Three Suggestions about Love
A Sermon Given
by Rev. Roger Fritts
February 15, 1998
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
Thirty-three years ago a Sunday School class held at a Unitarian
Universalist Church introduced me to a little book about love. I paid
my sixty cents for the 140-page paperback and took it home to read.
As a teenager the title of the book excited me--The Art of Loving. I
had high expectations. In the privacy of my room I skimmed the
pages quickly. It did not turn out to be what I had expected.
Disappointed at first, for a time I barely glanced at the book, and I
paid little attention to the Sunday discussions. However, over a
period of weeks I became motivated to look more closely. As I read
the chapters I felt as if my mind had been opened. My teenage world,
which had seemed confused and chaotic, suddenly seemed to make
more sense. Some pieces of the puzzle of life fell into place.
The author of the book was a German Jew, a refugee from the Nazis,
a man named Erich Fromm. His basic position, the idea that gave me
insight as a teenager, is found in the second chapter. He wrote:
The awareness of human separation, without reunion
by love is the source of shame. It is the source of guilt
and anxiety. The deepest need of human beings, then,
is the need to overcome our separateness, to leave the
prison of our aloneness.
In the thirty-three years since I first read this book I have read many
other books on philosophy and psychology, and I have taken many
classes on such subjects. I have also been involved in many human
relationships, some of great intensity lasting over a considerable time.
I have matured a great deal, both intellectually and emotionally. My
understanding of human nature and of human relationships has
developed considerably from what it was when I was a teenager.
One reason the ideas of Erich Fromm attracted me is that he put into
words a philosophy of love I learned as a child. This may be because
Fromm was a German in ethnic background and a German-American
mother raised me. She taught me to restrain the expression of
emotion. My family of origin taught me the importance of clear
borders between myself and others. They taught me to place less
emphasis on being warm and loving and more on fairness and justice.
They taught me to regard feelings as unreliable and unstable. I
learned to be suspicious of emotionally expressive hug-a-stranger
types.
Each of us is limited by our own cultural backgrounds, and I am
limited by my German-American background. Nevertheless, I have
learned three things about love that I have found helpful in my own
life. This morning, I want to share the three with you.
I. Erich Fromm
First, back in high school and college I watched movies and heard
songs that told me I need only to find the right partner. This would
solve all my problems. I was encouraged to believe that love is the
outcome of a spontaneous, emotional reaction, the result of the
sudden grip of an irresistible feeling. This is how I first approached
dating. I found the first few days and weeks of a new relationship
very intense and exciting. However, after I was in such a relationship
for a time, I noticed that it was not a state of endless bliss. All the
nagging problems that go with human relationships had not
disappeared. Being with another person, I discovered, can be taxing
and demanding. Dating the same person over time required
sensitivity, understanding, compromise, patience, diplomacy, and
much attention and energy.
In time, I remembered Erich Fromm's words in his book about
loving. He wrote:
If two people who have been strangers, as all of us
are, suddenly let the wall between them break down,
and feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one
of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in
life. It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for
persons who have been shut off, isolated, without
love. This miracle of sudden intimacy is often
facilitated if it is combined with, or initiated by,
sexual attraction and sexual fulfillment. However,
this type of love is by its very nature not lasting. The
two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy
loses more and more of its miraculous character, until
their antagonism, their disappointments, their mutual
boredom kill whatever is left of the initial excitement.
In other words, Fromm was not comfortable with the phrase "falling
in love." To fall in love is to be swept up passively into a relationship
without taking deliberate responsibility for what we are doing. Most
of the time when we hear the word love on television or in the
movies, it refers to this passive collapse into the arms of another.
In the last few years people have come to speak of romance addiction.
I have heard romance addiction described as a psychological craving
for the high that people feel at the beginning of a new relationship.
So they fall in love and break up and fall in love again repeating this
pattern.
I came to agree with Erich Fromm, that mature love is not infatuation.
This realization hit home gradually. Slowly I abandoned my belief
in spontaneous chemistry. Mature love, the quality that is
characteristic of stable, satisfying long-term relationships is a
deliberate intentional decision--a judgment, a promise, an act of
conscious, intentional will. A strong feeling of attraction may
accompany it. However, if love were only a feeling, then no
foundation would exist for a relationship to last through the inevitable
problems.
In defining mature love, I begin by suggesting that we make an
intentional commitment.
II. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My second suggestion about love was hinted at by the writer Kurt
Vonnegut Jr. in a talk he gave a few years ago to the General
Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association. I am a fan of
Kurt Vonnegut. I like his imagination, his irony and his sense of
justice. German-American parents in Indianapolis raised Vonnegut.
In his lecture he said:
The Christian preachers exhort their listeners to love
one another, and to love their neighbors and so on.
Love is simply too strong a word to be much use in
ordinary, day-to-day relationships. Love is for Romeo
and Juliet.
In one of his books Vonnegut puts his doubts about the word love
even more bluntly. He writes:
I am highly suspicious of love. If somebody says "I
love you," to me, I feel as though I had a pistol
pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under
such conditions but that which the pistol-holder
requires? "I love you, too." The hell with love, and
hooray for something else, which I can't even begin to
name or describe.
Like Vonnegut, all my life I have been very reserved in my use of the
word love. My position is something like the position of the Jews in
ancient Israel toward the word "God." They did not allow the word
God to be spoken. Priests who copied and recopied the Hebrew Bible
left a blank space instead of writing Yahweh. Yahweh itself means
in Hebrew "my name is nameless" or "my name is the one with no
name."
The ancient Jewish philosophers did not intend to oppress people
with their strict rule against making any image of God or of
pronouncing God's name. They intended to free people from the
worship of idols so that people could think of God as the unity
underlying the universe. They wanted people to experience God not
as a symbol but as the undefinable ground of all existence. The more
mature people's understanding of God became, the more people
moved beyond words.
This is what Kurt Vonnegut suggested about the word love. The
more mature our understanding of love, the more we move beyond
words.
I have seen great importance attached to declarations of love. I have
seen the word LOVE worshiped on a pedestal like a golden calf. I
have heard couples say that, no matter what else they do, if they
continue to say that they love each other, everything will be all right.
In my role as a minister I have heard people say, "Yes, I made a
mistake; yes, I was rude; yes, I was late for dinner; yes, I made love
to another person; yes, I got drunk--but I still love my partner with
all my heart." This declaration of love is supposed to overcome all
transgressions, all conflicts, all problems. In many relationships this
attempt to make an idol out of the word love holds relationships
together for long periods. The symbol can sustain the relationship
long after the substance is gone.
However, I have come to believe that mature love dwells in
substance, not in the symbol. Love is people being honest with each
other, respecting each other, trying to understand each other, trying to
be sensitive to each other's needs for days, weeks, months and years.
My love for others exists in my honesty, my respect, my
understanding, my caring and my commitment to others.
Mature love exists in behavior, not in rhetoric. The essence of love
is an uplifting and constructive action toward another human being.
Love is not a state of being; it is an act, a deed, a happening, a daily
demonstration.
The substance replaces the symbol, and we move toward an
experience beyond words. Vonnegut says: "To hell with love and
hooray for something else, which I can't even begin to name or to
describe."
III. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
Erich Fromm teaches that mature love is first an act of will, not the
sudden grip of an irresistible feeling. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. suggests that
love is substance instead of a symbol. I want to add a third element
to complete this brief description. I first started to think about this
third element when I began to study the writings of a woman born in
the German-speaking part of Switzerland. She came to the University
of Chicago after World War II. Her name is Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.
Kubler-Ross teaches that love is the ability to say hello and good-bye.
The longer I live, the more conscious I become that life is a process
of many births and many deaths. People are constantly moving in
and out of my life. As I see these changes I become more and more
aware that to love fully I need to learn how to let go of the past and
greet the future. I need to learn to trust in my heart that every
good-bye will lead to a new hello.
In my life I have had times when I found it difficult letting go and
saying good-bye. I have experienced times when I did not trust that
another moment, would come, that I would experience another birth,
another spring. I wanted to grab onto the good moments and I try to
make them eternal and universally significant. Some times in my life
I have distrusted the future, I have feared that I would not have new
experiences.
However, over forty-seven years I have learned to be open to that
which is new in my life. I have decided to welcome new people, new
ideas, new experiences. As part of the same process, I have learned
to move beyond the past. I have chosen to work through my feelings
of grief, to work through my anger, my denial, my depression.
I see this need to learn to say hello and good-bye most clearly in
relationship to children. The birth of a child requires both a big
welcome and a willingness to say a good-bye too much of past
freedoms. The growth of a child is a constant series of good-byes and
hellos reaching all the way into adulthood. If a parent is afraid to let
go, afraid to say a good-bye, then both the parent and the child suffer.
However, the need to say hello and good-bye is equally important in
all mature, loving relationships, not just in the relationship between
a parent and a child. In a long-term relationship with another person,
it is essential that I be willing to allow that person to grow and unfold
in his or her own way. It is also essential that I learn to let go of the
disappointments and the tragedies, to deal with the consequences
without denying what has happened, but then to put the bad
experiences behind me, say good-bye to them, and move on.
In this regard, faith continues to be a category that means a lot to me.
I find that I do not experience mature love once and for all. I reach
a certain level of maturity and then things change, people change, I
change. I need to say good-bye to the past and embrace the present
and the future. Having faith is a good way to describe how I make it
through these experiences. I bring forth a courage at the core of my
being, a trust that life is worth all that goes into it.
These are three elements I include in my definition of mature love.
First, love is an act of will and not a spontaneous emotional reaction.
Second, love is substance and not a symbol, and third, love requires
an ability to say good-bye and hello.
The roots of these three points I learned first from my family of
origin. They were the people who first taught me about love. This is
where we all first learn about love, from the embraces of our fathers
and mothers.
Whatever way we express our love, it is fundamental to human life.
A scholar asked Jesus "Of all the commandments, which is the most
important?"
Jesus answered, "The first is . . . 'you are to love . . . God with all
your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with
all your energy.' The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as
yourself.'"
Amen
Last modified: Mon Jul 13 14:07:18 EDT 1998
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