All Kinds of Love
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham
February 11, 2007
If you have somehow remained blissfully unaware of the near approach of Valentine’s Day, our Chocolate Auction after the service will bring you to your feet cheering for the day dedicated to Love. Like most other holidays, there are significant merchandising opportunities on Valentine’s Day. Flowers are mandatory, of course, but teddy bears have become a specialty of the holiday as well. Hallmark and all of the other card makers have a field day. Candy is big for the holiday, especially chocolates. I just learned that my Valentine is mad if I don’t buy a certain kind of chocolate. How would they know? About 8 billion conversation hearts, the little candies that say “Be Mine” or “Kiss Me” or the like, will be produced this year, enough to stretch from Rome, Italy to Valentine, Ariz. and back again 20 times—or, in more familiar terms, ten times around the world. And of course, if you really love someone, diamonds would definitely be in order.
All of this for a holiday named after a Christian priest in Rome named Valentine who took pity on young Christians forbidden by the emperor to marry because single men proved to be better soldiers. Valentine’s illegal weddings to enable dodging the draft resulted in his own martyrdom. I’m not sure where the diamonds and chocolates come in.
I do know where those conversation hearts come in: somewhere in grade school. Take yourself back to those days for a moment; if you were anything like me, you were probably shy like Woodrow the clarinet from our children’s story. My most acute memory is from when I was in fifth grade. I was new to the school that year and really didn’t know much of anybody, while all of the other kids seemed to have known each other since kindergarten. It was of the essence that any attraction I expressed to a girl that Valentine’s Day be anonymous, so I snuck little Valentine’s cards into two girls’ desks. The trouble with anonymity, of course, is that it’s hard for your intended to respond even if they’d like to! It took me another five years to get around to actually letting one of those girls know I’d been interested in her since fifth grade—not that we were a good match, mind you!
Those little Valentine’s Day forays represent the first little flutters of what will someday turn into romantic interest. A few years later, hormones surging, we plunge into adolescence and heartthrobs and think we’re really beginning to get somewhere. Heartbreak follows heartthrob and we gradually realize that our parents and older siblings were right when they told us we’d go through some puppy love before we were ready to get serious. Our feelings are too new, too raw and unpracticed to be ready for extended commitments, and our parents worry that they haven’t taught us well enough how to handle the tough work of being responsible for ourselves while being in love. Ready or not, we’ve come face to face with one of the most overwhelming kinds of love, known by the Greeks as eros, or romantic love. If fortune smiles on us, our passions can lead us into a deep, lifelong commitment which can carry us even when the heat of passion begins to wane. If we are less fortunate, we may miss that opportunity, or the passion may die too soon or even turn to hatred.
There is another kind of love which we learn in our growing years, though we don’t often use the word “love” for our less passionate relationships. This love, known to the Greeks as philia or brotherly/sisterly love, is less intense, more often referred to as friendship than love, but long-term filial relationships with friends made in school, in church, at work or in our communities and neighborhoods can be deeply sustaining for our living and working in the world and should be cherished for the steadier glow they provide us.
Some say that eros is a force of nature whose purpose is to trick us into getting married so that we can raise children in a family. It often seems to work that way, but today we have significantly expanded our understanding of marriage beyond just the function of childrearing. We recognize that marriage provides companionship and solidarity at whatever age and regardless of sexual preference or gender orientation.
If we do become parents, we discover yet another kind of love—the intense, protective, deeply committed love for a being completely dependent on our care for its very survival. This love, too, is a force of nature which serves to enable children to bloom and grow. We know that if children are denied affection and tender care when they are very young, they will find it difficult to fall in love themselves as adults and they may fail to thrive and grow altogether. The love and care we exchange within families—storge in the Greek—is absolutely critical to the ongoing survival of the human race.
There is another aspect to this matter of having children. We come at last to understand what it was our parents were up against when we were the age of our own children. All of the utterly irrational things they did to us suddenly become not only plausible but even occasionally wise! I remember visiting my family when our youngest was about six; we were at a state park and climbing up a watchtower when he threw a bit of a temper tantrum. We finally worked it out together and made our way up to the top. My father leaned over quietly and said, “Well, now you see what it was like to take care of you when you were his age!” Much as it pained me, I had to admit that he was right; it began to seem that they hadn’t done quite such a bad job in bringing me up as I had sometimes thought.
It seems that every generation of parents has to struggle to learn how to teach our children well, as the popular song has it. We swing back and forth between too much authority and too much liberty. We determine not to repeat our parents’ mistakes only to discover sometimes that those were their wisest choices. Any of us who are tempted to ignore discipline in the name of love have learned that indulgence is quite distinct from love, and that real parental love must sometimes be firmer than feels easy for us. My family was perhaps too literal in applying the advice of Proverbs [13:24] “Those who spare the rod hate their children, but those who love them are diligent to discipline them,” often abbreviated as “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” On the other hand, wise parents recognize that good discipline is essential to raising happy children; sparing children the need to obey rules makes for unhappy children and parents as well.
Parental love is often pushed to its limits when our children reach adolescence. Our affection begins to wane or at least to be tempered. Our adolescents’ affection for us frays as well. Perhaps all of this sturm und drang has as its real purpose transforming us into parent birds who serve their nestlings best by ejecting them from the sometimes too comfortable nest and forcing them to try out their own wings. This may be a kind of love, but it can be very trying when we’re in the middle of it.
All of these kinds of love coming in many different flavors at various points in our lives are bound up with our emotions and are affected by our feelings, which may vary from day to day and from year to year. Romantic love, eros, is perhaps the most changeable. It is almost inevitable that the wonderful intensity of romantic love begins to fade over time, and we speak in jest of a two year or a seven year itch in marriages–times at which the first fires of love are fading and we begin to wonder if we might have made a tragic mistake in falling head over heals in love. If only there were a way to make the fire burn with an even flame our whole lives!
A young couple came by last week to consider whether they would like to be married here at Second Parish in the fall. They were very much in love. In the course of our conversation we explored some of the issues that would be important to them in making their marriage last. They were both unhappy with the example of married life their own parents had set; one’s parents fought endlessly over trivial issues, yelling at each other miserably; the other’s father was domineering and pushed and pushed until his wife couldn’t take anymore and finally fought back. They were determined to behave differently in their own marriage, but of course the only role models they had were the ones they had grown up with. It is certainly possible for us to be different than our parents, but we will face a powerful temptation to repeat old patterns unless we are intentional in orienting our own lives differently.
They had both been raised in Catholic families but had drifted away and didn’t feel that they could have a Catholic wedding and maintain their integrity. There were too many points on which they found themselves unable to accept the doctrine and practice of the church in which they were raised. One has a sister who is gay and feels unable to simply accept the attitudes of the church toward gays in particular and toward women in general. At the same time, they wanted to find a way to include and honor God in their commitment to each other. They wanted a church that regarded all people as having inherent worth and dignity, and they felt a Unitarian Universalist church would be a place they could experience and share that respect. I think their desire to include God in their ceremony while maintaining their integrity is a good omen for the success of their marriage.
There is another kind of love, the kind of love Jesus talks about in the Sermon on the Mount when he says:
[Matthew 5:43-48] "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, 45 so that you may be
children of your Father in heaven…. 46 For if you love those who love you,
what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if
you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others?
Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your
heavenly Father is perfect.
This kind of love—loving the one who does not and probably never will love you—is different than the kinds of love we’ve been talking about because it’s not just based on emotion or feelings or mutual interest; it’s an intentional sort of loving that doesn’t just come over us but has to be chosen. At the same time, I think we have to recognize that we can’t force this kind of loving or we will become resentful. Perhaps the clue is in that puzzling final line: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” We certainly aren’t and can’t be perfect, and trying will only make us prideful fakes. We can only orient ourselves toward such perfection, make it a direction, not an achievement we will look back upon with satisfaction. Here’s another place where Jesus refers to this puzzling kind of selfless love, and here he’s quoting directly from the Hebrew Bible:
[Matthew 22:35-40 O]ne of them, a lawyer, asked him a
question to test him. 36 "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the
greatest?" 37 [Jesus] said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God
with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' 38 This
is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: 'You shall
love your neighbor as yourself.' 40 On these two commandments hang all the law
and the prophets."
I have to admit I’m a little puzzled about the first part, “You shall love the Lord you God with all your heart,” and so on, and I suspect some of you are as well. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is familiar and intriguing; in another context we have the story of the Good Samaritan to help explicate who my neighbor is; but what about that first part? The reality is that there is some ground of all being, something greater than all humans, than the earth, even than the galaxy, which we stumblingly call the Spirit of Life, a Higher Power, or the Lord God. Every attempt we make to characterize that something is bound to go astray, because it has to fall outside all of our normal categories, analogies, or models. But something there is which is greater than all this, and it is that something, that greatness, that Spirit of Life, that God if you will, that we are to love first and foremost, above all particular loves of friends, lovers, children, or family. Every earthly love will fail us at some point or other, but if we orient instead to that other source of love, we can be sustained in our inner being and in turn learn to love our neighbor near and far as ourselves.
This is an odd sort of love, deriving not from feelings or emotions or hormones but from an orientation of ourselves to something greater than ourselves. This kind of love is possible for us only because we are, all of us, loved into being by a long chain of parents, remote ancestors, accidents of fate, of the earth and the universe. We are here, we are alive, we have the precious gift of life, and for that we give thanks and love. We are able to love because we have been loved, literally by our parents and family but more remotely by everything that has preceded us back to the dawn of unknowability which we can call, for lack of a better name, God. This kind of love, this divine and selfless love, is given the name agape in Greek.
We have been talking about all kinds of love, but this kind of love infuses the others, enables us to be intentional in our loving, allows us to love without grasping or holding on to the other, calls on us to love others as we love ourselves. This is the love Rilke refers to in our reading as a great work. We have spoken of romantic love because most of us can identify with those experiences in our own history. But romantic love has its limits, it can grow stale over time, and finally it comes to an end. This other kind of love, this agape, enables us to be clear-sighted in all of our other loving and allows us to survive the loss of other loves by bringing us back to a higher, deeper, divine love in which we live, and move and have our being.
My spiritual friends, what if, this Valentine’s Day, we could recover the excitement we had when we were kids, eager to love and be loved—or at least infatuated—but do it as we are now, older and wiser and more confident and able to love without requiring anything in return? If we could combine that youthful innocence with our life experience, we would be able to experience a love that doesn’t end, a love that could hold us and sustain us even through the loss of love.
The Apostle Paul speaks of this kind of love as he compares it favorably to all of the other accomplishments people boast about in the church he’s writing to:
[I Corinthians 13:4] Love is patient; love is kind; love
is not envious or boastful or arrogant [5] or rude. It does not insist on its
own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing,
but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes
all things, endures all things. 8 Love never ends…. 13 And now faith, hope,
and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
“Love never ends; the greatest of these is love.”
May this love bear us up this Valentine’s Day and every day, and may we become channels of this love even as we ourselves are loved.
Amen