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Reading:  

“If You Want Love . . . “ by Joan Nelson

 

I picked up a flyer at UU Berkeley promoting a romantic event last Saturday: “Love Sounds and Poetry.”

Ah, yes…poetry. In high school I memorized Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach when feeling out of sight for the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day’s most quiet need. By sun and candle light…”

I memorized it so well, that I spent years waiting to “fall into” the romantic kind of love that Elizabeth Barrett felt for Robert Browning. (Which was just as futile as my waiting to be swept off my feet by Fred Astaire.)

Fast forward to 9/11. Since then you might have heard the greeting on my phone answering machine: “This is Joan Nelson reminding you that the purpose of life is to learn to make love instead of war. Leave a message. I will return your call.” When strangers said they liked the “make love” message, I usually just said thank you and let it go at that. But, sometimes, depending who it was, I explained the double meaning of “make love.” As most of you know, I’ve made a living as a clinical sexologist. Clinical sexology might not sound very romantic. But, you never know…

Last week, I was one of the UUCM “Remarkable People.” (All members, sooner or later, get a chance to tell our life stories in our series of “Evenings with Remarkable People.”) While telling my story, I realized Valentine’s Day was coming, and it was time to take the WAR out of my phone message.

After all, I’ve had 25 years of marital counseling. (That’s me counseling others.) But that didn’t start until after I had endured 2 short-lived ecstasies of “falling in” love, and long-lived agonies of falling out of it, through 2 divorces.  After receiving a wide range of therapies and counseling, and slogging through 2 graduate degrees (in psychology and human sexuality) I finally learned how to “make” love. I taught it to Husbands Numbers 3 & 4, both of whom were nervous because they had failed at marriages of their own.

No matter what (particularly if we were in the midst of a disagreement of some kind) we chose to end each day with a question and a kiss. The question: “What choice did you make today that caused you to do something difficult. And because it was difficult, made you grow?” It’s not easy to confront yourself so deeply every day. Particularly when you have to share it with the person you live with. But because we chose it and shared it, we got to “bottom line” of love “making.”

Husbands 3 and 4 were diagnosed with terminal illnesses. When we got it that “we” together didn’t have much time left, we made a pledge to one another and posted it on the fridge: “Life is Short. So we choose to make it as wide as we can…by making as much love as we can.”

This is where it gets romantic: Last summer, as we approached the end of John’s life, we often found ourselves making a bodily-fluids kind of love. Fluids of a clinical, medical kind…

Throughout the care-giving procedures, while mucking around somewhere near his “bottom line”, I would occasionally choose to look into his eyes, and ask, “Isn’t this romantic?” John would reply “Yes. Because we have chosen to make it so.” Even an impartial observer would have declared that we were, indeed, “making love,” in a profoundly renewed way.

Now that I’m deleting the War from my phone message, you can call my machine and hear, “This is Joan Nelson reminding you that if you want love, you gotta make it.”

 

Sermon:

         This past Thursday was Valentine’s Day, just in case you managed to miss the commercial and hype. Or, as some others might call it: Hallmark, chocolate manufacturers and florists day! Despite that cynicism, it is good to have a day devoted to love. Valentine’s Day has its origins in the remembrance of a Christian saint and martyr named Valentine. A long time ago, Emperor Claudius II discovered that bachelor soldiers were more efficient than married ones. These men loved the competition, and weren’t as worried about coming home safely. Plus who would care if they didn’t make it back? No protests from widows and orphans. Bachelors were so much more expendable. So the emperor forbade young men from marrying. Didn’t matter if they were in love. Well, Valentine heard about this and he married couples even in the face of the emperor’s displeasure. That landed him in the dungeon until he was then killed. But then he got beatification and sanctification, and we got Valentine’s Day, and who ever heard of Claudius II Day?

         Valentine’s Day is a wonderful day, when you’re in love with someone who loves you back. All the music, hype and carrying on is terrific. But what if this isn’t your story? What then? When my friend Theresa got dumped, or dumped someone, her remedy was country and western music. Lyrics like “My achy-breaky heart” or “you’ve cheated on me this one last time,” or “drop kick me Jesus through the goalposts of life” helped her get over heartbreak. After three days, she was cured.

         But for many of us, it’s not always that easy. For many, love and its fragments hang around for a while, inconveniently piercing our hearts from time to time. Both when love has ended and when that true love hasn’t found a place to call home. That’s leftover love—the fragments that remain after we’ve burned the old love letters, returned unwanted presents, and filed the pictures away. It’s the stuff we cart around after we’ve returned the keys, or when we realize our love is not returned, or never found a home.

         That’s the part of love we don’t hear about on Valentine’s Day.

         Love is such a paradox. It is the easiest thing, and the hardest. To fall in love may take an instant, or a lifetime. It is the most warming and the most chilling thing that can happen. It sends us into ecstasy and joy, and plunges us into the depths of despair. It makes every day a melody and every day a cacophony of noise that leaves us running for cover. If we get it anywhere near right, it can be the salvation of our days; if we get it anywhere near right, it can devastate us more fully than anything else. It demands of us an openness and trust that know no bounds, but when that openness and trust is betrayed, it closes us up more quickly and fully than a clam sensing danger. Western society’s notion of love and marriage has changed from political alliances to protect holdings or to keep a kingdom together, to a notion of romantic love, with a capital L-O-V-E, where we’re all supposed to live happily ever after, without any wrinkles, without any hitches, without the necessity of work. The stakes feel higher than before. What defines “good love” is a feeling that sweeps you off your feet, that leaves you utterly breathless, that creates a whole flock of butterflies in your stomach. We believe we must be dazzled, all the time, for all time.

         And too often it fades. With laundry and schlepping kids, with garbage to take out, and the in-laws visiting, we face the hard work of living day-by-day, side-by-side with a person that we don’t always recognize. Sometimes we’re able to grow our way through it, to leave the misperceptions created by pheromones run amok, and see the real person hiding there inside. If we’re lucky and work hard, we can make it through. But not always.

         Sometimes for very good and valid reasons, and sometimes out of boredom or misunderstanding or lack of trying, the relationship ends. And then, then it’s time for that leftover love, for those feelings that hang around even after our love isn’t there. We’re left with dreams of the future, and dreams of what might have been. This is true whether we find our one true love, or if we never do. Dreams die hard, and live lives of their own.

         So what do we do with leftover love?

         Get angry? Get mad about all that has been broken, all the spirit that has gone out of us, all the dreams we’ve had to throw away? Cry our way through? Break things? Get drunk or eat ourselves silly? Do we try to ignore it? We might do some of these, or all of these, but in the end, we know that the anger eats us up, the tears deplete our bodies of sodium, the alcohol leads to hangovers, when we eat as medication, our clothes start feeling really tight, and if we just try to ignore it, the feelings go underground, waiting to sabotage us another time.

         At some point, we have to face our lives and decide what to do with that leftover love. We can choose to be victims, captive to those feelings, feeling bereft, alone and hard done by. Or we can choose to let that go, and live into a different kind of life. One in which, like Joan mentions, we make love and give it into the world.

         Because leftover love can go into a different corner of the heart. As we struggle with the leftover love, with the ashes and residue of the past, we learn to perform a sort of by-pass operation to carve open new places in the heart, and new pathways for our love. We dig out blockages that keep us from turning that good-that-went-bad into something that, in the end, honors the truth of who we are, what we have been, and where we have loved. Not by denying, or living in anger, or living in sorrow, but in finding the new places of the heart where the old feelings can mingle with our spirits, and free us up to love again.

         I spent a lot of my adult life single. There were seventeen years of singleness between my marriage to Jackson and my meeting Amy. It was a time when I didn’t expect to find anyone ever again, and I imagined the rest of my life as a single person.

         Much of that time, I couldn’t imagine finding someone or giving up the freedom of living alone, of not being responsible to anyone else, of being able to live in the sloppiness of my own home without anyone looking over my shoulder. I loved not having to worry about where my dirty socks were, or to have to discuss and debate what movie or junk TV I would watch. The compromises to my then-comfortable life seemed too much to give up for someone else.

         But there were other times when I wished so deeply for someone special. When the holidays were coming, when I was too tired to get up in the morning and walk the dog, or do the grocery shopping, or make the meals. Or, most particularly, when I felt the empty, aching longing in my soul that told me I was alone. Then I longed for, and mourned, the absence of some person, a special other person in my life with whom I could share my joys and sorrows.  There were times when I was envious of others, when I almost despised their happiness, when I just didn’t want to see another movie with anyone else finding true love. Then I wondered what to do with my leftover love of not having someone special in my life.

         Every person I know, whether coupled or not, knows that sense of wanting connection, of wanting not being alone, knows the want and need of hugs, need of connection. It is, I believe, an innate part of being human, and maybe even being a porcupine. We want to know why, we want to make meaning, we want to make a difference, and we want to be deeply connected to others.

         Yet during that single time, and even now, I realized and believe that it doesn’t have to be about a special person, although that is very nice. We are, in large part, only as alone as our definition makes us. Time after time, when disaster strikes, it is not only those who know us, not only the “special someone” in our lives, who comes to the fore. Countless times, when I have responded to tragedy, be it death of a child, or diagnosis of cancer, or heart attack, or car accidents, or viewing the AIDS quilt, or attending a memorial, or when planes fly into buildings, I have witnessed people reaching out and caring for each other. Strangers helping strangers. Offering words of comfort, offering hugs and tissues. If you define being alone as only being without a significant other, then we cut ourselves off from the knowledge and opportunity that in one sense we are only as alone as we call ourselves.

         And what I also learned is that there are many places we can give our hearts and leftover love. Both if there is no special person in our lives, and if there is one. There are places crying out for our leftover love. One thing that is true: as long as we are willing to risk sharing what happens to us, as long as we are willing to spread out our love and the possibility of others’ love being there for us, then we are never alone. That is, as long as we are willing to give our love and caring away. No place to put it? Why not volunteer in a school, or nursing home, or homeless shelter, or as a big sister or big brother, or animal shelter or your local hospital. Or for the environment, or even, dare I say it, in your local religious community! All of these are places that need love, and give it back to those who share. If I define being alone as being without a partner, then there were countless times I was alone. But as long as I have opened up my definition wide, then I know I never was alone at all. In my giving love away, I was joined by friends, colleagues, and strangers who gave of themselves, as was I. There was never any leftover love at all—there was only love that flowed back and forth, here and there, that helps us all to heal from the living of our days. Some people even call this love god.

         Leftover love. So necessary to make our world and hearts sing. Even in religious community. Especially in religious community.

         If you’ve been at UUCM for a while, you know that there have been times in the past history of this congregation when it seemed that rather than an abundance of leftover love, love got left over and over again. Conflict can bring out the best in people, when they pull together, but it can also bring out the worst when love—leftover or other kinds—is not present. It is hard on a congregation, as it has been hard on this one. But here’s where some of that leftover love can be put to good use.

         Today, I invite you to do something perhaps new, perhaps a bit daring. I invite you to write anonymous thank you notes. Anonymous thank you notes to members of this congregation. Love notes of a sort. Find some of that leftover love inside you, and then, as Joan and I pass out these postcards, write an anonymous thank you note to someone in this congregation. Write their name on the address side, and I’ll fill in the address itself later. Thank someone for what they have done for UUCM—something big, or something small. Think of thanking someone who never gets noticed, never gets thanked. For those of you who are new here, and don’t know who to thank at UUCM, then please feel free to use the postcard to write a personal anonymous thank you to someone in your life. You’ll have to supply that address yourselves.

One more invitation: Over the past few years, there may have been people with whom you’ve had a hard time, or where there have been harsh words. Consider, if you will, and if you dare, writing them an anonymous thank you note. Look past the hurt and anger and fear and see if there is something you are grateful for, and then write that note. It might be hard, but I think you’ll be amazed at how good that can make you feel.

Please, I’m serious about these being anonymous. Don’t sign your name. Imagine what it would mean to get a note, and not know who it is from—imagine thinking that any person in this congregation could be the one sending you the note. Imagine what that would do, if we all looked upon each other with the suspicion of catching each other doing something right, or of loving each other because of our humanity. I’m sorry that there aren’t enough people here today to ensure that everyone receives a note—I’m sorry about that because you all deserve one. And so take a candy kiss from me on the way out today to know you’re loved and important. Let us know, too, if you need another card—we’ll take time here during the service to write these, and then we’ll collect them. If you don’t get finished while Sandy plays, then feel free to finish during the Offertory and hand them to me after the service is over, when you get your kiss.

Card writing period.

         Leftover love—what do we do with it? The answer is simple: recycle it. Find those undiscovered corners of the heart, those undiscovered places where love can grow, and plant it there. Plant it so that it flourishes wildly. There are infinite places for that love to live and grow. There are infinite places for god, and an infinite number of people who want and need our love. Maybe not always that special someone, but maybe instead hundreds of special someones whose lives are made better by our caring, who want the connection as deeply as we do ourselves, who feel blessed for us being here. For there is something about love—when we give it away, it only grows more. May it ever be so.