I John 4: 7-11 selected and Ruth 1: 16, 17
[ Audio
(mp3, 18.3Mb) ]
at pining, aching, yearning of every young person… is old enough that it was the subject of an evening discussion in Plato's Symposium. Aristophanes explained that it must be the case that we were originally created by the gods as one entity that the gods found sufficiently threatening that they ordered us cut in half.
Because it seemed to Aristophanes that we seem to bounce through
our lives searching, searching, searching
for our other half… We are half hoping that there exists somewhere
out there that will complete us. And we keep hoping that in different ways most
of our life. It is the longing of love, of life itself. As the guy says on the
Dos Eques Beer commercial, ‘stay thirsty my friend.'
The Greek
philosophers were threatened by the way that the love desire can be so
overpowering that it directs our lives, overriding our rational selves to the
incredulity of parents in every generation. (“You are moving where? For what?”) Oscar Wilde once said of this temptation that ‘the
only way to get rid of it is to yield to it.' Yield to it we do.
Who does not
want to fall in love? … ‘the dizzy dancing way that
you feel, when every fairy tale comes real'… Like the wonderful title of one of
Lena Wurtmuller's movie's “Swept Away by an unusual
sense of destiny…”.It feels like there might be other options out there but for
some reason we are magnetically drawn down one path.
The Greeks
called it ‘ecstasy' from ek-stasis, which literally
means “to stand outside of yourself”, to become so lost in your beloved that you
momentarily forget yourself… You forget, as Sigmund Freud was so fond of
reminding us, your anxieties, your vulnerability in the world, you forget that
you will ultimately come apart and die. But for a while you have lost yourself
in the love of another. Passion is so delectable and Freud was so dour and
middle aged.
Ah, but humans
are hard-wired for the chase. It starts young as I'm reminded
every time I watch children flirting on the playground of our nursery school.
It stays late in the bank of memories that we look back on in old age with a
golden glow. It entertains us in movies, opera, and literature like no other
subject. Who doesn't want to fall in love?
If Aristophanes
was alive today, he would be amazed and incredulous because we no longer have
to wander the wide world looking for our other half,
the world has come home to us, just a few clicks away on the internet. Dan
Slater has a provocative new book, “Love in the Age of Algorithms” where he
describes how we actually meet each other these days.[i]
By my anecdotes,
he is largely right. In the past decade, I dare say that the decided majority
of people that have asked me to preside at their weddings have met on-line.
We are
wonderfully more efficient today than wandering round in Aristophanes day,
frustrated and unfulfilled because we are only limited to what is available on
our small island in Greece somewhere. But it is not only that we can connect
with people from around the country, there is now so much specificity that we
can search. We have websites for the over 50 crowd, the under 30 crowd, those
divorced, those married but seeking outside entertainment. We have websites for
the Ivy league and yes, even for Philadelphia Eagles
fans seeking each other.
And the reason
that such a decent percentage of them end up in my office is that we've also
gotten much better at understanding personality types, so that we can predict
which people will actually be compatible with one another. So E Harmony and
Match.com have these fairly thorough personality tests that you fill out and
they can match you with a whole other portfolio of people you are much more
likely to actually find a solid compliment, making it exponentially more efficient
to search for a potential date on-line than just hoping for an introduction to
Mr. or Mrs. Right from your wee circle of friends. At the moment, this a
burgeoning field of research, as we seek to better understand the dynamics of
compatibility, so that chemistry can spark resonance and more of us can find
fulfillment.[ii]
On the whole,
the past fifteen years have been great at bringing more people that are
compatible into contact with people that could really develop into a fulfilling
life partner. So much so, that we are presently becoming victims of our own
success without really intending it.
Mr. Slater
decided to follow a couple people that illustrate the new world of on-line
relationships and so he interviews a 32
year old named Jacob that has moved to New York via Boston, having originally
grown up in Portland.
Right out of
college, he had a live-in girlfriend for a few years that fell apart because he
was a poor communicator and she never felt like she was really important enough
to him in his life, so after a while, she left.
So he goes
on-line, registers for a dating site, and can't believe all the people that are
out there. Pretty soon he is dating a cuter woman than he ever imagined. His
friends are envious. He's feeling great about himself, life is good.
Jacob is not a
real go-getter in life, particularly not in love, so in a former age, he
figures he probably would have married this new girlfriend shortly after he met
her but he doesn't, largely because he is a lazy twenty year old boy who
consistently seeks out the least challenging route to living (my interpretation
as a Father) but partly because he is now confident in the deep recesses of his
mind that there is probably another cute girl just like her out there
somewhere, and in the era of Algorithms, he has a pretty good chance of finding
someone else just as wonderful and engaging as she is.
They move in
together an d a couple years go by, in other words
just enough time has passed that we have to move beyond the initial flush of romance
and you have to deal with the underlying issues of ordinary life, and they
start to have friction. He still have poor
communication skills and a lack of focus about his life and his relationships.
This time round,
though, when the challenges of translating the first flush of love into a lived
life start to mount, he finds himself just casually re-connecting to the dating
site that originally put him and his girlfriend together. And the dating site
would welcome his return as a paying customer which is why they send him an
email every few months with the pictures of a few other people that have tried
to contact him since he has left.
Choice itself
has become distracting. So he finds himself re-joining his old dating site and
just trolling through the profiles to see what is out there. He doesn't
actually do anything but neither does he really work at his relationship to
address the things in himself that need to mature for him to be a good mate.
Just like before, his girlfriend tires of his immaturity and moves out.
He's been dating
again. Interestingly, when Mr. Slater interviewed him, he has less excitement
about the novelty of a first date than he did 8 years ago. He wonders if his
diminished enthusiasm is because he is now getting old (at 31) or whether it is
the sheer fact that there is just not as much enchantment when there are so
many people available. And he finds himself wondering at ‘what point does this
long learning curve become an excuse for not putting in the effort to make a
relationship last'. “Maybe I have the confidence to go after the person I
really want”, he says. “But I'm worried I'm making it so I can't fall in love.”[iii]
The title of the
article was “A Million First Dates”. When you add to this the pervasive
background metropolitan sophisticate milieu that is already a little jaundiced
about real romance actually taking root, we are probably living through an era
where we are cultural ethos broadly encourages us to tamp down our expectations
about romantic fulfillment. Part of us wants a deeper fulfilling love, and
another part of us really doubts that it can really happen. It probably can't
happen to us anyway. Maybe we should just settle for less. We won't be
disappointed and it works, at least for a while. And maybe that is enough for
most people.
Much evidence to
support this thesis… Most marriages end in divorce. Maybe it is too much to
hope for a life-long fulfillment. But there is a road, less traveled perhaps.
It is the spiritual way. It doesn't abrogate romance or eroticism but it does
channel them towards a fuller, more difficult and more fulfilling love.
At some point in
the process of growing wiser about relationships and love, you come to realize
that it is not so much about finding the right partner as it is about being the
right partner. And if you are lucky, you just might find yourself repeating the
words that Mark Twain used in a tribute to his wife, ‘wherever she was, there
was Eden.'
At some point in
your relationship, it becomes obvious, even if you aren't brave enough to
actually name it, but it becomes obvious that you can only access the deeper
spiritual love that God wants for us when you make a commitment to one person
that come what may, we are in this together.
And for so many
of us, that moment comes to us pretty much like it came to Ruth. She is away
from her home, her life is before her, like the song by the Dixie Chicks, she is looking out at some wide open spaces. It is a big
open canvas.
She is actually
talking to her Mother-in-Law and she says the words that I suppose every
Mother-in-Law everywhere would love to hear. But it could just as easily be a
pledge of love that any of us might make to our spouse or really close friend,
‘Where you go, I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall
be my people, and your God my God and where you die, I will be buried' (Ruth
2:16, 17).
Part of what
makes that so moving is that you have to put yourself out there, with all the
vulnerability that such a hope entails. We can't access the deeper meaning that
love has to offer us without actually taking a leap and opening ourselves to
someone else imprinting themselves on our lives so deeply that they shape us
and change us.
We humans are
spiritual beings and, even in romance, libido takes us only so far by itself.
After the blush of romance wears off, we have to put ourselves out there
further to keep growing in intimacy and love with those around us and this is
usually pretty difficult because we have to trust others to help us grow and
develop.
I had a
colleague in my early thirties who observed, “Most of the gifts I received from
my parents turned out to be things in myself that I had to overcome in order to
become someone that could give and receive love.” Whether or not, the previous
generation was guide or obstacle, most of our significant disputes with our
spouses, our partners, our closest friends point up
the areas in our lives that we are deficient and so we are defensive.
But what we hope
for are people around us who recognize those deficiencies for what they are and
are patient enough to help us actually grow and develop, especially as we
stumble and misstep seeking to transcend these ways of behaving that impede us
from developing intimate and healthy relationships.
Lo, behold, this
invitation to growth just keeps evolving so that really about every seven years
in our relationships we tacitly sign up for one more chapter with our partner,
with our spouse. Unconsciously, we kind of take stock and ask ourselves whether
we are growing together for the good of each other or whether we just aren't
likely to be able to realize in each other enough to give this relationship a
life future.
And the issues
keep changing, getting more complex as we develop a home together, support one
another in our vocations, as we build a family and grow up together raising the
next generation, as we deal with unanticipated difficulty, sometimes tragedy
and death.
Some of these
things that happen around us, change us so much, that
you couldn't really predict from the outset of the relationship that you were
going to need a quite different set of things from your spouse. It can be quite
a dramatic challenge for people to have to change and exercise a whole new set
of skills that weren't on the original list of desired attributes, usually not
something our spouses were particularly good at, like genuine patience. And it
can be really hard to acquire that new set of skills. It almost always is.
But we are
buoyed along by the deeper form of committed love because it can be so deeply
fulfilling. There are those moments in our lives when it really seems like we
are able to lose ourselves mutually in caring more about each other than our
own selves. And in those moments, we stumble into the deeper fulfillment that God
intends for all of us. Like the passage from 1 John we read earlier, we can
say, ‘let us love one another because love is from God… If
God so loves us, let us love one another.'
There is a
humane grace and graciousness in that deeper committed love, the love that
accepts us and encourages us and inspires us to be better… quite in spite of ourselves.
Who among us has not wandered the house in the early morning wondering what a
mess I make of my own life? Who in the world would take the time to invest in
this contradiction? I am not worthy…
And what a great
thing to feel loved anyway. What a
great thing, to start on an adventure together, write a story of a life and, by
the grace of God, to see some of the better themes from that story turn up in
the next generation that you nurture together. What a great thing to become the
support that inspires your loved ones to bloom and develop and flourish. It is
what brings us the deeper spiritual fulfillment.
It's loss causes us the greatest personal pain and I am sorry
about that. A deeper, fuller sorrow is the price we pay for the privilege of
love. It turns out that if we are lucky, we are never very far removed from
genuine vulnerability. The life of love keeps challenging us to make a leap in
faith in every chapter of our relationships right through the last chapter.
The qualities
that make for profounder love in marriage aren't much different from the
committed love that we know in deep friendships and in genuine community. So
most of what St. Paul talks about in his letters is
how to foster love in our midst in and through the church. The New Testament
calls it the beloved community. And when the Spirit of God is moving in our
midst, the power of the life of love is being released in our midst. It makes
us stronger. It gives our life savor and meaning. It gives us a transcendent
connection and ground. We all want to get better at that.
So this week, beyond
the canned and sentimental hype of Valentine's Day, may you find your voice and
express your appreciation for those around you that you love. May your disputes
grow into occasions for a reconciliation that makes you healthier.
May you find a genuine opportunity to bless. And may
you find yourself growing so that you are becoming the genuine key that your
loved one needs to open the fullness of this next chapter of your life. Amen
