The book of Love

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 15, 2015

Let’s talk about love on this Valentine’s weekend. How can we learn to love one another and this planet on which we live? How can we get better at receiving love? We take a lesson from “The Book of Love”.

Sermon

This weekend is all about love. We’ve been sending greetings of love to friends and family, special ones to partners, spouses and lovers. There are ironic greetings, romantic ones, sexy and sweet and grumpy ones. Love comes in all the shimmering, sparkling shades of the rainbow, including shades of gray. About which the UU group Leather and Grace has come out with a statement, you can look it up online.

You may have heard me say that the purpose of life is to learn to love and be loved. Just my opinion, with no bearing on what you believe about its purpose, but there it is.

It is important to me to be honest about love, but I can only be honest from my perspective, my studies, my experience. When I was in seminary we learned that love was an act of will. You choose every day to love the people you love, the way you love them. I was married to a man I met in seminary for seventeen years. I often heard him say this to other people, that love was an act of will. After many years, this was embarrassing, unsatisfying. I wanted to be loved passionately, because I was fabulous, I wanted to feel it. When, for many many reasons I decided to end the marriage, I wondered if he might be able just to will not to love me any more. Easier for everyone. It turned out to be awful, harder, crazier than that, as most of you who have gone through a divorce already know.

Some people say love is complicated. In the Christian Scriptures there is a description of love in the letter to the Corinthians.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

One thing I love about the Christian Scriptures is that they proclaim that God is love. That is a basic foundational proclamation in that major religion, and I appreciate its followers who hold fast to that and stand on it with both feet. I find it interesting that some people whose whole religion says “God is Love” also sometimes seem to imagine a God who is not patient and kind, who is envious and boastful, easily angered, and who DEFINITELY keeps a record of wrongs. Do they not read their own Scriptures?

Human love relationships aren’t always patient and kind, even though we want to be. It’s hard for us not to keep a record of wrongs. They say that the happiest relationships are the ones where people have bad memories. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there were many different loves, but never the same love twice.

Some of us are in love and others are between loves. Some are in long term relationships, and others are in ones that have just been born.

The text for this morning is a song sung by The Magnetic Fields

The book of love is long and boring
No one can lift the damn thing
It’s full of charts and facts and figures
And instructions for dancing

But I, I love it when you read to me
And you, you can read me anything

The book of love has music in it
In fact, that’s where music comes from
Some of it is just transcendental
Some of it is just really dumb

But I, I love it when you sing to me
And you, you can sing me anything

The book of love is long and boring
And written very long ago
It’s full of flowers and heart shaped boxes
And things we’re all too young to know

But I, I love it when you give me things
And you, you ought to give me wedding rings
I, I love it when you give me things
And you, you ought to give me wedding rings

Songwriters: Warren Davis, George Malone, Charles Patrick
Published by: Lyrics © BMG Rights Management US, LLC

You can sing me anything. You can read me anything. That’s courage. That’s vulnerability. Open to hearing about dumb things, transcendental things, instructions for dancing, opening heart shaped boxes. So many of us have rules about love. You open it, you close it. You dropped it, you pick it up. You hurt me, I hurt you. Don’t talk to me any more about former lovers, about money, about my drinking or using. For me, it’s nutrition or music theory. I don’t want to hear about bee pollen or 251 substitution in jazz or solfege. I’m wrong about that, though.

Is it courageous to be open to being read to, sung to from any page? There is plenty that masquerades as love, but is accusing and needy, tit-for-tat, abusive, eye-rolling, ignoring, withholding, or toxic. These are for sermons to come. The bad love series?

Real love is what we’re talking about today. It can still hurt. It can still be difficult, but in the midst of the struggle you have, at your core, the knowledge that this is what you want. The voice saying “GO! Save yourself!” Is not there. I think good love is medicine, whether it’s romantic, friendly, family, animal companion love, or watching videos of elephants who are friends with dogs. Love is powerful.

What about receiving it? Some of us are better at it than others I work on my own capacity to believe and feel that I’m loved. Every other day. Let me read you what I wrote about it.

I didn’t even make a New Year’s resolution this winter. I’m not sure why. For the last ten years or so my resolutions have been very short, and they have come to mind, one by one, in late December. The first one was “Tell the truth.” I never thought I didn’t tell the truth, but as I tried to keep the resolution on a moment-to-moment basis, I realized how much a sweet small lie lubricates social interactions. I found a way around those and counted down the months till I could indulge in them once again.

About some things, you just have to lie. Clogging, for example. I had someone ask me once how I liked clogging. (We are in the Appalachian region here, and there is a right good bit of it going on at fairs and festivals.) I answered that clog dancing held a special place in my heart. It does: the place where I imagine hell, if there were one, and what it would be like. For me it would be filling out paperwork while a flatbed truck full of white people clogged in the background to a speeded-up track of “Give Me That Old-Time Rock and RoiL” But I digress.

Telling the truth was what I paid attention to that whole year, discovering that my untruths mainly consisted of lies I told to myself.

“Be quiet” was the next year’s resolution. It floated into my head during prayer and meditation. I did an inner double take. “What? I make my living speaking. How can I be quiet?” The Universe responded with-well, with quiet. I had to figure it out. It turned out that I needed to pay attention to being quiet inside, to not having to have an answer for every question I was asked, to being content to let others dominate a group discussion, to not voicing every opinion that was in my head.

Over the years there have been some easy resolutions and some hard ones. Who could have known that the year I resolved to “enjoy life” would turn into one big challenge? There you go. The Universe/God/Spirit/Wisdom is like that sometimes.

This year no resolution came to mind. I’ve been working on a question, though: “What would it be like if you felt really loved?”

Maybe the resolution is to wonder about this question. When I feel loved, my mind breathes better. My body relaxes. My behavior steadies. Something in my spirit opens like a rose. I want to feel it if I can, from the people around me or from the Spirit of Love that flows like an ancient river through the universe.

On my first CD I printed a quotation from a letter Martha Graham sent to Agnes de Mille. According to Agnes de Mille: “I was bewildered and worried that my entire scale of values was untrustworthy…. I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.

Martha said to me, very quietly, “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”

When I feel loved, it’s easy to keep the channel open, and that’s really what I want.

Maybe I could get really good at loving the world just every other day. Maybe on that day I could love myself as well. Just every other day, let go of self-improvement and challenging other people’s mistakes. I invite you to think about doing this, too. Every other day, maybe we could let go of wondering if we are good enough, of wondering if we are doing it right. Every other day rest, if we can, in the warm animal pleasures of wind, water, food, earth, friends, love, and beauty. Every other day put in abeyance the drive to feel that we are smart enough, thin enough, cool enough, doing enough.

The reason I wonder about doing it every other day is that, having read Kant, I have to ask what the world would be like if all of us did this every day. I’m not sure how well it would work. Maybe we would melt into self-satisfied goo. One the other hand, the world would be sour and clammy if we didn’t do it at all. So, on alternate days we can all agree that this is New Age pap, and we can sharpen our intellectual claws in ourselves and one another with edgy glee.

It’s February. Surrounded by talk of love, I’m growing aware that I do have a resolution for the year: I get to wonder about love. Maybe being grounded in love makes change easier, rather than lulling us into staying the same. Maybe if we felt safer we would grow more freely. What if we felt really loved? This year, I aim to find out.

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