Love Is Not Enough
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham
February 14, 2010
READINGS
NKJ 1 Corinthians 13:1 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. 2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing. 4 Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; 5 does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; 6 does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part. 10 But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. 13 And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
“All
You Need Is Love,” The Beatles, by
Lennon/McCartney, From The
Blue Album
Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love.
There's nothing you can do that can't be done.
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game
It's easy.
There's nothing you can make that can't be made.
No one you can save that can't be saved.
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you
in time - It's easy.
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love.
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
There's nothing you can know that isn't known.
Nothing you can see that isn't shown.
Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be.
It's easy.
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
All you need is love (all together now)
All you need is love (everybody)
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
SERMON
We all know the story of Cinderella. Poor girl, forced to do all the chores in the house – tough chores, too – persecuted by her evil stepmother and her two ugly but empowered step-sisters, suddenly transformed by the intervention of a fairy godmother into the beautiful and highly desirable maiden who catches the eye of Prince Charming; by good fortune, her feet are perfectly sized to fit into the glass slippers, which alerts the prince to his perfect mate. They go off in a blaze of glory and live happily ever after, cheered and adored by all.
Yeah, right!
Time went by, and the glass slippers began to pinch Cinderella’s feet, but Prince Charming insisted she wear them – all the time! – in memory of their first infatuation with each other. The castle, beautiful as it was on the outside, was cold and drafty on the inside, but the Prince wouldn’t hear of letting Cinderella bundle up in sweaters; it took the edge off her beauty, he said. Consequently, Cinderella lived in mortal fear of catching a cold, and she refused to leave the palace even though even the bed was uncomfortable because she could sense the presence of even so slight a distortion as a pea through many layers of mattresses – oh, sorry, that’s another fairy tale! The Prince turned out to exceedingly charming in small groups, but when he became King he found that he was tongue-tied in public, so afraid of making a mistake that he remained mute in front of groups of more than three or four of his counselors. Their children were no bargain, either. The eldest – Hermione, as I recall – lived in mortal terror of fire; she went about dousing the candles and hearth-fires throughout the castle, which only made Cinderella’s fear of catching a cold worse. Their son, Henry – Harry, as he was known to his friends – was a bit of a hellion, always getting into trouble of one sort or another, lighting candles just to drive Hermione crazy, leaving doors open to let in the draught which made Cinderella quite cross, and speaking inappropriately to strangers, which worried his father no end. And the youngest, Helen, was mortified at how weird and eccentric her family was and couldn’t wait to get out of the house and live on her own.
You’ll be happy to know that a bit of family counseling and a new commitment by each of them to file off their own rough edges led them to new happiness – they didn’t live happily ever after, exactly, but at least they realized that happiness was in their own hands, not in their fate. Not quite so happy an ending, but more practical, on the whole.[i]
When I help to prepare a couple for a wedding, one of my jobs is to try to explode the Cinderella/Prince Charming myth and to let them in on the secret that married life is not a bed of roses – or rather, to remind them that roses come with thorns. In the throes of having fallen deeply in love, they don’t necessarily want to hear this, or they deny that it applies to them, or they imagine that they will make up for all the defects of their parents’ marriages, which they acknowledge fall short of their own ideals and dreams for their lives together. I suggest to them that their relationship will suffer from something known as the seven-year-itch, when they suddenly look around and realize that they find other people attractive – perhaps more attractive than the partner to whom they’ve chosen to commit their lives. Like Cinderella, they’ve imbibed a little too much of the Beatles – “All you need is Love; It’s Easy.”
As it turns out, you need more than falling in love to make a relationship that will last for a lifetime. Couples who stay together find out that adjustments are necessary and, if they are wise, they recognize that each of them need to make some changes in themselves to accommodate the person they married, who is not quite the same as the person they thought they were marrying. Skills of communication and a bit of selflessness come to be more important than whatever it was that drew them together initially – glass slippers, good clothes, beauty and charm – whatever it was.
Hafiz – a fourteenth century poet, the most beloved poet of Persia, whom Emerson called “a poet for poets” – wrote this about what makes love work:
Even
after
all this time
the sun never says to the earth,
"You owe me."
Look
what happens
with a love like that--
it lights the whole world.[ii]
Of course, there are more types of love than those that lead to the bliss of lovers and of marriages. The tales told of St. Valentine to explain the origins of Valentines Day illustrate several of these. One tale tells us that St. Valentine, a Christian priest who was martyred in the fourth century, fell in love with his jailor’s daughter and wrote her a loving note from his jail cell, signing it “Your Valentine,” as we do to this day. That sort of love is known as eros, from which we derive the word “erotic.” Another story is told about how the children whom Valentine had taught loved and missed him so much that they threw missives over the walls of the jail to him expressing their affection for him – something we call filial or brotherly love. Another tale says that Valentine healed the daughter of his jailer of blindness – an illustration of agape, selfless love. There is also, though not in the stories of St. Valentine, sorgé, love of family.
These types of love also have as one outcome falling out of love. Love of family is a wonderful idea, and the moment a child is is born we normally feel a surge of love for this new being. After, oh, give or take something like two years, when the child develops a will of its own – the “terrible twos,” it’s sometimes called – and parents are a little less naïve about their undying love for the child and may even consider the wisdom of giving it back; tragically, some parents to just that, giving the child to their own parents, for example. And that’s to say nothing of having a teenager or two in the house!
Sometimes we might feel like we want to give our whole family back; perhaps during tense dinners with all the relatives at Christmas time; or then there’s the fantasy many of us have that we must have been adopted, so different are we from our parents and the rest of our family – sort of like Helen, the third child of the Cinderella-Charming family.
We might find a church which seems just perfect for us; we might feel that at last we have come home to a community of like-minded people with whom we can finally share things about our lives we never could before – only to discover that there are a few difficult people who rub us the wrong way – just like in any family or home.
We come to be lovable because we are loved. Someone in our lives – parents, siblings, teachers, mentors – has given us an experience of being loved so that we in turn can love. The poet Hafiz puts it like this:
How
did the rose
ever open its heart
and give the world all its beauty?
It felt the encouragement of light against its being,
otherwise we all remain too
frightened.[iii]
Jesus says to his disciples, “[John 13:34] I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” In the first epistle of John, we are told: “[1 John 4:7-8] Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” More astonishingly, Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “[Matthew 5:43-44] 43 "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Love of friends, lovers, and families – that we can understand, but love of enemies – that’s tough. Almost as bad is the instruction to “Love your neighbor as yourself,” where “your neighbor” means any other human being – complete strangers of whatever despised group or nation who need help, assistance, love. It took Gandhi – a great lover of Jesus but a Hindu, not a Christian – to demonstrate how that might actually work in practice, and his example and commitment to satyagraha, soul force, inspired countless others to practice love of enemies in the form of non-violence, among them Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday we celebrated last month; and Nelson Mandela, the 20th anniversary of whose “Walk to Freedom” was celebrated just in the past week. It’s tough to love like that; hard enough to stay in love with our marriage partner, our family, our friends, our church.
And yet we must love, and we must make it work. The poet Rumi was born in Afghanistan in the thirteenth century and driven out by violence in his homeland along with his family when he was eight years old – an old and recurring story in Afghanistan, as it happens – to settle in Turkey for the rest of his life, where he wrote some of the greatest poems in world literature, deeply influential throughout the Islamic world and today one of the most widely read poets in the English language. He wrote:
A lifetime without Love is of no account
Love is the Water of Life
Drink it down with heart and soul![iv]
I hate to contradict those great philosophers John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who maintain that “All you need is love;” actually, they’re right about that. But they’re not right when they say “It’s easy.” Love – all the different kinds of love – love is a lot more complicated than their lovely song suggests. Love takes work. Love takes understanding. Love takes communication and the ability to extend love even when it’s not “deserved,” even when loving is hard, even when we must love despite sorrow and loss. As Mary Oliver puts it,
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
We do indeed live in this world, and in this world love is more complicated than in the fairy tales where love leads quite simply and without much effort to living “happily ever after.” Love molds us and shapes us and transforms us in unexpected ways; love awakens us and causes us the greatest of agonies; love – at least the love of God for us – never fails. Maybe the Beatles need to be supplemented with the more comprehensive words of the Apostle Paul:
[1 Corinthians 13:]4 Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; 5 does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; 6 does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never fails.... 13 And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
I close with these words from Kahlil Gibran, “On Love,”
When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams
as the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth....
When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, "I am in the heart of God."
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.[v]
Amen