"The Pain of Too Much Tenderness"
Unitarian Universalist Church of Muncie
February 14, 2010
© 2010 by Beth Lefever

I want you to rest for a moment in the beauty of (Gibran's reading on love).Whether you are in love or not, whether you have loved as deeply or not, what sheer beauty lies in those lines, those words!

I have loved Gibran's The Prophet since I was introduced to it in high school, and I love it still. However… call me practical. Call me too practical, if you will, but as much as I love the reading, and as much as I love love, I'm just not so sure about that bleeding part… "bleeding willingly and joyfully."

And I must say, too, that I often have simply too much to do or to think about to spend my lunch hour meditating love's ecstasy, even when I am at a place, emotionally, where I can acknowledge love's ecstasy – which isn't always the case. For love, in the best of situations, in the most romantic of relationships, is simply, well… not always ecstatic.

I hesitate to talk about love. It is too big, as a topic; too emotion-laden, too touchy, too difficult. It is something we all experience, in one way or another, and yet it is something with which few of us rest fully at ease.

Love exhilarates us at times, terrifies us at other times, perplexes, drives, teases and torments us. And there is never a time that it can be discussed when someone isn't hurting because of love; when any number of us are not hurting because of love.

And yet, it is basic to the human experience. Love, in all of its manifestations, animates us, informs us, and gives substance to our journeys. It is basic to the individual, to the culture and certainly to the church.

And so today, Valentine's Day, we are going to talk about love.

Scholars tell us there are four Greek words for love (Greek being the language in which the Gospels were written). These are agape, which is spiritual or unconditional love (though this has more recently been aligned specifically with Christian love; eros, or erotic love; philia, which is love between friends, and storge ("storgay"), which is familial love, that full, enveloping affection a parent feels for a child, for instance.

We know these dynamics by more familiar words. We know of romantic love, sexual love, platonic love. We know the love of family, love between friends. We know the angst-filled torment of puppy love and crushes, and the deep, abiding respect and caring for the human condition. We know about universal love and self love.

We know too, most of us, that love defies clear definition, that the lines between the many ways in which love manifests are often blurred and indistinct.

We have, in fact, an infinite capacity to feel love -- that warm, heart-swelling affection or the stimulating, exhilarating attraction to persons, places, things -- and an infinite variety of ways in which we love.

Gibran talks about "the pain of too much tenderness," and we know that pain, that tender pain which, every once in a great while, almost always unexpectedly, jolts us to a sudden halt with its impact, brings us to our psychic knees with its intensity.

We feel it in the midst of busy-ness, in the midst of tasks to be done, thoughts to be gathered, life's daily chaos to be sorted through, when the loves of our lives are often the furthest thing from our minds. We feel it, the pain of too much tenderness, deep at the core of our beings, and when we feel it, it is a thing of wonder, a fleeting treasure to be cherished and held close in memory, even as it begins to dissipate.

We know that pain, that tenderness, because of our boundless, enduring ability to experience love.

And surely that is a blessing. Surely, our capacity for love is a blessing and a gift of human be-ing.

But it also is a curse. For love is not always patient and kind. Sometimes it is loud and demanding.

Sometimes it is tedious. Sometimes it is peevish and perverse.

We all have stories we can tell – stories under the heading "we can laugh about it now…"

Evan and I have a friend who tells such a story about an incident that occurred early in his now long-lived marriage. I've heard him tell it several times (although interestingly, I've never heard his wife tell it), and each time it has that comic ring of familiarity:

"I was newly married," he says, "and still very much in the throes of romantic love when I suddenly was brought face to face with the broader implications of marriage.

"I had had my evening bath and was relaxing on the couch with a book while my wife went in to take her bath. All of a sudden I heard this earth-shattering scream coming from the bathroom." (Let me note here that I'm quite sure our friend exaggerates!)

"I went bounding into the bathroom to see to my wife's health and welfare, feeling certain that she was under serious attack of one kind or another. I hurriedly pushed open the door, ready to do battle with whatever threat loomed, only to find her standing there, wrapped in a towel, staring in horror at the tub.

"I stared too. I didn't see anything.

"She pointed. I looked closer. I still didn't see anything. So she enlightened me…

"'You didn't wipe out the tub!' she accused.

"Now I'm a rinser," he explains, "not a wiper. My family rinsed, they did not wipe. In fact, I come from a long and honorable line of rinsers. But my wife, well, she was a wiper…"

My friend kind of fades out at this point in the telling, and we are never quite sure where that particular marital odyssey led for the two of them. But it is indicative of the kinds of ways partners, even in the most loving of relationships, can make each other nuts.

Unitarian Universalist author Philip Simmons, who has since died from ALS, touched further upon this as he discussed the trials of a typical day.

He said:

"No wonder then, that at the end of the day it's such a relief to get home. Only when we get there do we remember that it's the people we live with we are most desperate to avoid.

"Funny how I can miss my wife terribly all day until the moment I walk in the house. We have a wonderful marriage, but some days it seems that the whole point of long-term relationships is to give people time to learn to torment one another efficiently.

"We become athletes of insult, proud of our ability not just to inflict pain, but to do so with minimum effort. We know a relationship is fully developed when, with a single lifted eyebrow, we can ruin someone's entire day."

Now I think he overstates, but the point is well taken: love confounds us. Why do we pick at the loved one we have missed all day? Why do we push one another's well worn buttons?

Love confounds and bewilders us. We do not grasp its intricacies and perplexities. For all the loving we do in our lives – love of people, places, pets, causes – for all the practice we have at loving, it should be easy, it should make sense.

But instead, it is hard. It is hard and it is messy, and sometimes our stories do not end in laughter.

We all have those stories, too, the stories of pain and heartache and fear and frustration and loneliness.

We all have them. If we are human, and over the age of seven, we have been hurt by love, or perhaps the sense of love's absence.

It is good, when we are lonely, or when the tough, messy times occur, to have people to whom we can turn, people with whom we might not even share our pain, but with whom we know we could if we wanted to, people we know would be there if we needed to unburden our hearts. It is good to have people whom we know accept us, however flawed and faltering we might feel, however despairing we might be.

That is one of the roles of the church. It is one of the ways of being the "Beloved Community."

Here is a place where we embrace each other in acknowledgement of our shared humanness, our shared struggle through life. It is a place where we can feel honest affection even for those with whom we might widely disagree politically or philosophically, because we have made room for the individual journey.

And when we make room, it is then safe to love.

Making room, in fact, is one of the most exquisite ways in which we love one another, one of the most generous acts of love. Making… room… for us. Making room for us.

Is there any greater task of the church? Is there anything more fundamental to the religious impulse?

The sharing of love -- the making room for us, for one another, for the other -- is what our church was built upon, the foundation from which both Unitarianism and Universalism rose. And it is the ground from which the Christian Church grew for it is the core of Jesus' message and ministry.

Jesus loved indiscriminately. He loved all people. He loved women and seemed to have an especially close relationship with Mary Magdalene.

He loved, and had close relationships with men. In fact, some few Biblical scholars theorize that Jesus may have experienced physical love with both men and women. This is a notion not likely to catch on, and a theory that simply can't be proven one way or the other because the issue of Jesus' intimacy is simply not addressed in the Bible.

Strange, actually, isn't it? Conspicuous in its absence, perhaps, given the power and pervasiveness of love within the human condition.

What we do know is that Jesus urged us to love. He spoke simply but eloquently about love, commanding us to love so broadly as to love even our enemies. Jesus was about love if he was about anything – broad, encompassing love.

It is ironic that so many Christian churches leave out that piece of the Christian message, or at least seemingly do so. They not only do not celebrate the many ways in which human love manifests, they condemn any love which they deem ungodly.

I don't understand that. I don't understand how anyone embracing the notion of God, could possibly believe that such a being would condemn any love that was respectful, compassionate and caring, shared between mature individuals.

Such a view limits the infinite capacity of God's love, God's will and God's creativity in forming humans who can love limitlessly and diversely. It certainly denigrates the message of Jesus, a message to which most UU's subscribe, and around which we tend to gear our social justice endeavors.

Ours is a Welcoming Congregation, which is an official designation of the Unitarian Universalist Association. It means that we went through a relatively involved educational process about human sexuality and gender issues in the culture and the church so that we might be better equipped to helpfully welcome GLBTs into our religious community.

The Berrien Fellowship in St. Joseph, Michigan where I have ministered half-time, became a Welcoming Congregation the second year I was there. The Elkhart Fellowship is in the process of becoming a Welcoming Congregation right now.

This is a process and a designation which some of us might be inclined to question. Why, we might ask, should we specify GLBTs to welcome? Don't we welcome all people? Don't we want to be welcoming to all manner of diverse individuals and groups?

Well, yes, we do! And we are, or we try to be. It is among our most cherished values.

We specify GLBTs, however, because this is a group of people for whom church membership and participation is not a given. It is a group of people who likely will not be embraced in any number of other churches, and who, even if they are embraced, may not be allowed to share the joy of their primary love relationships with their church family.

Can you imagine that, you who feel close to this church family, or who have felt close to any church family? Can you imagine being immersed in an organization of people whose primary purpose in being together is to deal with the deeper issues of our lives, issues of intimacy and ultimacy, issues of life and death and meaning and relationship… can you imagine being immersed in such a church and not being allowed to share the joy of your own intimate relationship? Or the pain, when it happens?

This was a deal-breaker for Evan and me with the Church of the Brethren we had attended for four years. When a member stood up during joys and concerns and said he could not tolerate any legislation giving rights to gays, whom he believed to be aberrations, and when we were given no opportunity to respond, we left the church and put our full commitment with the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.

I am glad that we did so. I am glad for so many reasons that we did so, the least of these being that it is, in fact, exactly what I think Jesus would do, as the once-popular bracelets used to ask. What would Jesus do? He'd join a Unitarian Universalist Church!

Ours is a religious tradition unafraid of love, healthy and robust, in all of its myriad manifestations. It is

a religious tradition unafraid of love, unafraid to love, unafraid to defend love, for love, amazingly, often requires defense.

And it is a tradition unafraid of the demands of love, for love always requires a response. It calls us to feel, calls us to move, calls us to act. It calls us to touch others in those ways that further the human connection, further the unity of the human condition. It calls us to a fullness in our living and in the living we share with others – so many others, countless and countless others because our touching never ends.

Frederick Buechner, a Presbyterian minister and author, wrote: "The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt."

Who knows where the trembling stops?

Who knows?