Valentine's Day brings out the cynic in me. Take this Valentine's Day, for instance. Before I got out of bed my wife had already lavished three bags of chocolate chip cookies and a card on me. I was just thinking about getting a card for her, but had not as yet acted. So on my morning walk I stopped by Village Green Books on Monroe Avenue to buy one.
Now, I am not a romantic - you might say I'm romantically challenged, like the man whose wife repeatedly complained that he never told her that he loved her. Finally, he turned to his wife and said, "My dear, when I married you twenty years ago I told you that I loved you; if it changes, I will let you know." And so those flowery cards with the sentimental, but bad, poetry have no appeal. I look for amusing cards that are gentle, loving, clever. However, the vast majority of the commercial stock are crude cards of unadulterated carnal lust that try to be funny, but are not - unless one has a sick sense of humor.
Valentine's Day is really not religious in nature; it commemorates no famous person, no great battle, no seasonal shift - just human affection. It is a simple celebration of love. But, sadly, there is little love in the cards at Village Green or anywhere else I have shopped. It is a battle between sentimental tastelessness and erotic crudeness - which I declare to be a draw. That only confirms my disillusion.
However, for some strange reason I choose to preach on love every year on the Sunday nearest to Valentine's Day. It seems I ought to do it. But there are times I wonder, with comedienne Lily Tomlin, "If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?"
My cynicism stems from the discrepancy between the paean to love I feel called upon to preach, and the reality of relationships which seem to "have a way of rubbing our noses in the slime of life," as Thomas Moore puts it in Soul Mates. That's not very romantic.
How, then, can I extol the meaning of marriage when I know how many currently married and formerly married people are in pain? When there are those among us who have lost loved ones? How celebrate the family when there are those among us who have suffered abuse in the family? How can I speak of family when family means so many things among us? We have traditional nuclear families, husband-wife older couples, two-parent working families, like-sex parent families, single-parent families, adoptive families, unmarried families, surrogate mother families, blended families with children of two households, and single people living alone.
Therefore, I give no advice, only reflections on how hard it is to love. We human beings seem to be like a group of porcupines huddling together against the bitter cold of winter, trying to be close, yet pricking each other in the process. In the very act of trying to be intimate, we often manage to hurt one another. And yet, I agree with the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevski that "hell is the suffering of being unable to love." All of us yearn to love and to be loved. Being a minister provides a privileged vantage point to see love lived over the years.
I think about weddings of which I have read - and weddings I have performed. I remember one bride who began hysterical laughter in her parent's living room just before the vows - we had to wait an eternity for her to regain composure; and there was the time I had to entertain guests of a couple late for their wedding because of a blizzard; and I will never forget the living room wedding when the videographer buzzed about like an annoying fly.
Thomas More notes a wedding in which the father of the bride accidentally stepped on her train, which ripped off at the waist, taking a good part of the dress with it. "There, in the middle of the church, the ceremonious music playing, the attendants swarmed around the bride," he writes, "protecting her modesty like the nymphs of Artemis at her bath, while one of them stitched her up before the wedding continued."
And then I read of the progeny of marriage, one father who "had just driven 1,000 miles in a small car with two small boys - his sons - I can relate to that.
'After a hundred miles,' he reported, 'I understood the meaning of original sin ... and after a thousand, the meaning of total depravity!'"
Now I admit this is not your typical Valentine's sermon, full of phrases praising lofty love. Perhaps you will say I am being too cynical. But the point of these stories is that they have stripped relationships, marriage and family of some of the frills and left us laughing at our human frailties and presumptions - because despite it all - we keep on trying to relate to one another - in love.
Traditional family is the great cry of conservatives in our time, like Dr. James Dobson and his Focus on the Family, calling us back to the presumably idyllic 1950's. Where are the "good old days" when families were more like Ozzie and Harriet and The Waltons than The Simpsons? I had in mind the Bart Simpsons of Fox cartoon fame, but I might as well have meant the O.J. Simpsons of real life fame - not a flattering comparison in either case.
However, when one looks back it becomes clear we have romanticized those glorious days. The nostalgia for the 1950's is like children's recollection of their summer vacation - at first they remember the good and the bad, but eventually all they can talk about is the good. For example, by the end of the 1950's 25% of Americans, 40-50 million people, were poor, compared to about 13% and 33 million now - not good, but better.
And, of course, there were other depictions of the family in the 1950's, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman, not exactly happy and heroic figures. It was not so much that the family of the 1950's protected us from the outside world as that the family hid much of its trouble which is now out in the open.
And the relative health of the 1950's family can be traced in part to rising wages, government subsidy for housing, and community support - you know "it takes a whole village to raise a child." And yet Dr. Dobson and others tend to oppose all those public policies which would support today's family, which must often send two workers to the marketplace, take extra jobs, work overtime to support a family. The marketplace has invaded the family and there is no one to help.
But, apart from these social dynamics, the hard truth is that we all live in dysfunctional families - some more dysfunctional than others, to be sure, but all with our own problems and failures. It has been ever thus. Do you remember Adam and Eve, the first dysfunctional family? This mythical family was in trouble from the beginning.
And take the biblical David of ancient Israel, whose father-in-law, King Saul, tried to kill him out of jealousy; David, who while married to Michal coveted the lovely Bathsheba and sent her husband Uriah off to the front of battle where he would surely be killed - and was; David, whose son Absalom rebelled against his father and was killed in battle, perhaps just retribution for sin, for the tragedy provoked his father into an outpouring of grief. Here was a dysfunctional family of mammoth proportions!
In families we are stuck with the people we're stuck with. To be sure, now and then, we can't stand being stuck and get out. We are in this dilemma of a situation that is too good to leave, but too bad to stay.
But this is Valentine's Day and I have spoken only of the downside, the pain of relationships. There are examples all about us of love that is deeper than romantic, more spiritual than erotic, more loyal than capricious.
It is my privilege to celebrate those rites of passage where love lives - birth, marriage and holy union, death. I recall a wedding rehearsal where members of the wedding party each spoke about their deep friendship with the bride and groom, while the parents had prepared a video of their children growing up. There is in such occasions a rare and wonderful look at the blessed continuity of human love in the family.
And farther on down the line, at times of death, there are the loving tributes to the departed - comments not only by friends and colleagues, but increasingly also by children who, in their grief, summon up the courage to speak of a parent. There is the growing practice of displaying memorabilia at memorial services - pictures and objects tracing the high points in a life - memories etched in love.
The family, in all its many configurations, embodies the mutual promise of a group that loves and cares about each other. We are creatures who make promises - and break them - and try to make amends. Keeping a promise is hardly suggested by the cards I found in the Village Green on Valentine's Day. Keeping a promise to love is altogether different from mere romance. It requires an irrational commitment but over time and trouble.
One of my favorite stories about that kind of family covenant is the tale of "The Peach Seed Monkey" told by Sam Keen. It is a quintessential father-son story - the epitome of trust, patience and loyalty. The father carved charming monkey figures out of tiny peach seeds. He gave one to his wife, Sam's mother, and promised one to Sam. Sam forgot the commitment until many years later when his father was near death. His father, eager to leave his life in love, struggled in his dying days to fulfill his promise, and did, though he broke one of the peach seed monkey's arms. He died, as Sam put it, "only at the end of his life....a peach seed monkey has become a symbol of all the promises which were made to me and the energy and care which nourished and created me as a human being. Each of us is redeemed from shallow and hostile life only by the sacrificial love and civility which we have gratuitously received.... (We) are the animal who makes promises."
In one of my wedding ceremonies I ask the couple this question: "Knowing what you know of each other and trusting in what you do not yet know, are you now ready to be married?" We know so little about each other no matter how long we have been together. And so we cast our lot with others based on trust - can we be mutually committed over time come what will? can we make an open-ended covenant that stretches to circumstances we cannot know or control? It is THE question of Valentine's Day.
Robert Fulghum, Unitarian Universalist minister and author, explored that question at the Orthodox Church Academy on the Island of Crete, and spoke about marriage with its director, Alexander Papederos. The custom of arranged marriages continues there. "The Cretans think romance is nice enough when it happens, but it is not a particularly good basis for marriage," Fulghum writes. "Papaderos had stumbled over a concept he had found in Western literature. "Making love." It confused him. "What is this making love?"
Fulghum explained, as delicately and discretely as he could. Papaderos replied that for Cretans "'making love' is a serious notion summarizing the process of marriage and families. When two families agree that a son and a daughter would suit one another, it is expected that over time the man and woman will work at becoming compatible partners in the same spirit one might work at achieving competence in a life's vocation. This is making love....Love is not something you fall into. Love and marriage are 'made.' Thus, in Cretan terms, when a married couple have been overheard arguing or fighting, the Cretans smile knowingly and say, 'Ah, they are making love.'"
Fulghum experienced this understanding of making love that New Years on Crete as an 88-year-old grandmother, blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, and shriveled by time and a hard life, through mountain living, world wars, and civil war challenged her children - men and women of middle age - to a can-you-top-this singing contest, and sang all the rest into exhaustion. It was a joyous and exuberant family occasion. When dinner was over she went into the kitchen, insisting on helping with the dishes. She came to the kitchen door with a bag of garbage and barked at her husband of sixty years. He groaned up out of his chair to do his duty, and she barked at him some more and he groaned back some more.
"'What's going on?' I asked Papaderos.
"'It seems her husband did not eat all of his salad and was singing off-key,' he explained. 'They are still making love - it takes forever.'"
And so it does, whether in the arranged marriages of a traditional culture or in the freedom of ours. I leave you with no advice - only this troubling question for Valentine's Sunday:
"If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, whom would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?"
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