So many songs about love

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 14, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

What kinds of love are there? What makes love good? How do you know if you love someone? How can we get better at love?

Years ago I worked in an office with Pat, a friend and co-author. Pat talked about love all the time. He preached in a country church and got complaints from the members about how all he talked about was love. “Love, love, love,” one of the elders would say, frustrated and derisive. “That’s all you talk about.” The mailman, Perry, would come every afternoon. A tall bald man with a mustache and skin the color of coffee, Perry would wave as he came in with the mail. “Hey, Perry!” we’d say. On his way out, he’d give a little salute. Pat would call out, “WE LOVE YOU, PERRY!” I’d see Perry through the glass door, smiling and shaking his head a little.

Whenever Pat would tell me he loved me, I would say “Yeah, yeah. You love everybody. What does that even mean?” He’d say it meant that he felt positive feelings about someone, that he wished the best for them, that he wanted the light to shine on that person, that he’d keep their secrets, unless telling them would get a laugh in public.

I thought love was something to be handed out with care. Somewhere I’d gotten the idea that love meant putting someone else’s needs above your own. I had two small boys I’d have given my life for, some animals I’d loved wholeheartedly, a few best friends. I loved Pat, but if it were him or me, it’d have to be him. You know what I mean?

Thinking about this again has been one of the ripples made by a little book called The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. The Japanese author talks about her things as if they were alive. You don’t want to tie your socks in a knot in the drawer, she says. They have worked hard for you, bearing your weight, living between your feet and your shoes. After you wash them, put them tenderly in the drawer to rest, in a way that’s not stressful for them. I was charmed by this, although I thought it would be exhausting to go around thanking things as if they were alive. Then I realized I didn’t know why this would be exhausting, so I thought I’d experiment for a few days. The first thing I bowed to and thanked was the coffee pot after pouring my mug of espresso. Next was the pink tulips on the kitchen table. I thanked my socks, but I decided they liked being knotted up in the drawer all cozy and undemanding.

As it turns out, thanking things was not a zero-sum activity. The more thankful I was the more thankfulness I felt. I thought about Pat, and about the people who say the more love you give, the more you have to give. That works unless you believe love means you have to put other people ahead of yourself if you love them. I realized I don’t believe that any more. I don’t even know where that belief came from. Not from the Bible, which is poetic and very sensible about love. The most famous passage about love is I Corinthians 13. “Love is always patient and kind. It is never jealous. Love is never boastful or conceited. It is never rude or selfish. It does not take offense and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people’s sins, but delights in the truth. It is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.” Loving like that would take toughness and commitment, and I can’t go to “enduring whatever comes,” having worked with battered women for years in South Carolina. The rest of it is something you can really work with when trying to figure out what love is, and if you love someone right, and if they love you right.

I think that idea of putting others ahead of yourself comes from a medieval idea of “courtly love,” which is an idealized love, a noble love that has very little to do with having a relationship with the object of your love so much as it has to do with performing services for the beloved. You love them in a romantic and idealized way, you shine your love on them like a beam, and they consent to receive it.

Real love has to do with a day to day negotiation of whose needs take precedence at which time. Your well being is affected by theirs, so it is mutually beneficial for both people to be doing as well as possible.

Is this true just for partners or is it true between parents and children, friends and other beloveds? We only use the one word, “love,” to describe how we feel about a spouse, a house, a cereal, West Texas, and all kinds of things. As most of you know, the Greeks had four separate words for love. There is unconditional love, agape. This is used in the Christian Scriptures for the love of humans for God, and the love of God for humanity.

Eros is passion, being engulfed by beauty, stunned and lit up by desire. It is mostly, but not only, for lovers. You can feel that way about nature at times, too, art and music, dance. Lit up and carried away. It’s a powerful energy. Philia is affection between equals. Family and friends, the way you love going to the movies or hiking. Storge is also used for family love, but it’s a love out of duty, loving them because what are you going to do, they’re family. It has a strong whiff of just putting up with it.

If I no longer believe that I have a limited amount of love to give, maybe the more I love, the more love I’ll have to give.

And if I were a sweet and earnest minister, I’d end there with a comment about loving the people and things that come my way, and we’d be in a pink hearts and candy mood because this is Valentine’s day, but I can’t do that. Because that’s depressing. You know why? Because it’s not true. And lack of truth is depressing.

Love is hard. I don’t care whether you are loving a friend or a child, a brother or a lover, love is hard. You worry if your love is enough for them. You worry whether you are lovable enough, and are they just fooled into thinking you are? You worry about messing up the relationship or being drained by it. You worry because your loving them doesn’t seem to be enough to make them stop taking the pills or drinking, it’s not enough to keep them always safe.

Having real relationships is about talking in an openhearted way with someone who could break you. Letting go of being mad, or well defended with sarcasm and an ironic remove. It means struggling to understand them before being understood by them. It means doing what you say you’ll do and trusting them to do the same. It means making decisions to leave if a heart connection isn’t possible or if they love drinking more than they love you.

Children are scary. You don’t know what can happen to them. You worry that you’ll break them. What will you do if one of the tigers: addiction, violence, derision, mental illness, physical illness, accident leap out of the forest as they are walking innocently by and snatch them into a place where you can’t reach them?

Some among us feel loved, and some feel unlovable. If our parents or care givers were unwilling or unable to give us love in a way that we could feel it as love, we tell ourselves the story that it must be because we are unlovable. None of us is unlovable.

Love won’t fix everything. You will find that UUs sometimes declare that love will fix people, situations, behaviors. Love is a power and it can do a lot but it can’t fix everything. Some things can’t be fixed. Sometimes we love broken people. It is heartbreaking. Still, we must not protect ourselves from heartbreak by holding ourselves aloof from love. Our hearts, by the end of our lives, should be scarred and full, broken over and over, tenderized.

The Painted Drum
– Louise Erdrich,

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

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