A Valentine's sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
February 16, 2003
With so much unfolding in the world around us today, it may seem even trivial to stop and reflect on Valentine's Day. Yet, it does dredge up some of the stuff that interests the most keenly, doesn't it? Love, allurement, desire. William James praised "the number and fantastic and unnecessary character" of the human being's wants.
So that other looming topic — war — will await next Sunday's reflections from this pulpit, when it's a little clearer what it is we're going to face. Today, love and desire.
There are few things that baffle us more than the desires that drive us. Our own loves, attractions and desires are one of the great mysteries of the universe. Sometimes our wanting is a cause for our hurting. Desire can be experienced like an unfulfilled hunger. It can drive us nuts. There's nothing new about that. The fifteenth century Indian poet Kabir wrote about it:
I said to the wanting-creature inside me:What is this river you want to cross?
Do you believe there is some place that will make the soul less thirsty?
I know. Churches are famous for their customary answer to the problem of desire. If you desire it, it must be a sin. Just say no.
At the turn of the century, there appeared something called The Directorium Asceticum; or Guide to the Spiritual Life, with imprimatur by the Archbishop of Baltimore. In it, author John Baptiste Scaramelli warns,
Modesty must be practiced by custody of the eyes It will be enough to keep the eyes generally cast down especially in the public streets, where dangerous objects are more frequently to be met with. Above all, in conversing with persons of the opposite sex, we should avoid looking them full in the face, but rather fix our eyes somewhat lower.
Deny it, suppress it — still it remains the truth that there is a primary binding energy and we can't live a moment outside its sphere of influence, its raw power.
Your interests are entirely our own. You have your own special set of attractions. Sometimes they're very special. Do you like music? I'll bet you don't love all music. But you're attracted to some music that you have to wait until nobody else is home to listen to because everybody else you know hates it. And out of all the sounds in the world, you have to be excited by this pattern of sounds.
The more you live the more awake you are to your own unique set of attractions. You have them. So do oxygen atoms or protons. They are attracted only to certain particles. So each person: each person discovers a field of allurements, the totality of which bears the unique stamp of that person's personality. (I'm indebted to Brian Swimme, the physicist associated with Matt Fox's "Creation Spirituality," on this point.)
Now — here's the important part —
Destiny unfolds
in the pursuit
of those allurements
interests
passions
and to experience desire, the mystery of allurement,
is to be drawn into love.
If there were not this energy
the other, dark energy that makes up 96 percent of everything that is and that drives the expansion of the universe1 would drive everything apart
the kingdoms of the heavens would break asunder
particles would separate
the stars would go dark
and you wouldn't go to work in the morning
because there would be no interest, no desire,
no motivation. Human activity would utterly cease.
Did humans once pour over plans and challenges, devoting their energies to the pursuit of new achievements, new answers, new questions? No longer. Galaxies, human families, atoms, ecosystems, everything would disintegrate as the desire, the desire pervading the universe is shut off.
Humans wouldn't devote themselves to
penetrating new questions
attaining new achievements
and lovers wouldn't seek each other in the night.
The excitement in the hand that tears open a letter or opens the email from someone we long to be with
is the same energy that holds the earth together.
AND. Here's what I'm interested in.
Desire — desire —
does this:
it awakens us to our own hidden identity.
And — at least in some sense — we become that thing we're becoming aware of. We become one with the anguish or beauty we become aware of. Whether it is a lover or a great play, it evokes being, it draws forth and enhances life. In loving we draw others into existence; we are drawn into existence. Hold in your mind someone you have loved deeply. Are you aware that someone drew forth life in you that no one else in the universe could have? Are you aware that you and you alone have the capacity to bring forth life in ways that no one else can? It's your destiny in this world to be a creative source. We are not always very creative — not in the best sense — but we are very creative when we move more deeply into this primal energy of love.
There are people and creatures all around you who will be drawn more fully into life because of you. Whatever you've been taught about the evils of desire — the truth is that we do pursue the fascinating beauty that surrounds us. And none of us knows what beauty will unfold because we pursue a passion.
When we pursue a passion — it, or he, or she, seems to make you feel more complete. It is as if a lost piece of yourself has suddenly come back to you. If it is another person, we may think that the qualities that make us now feel complete have primarily to do with the other. But that in itself would not make us feel so fulfilled. It is that those qualities in the other have awakened something that is hidden in us. In relationships, we must cherish what we discover in ourselves and nurture it.
I said that desire awakens you — whether you happen to be a galaxy or a particle or a person —
to your own hidden identity.
If you happen to be a star, you started off your life as big cloud of hydrogen atoms stretching through millions of miles of space. And the particles were attracted to each other and look what happened. It drew together and particles joined and it ignited and there's a brilliant blazing star.
In the depth of us is potentiality
you only find by responding to what interests you, what draws you — pursuing desire, desire.
That's how the splendor in anything comes forth.
You do not know what you are in your fullest significance,
nor what you can do,
nor what powers are hiding within you.
All this — concealed in the emptiness of your potentiality — a realm you can neither see nor taste nor touch.
What about physical attraction? The physical quality that attracts you is only a symbol or metaphor for some inner quality it awakens in you. It happens, as often as not, that when she opens her mouth you find out quickly that her inner realities don't match the feeling you got when you first saw her and she excited you. So much for the physical attraction! But when the inner qualities in the other do open up hidden beauty and undiscovered qualities in ourselves, something more can happen.
Human sexuality, from the heterosexual procreative standpoint, enables what is hidden genetically in a person to emerge. But there is another kind of generativity. In the intimacy of sexuality, much that is deeply buried in a person is drawn forth. Love opens up capacities for being we didn't know were there.
How will you bring these powers forth?
By following the interests, desires, passions that beckon. That is what love does. It opens up capacities for being we didn't know were there.
But there's also — the fear and loathing. There is, of course, permeating this culture, a powerful force of fear and loathing about this great force of allurement. I quoted St. Augustine here a few weeks ago, St. Augustine, who, around the year 400, said, shun the senses. He said that to beget children is, quote, to make good use of the evil of lust, but the action is not performed without evil. Every child is therefore tainted with original sin. If sex within marriage is intended solely to produce a child, it is forgiven; but it remains evil and sin. Here is a fear and loathing both fed and cherished by our religious traditions.
And so it was that the Congress of the United States, in 1996, passed the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act," or DOMA, declaring same-sex relationships invalid and illegitimate. It's now the law. The vote in the house was five to one. The Senate passed it 85 to 14, with Kennedy, Kerry and Pell the only New England senators to dare to vote against it. Immediately in 1996 the Legislature of the State of Illinois, where I was living, passed its own redundant DOMA law just to leave no doubt. In fact, this morning, more than thirty states have passed their own DOMAs, and, by the way, twenty-six of those thirty formerly banned interracial marriage. And right now, the Catholic Action League and the Traditional Values Coalition and the Massachusetts Citizens for Marriage are working to pass a constitutional amendment to do the same thing in Massachusetts, as they have been doing for years.
Marriage has been defined many times and in many ways over the centuries. For long ages it had a lot to do with property, money, and work, but it's been redefined. It has changed, I think we'd agree for the better, time and again and it is time for another change.
I could go on about this, but I would be preaching to the choir. So let me say this.
You may know that in the 1980s I served as Director of the Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Concerns of the Unitarian Universalist Association headquarters in Boston. My predecessor, for many years, was Rev. Bob Wheatley.
Bob Wheatley died suddenly this fall of a massive heart attack. His partner of 30 or 40 years, Kenneth, rode with him in the ambulance to the hospital here he was declared dead.
When the ambulance go to the hospital, Kenneth was asked:
"Who are you?"
He identified himself and told them he wanted to be sure Bob's wishes were carried out with regard to the disposition of his body and so on. Came the reply,
"You have no status to do that."
Kenneth repeated who he is and his relationship to Bob. He was told:
"We need the name of a relative."
Kenneth, pretty shaken, said, "I am his partner. He has no other relatives."
"Prove it."
Kenneth asked how they expected him to prove it, and repeated that Bob wanted to be cremated and he wanted to be sure his wishes are carried out. And was told:
"You have no standing to tell us he is to be cremated. You may be telling us that to cover up something about the circumstances of his death."
Kenneth called the crematorium; but they couldn't come for the body until the hospital released it, and they wouldn't. Bob had never had a lot of money and had never had an attorney draw up the costly legal documents same-sex couples need to handle these matters. My friend Gene Navias, the former UUA Religious Education Director, got many tearful calls from Kenneth, and in one call, a whole week after Bob died, he cried, "Bob's body is still lying on a cold slab."
The authority to take control of these matters is only one of 1,400 rights conferred by the signing of a marriage license. Information and visitation rights with hospitals are two more. There are property rights, rights regarding parenting, and the right to immigrate and receive permanent residency and citizenship. And Social Security benefits, pensions and IRAs and Veterans' benefits, and on and on and on.
All of these unequal privileges can gotten by the stroke of a signature. And so very ironically, my signature, on a marriage license, in an act I consider a strange and most inappropriate wedding of church and state.
I have been torn about this for many years. I have wanted to take a stand of conscience but I wanted to know that UU ministers, like myself, who happen to be gay or lesbian, would not be left swinging in the breeze by our heterosexual colleagues if we did this. Well, two weeks ago, Fred Small, who is heterosexual, married, and the minister in Littleton — and an attorney to boot — broke the ice. He told his congregation that he will no longer sign those certificates. Furthermore, it came out that Rev. Rhett Baird, the UU minister in, of all the darn places, Fayetteville, Arkansas, had actually been the first to take this stand.
And so today I can announce that I, too, will not be the agent of the state, and particularly, a discriminatory state. I will, with joy, conduct wedding ceremonies — a religious rite — but conscience will not allow me to perform the state function of signing legal documents. A Justice of the Peace can do for your for $75, which gets you 1,400 rights and privileges, at about a nickel per right. A same-sex couple can spend thousands of dollars in legal fees to win a small fraction of those rights.
In this I am supported by the Unitarian Universalist Association, whose General Assembly voted in 1996, with hardly a dissenting vote, to pass a resolution I helped write to call for the full legalization of same-sex marriage. Yet I have to say that an even better approach would be fully to separate the religious ritual from the legal status of domestic union.
So please consider the legal aspects of this covenant a matter separate from what we are doing in religiously marking this event in your life.
For the society at large, there is one moral principle I wish to see taken to heart, and it is this: It is wrong to deny to another that which you find essential for yourself.
In this great religious movement of ours, may it be that a full recognition of the goodness and creative potential of our essential human wants, drives, and impulses — will now be wed to our commitment to justice and equity. I call on a thousand and more colleague UU ministers in the United States to join Fred, and Rhett, and me, and take this step.
We respond to the people we respond to because something in them awakens something deeply hidden in us, and some splendor in the other awakens the same splendor in ourselves. And that other becomes a gift of Love itself, and a summons to love, a window to the Immensity from which all this beauty floods.
We learn about the Beloved Beyond, about Love itself, and our hearts are opened and prepared for it, through the loves of our lives.
Awareness comes to us of some aspect of life we never felt or saw before and we become in some way the thing we're becoming aware of. A passion, an interest, a love draws forth being. In loving we draw somebody else into existence; we are drawn into existence.
Finally, there's this. We may change the laws; we may one day establish a society without bigotry, open and free and just. But we cannot outlaw heartbreak. Wanting means hurting. Often we experience desire as frustration, we are allured by something that now seems past the horizon, out of reach.
There is much fine and ancient wisdom in this world to say that, then, we must free ourselves from our desire. If we did not want, we would not hurt. There is great truth to that, and it's a truth I need sometimes. But that is not how the universe evolved, nor was it without the anguish of wanting or pursuing an unfulfilled desire that humankind ascended and developed its capacities.
Still, we must know that wanting is a fact of our existence, and that in our finding, we only discover more wants, more desires to pursue. And what excites us in another is an awakening to a beauty that is first within, not outside ourselves. We can recover from our disappointed attractions and infatuations, but we can do more than recover from them. They can lead to us unopened doors within ourselves, and we can open them and find vast rooms of hidden splendor. I started with the words of the fifteenth century poet Kabir. Here is the rest of the poem:
I said to the wanting-creature inside me:What is this river you want to cross?
. . . . .
There is no river at all, and no boat, and no boatman.
. . . . .
Do you believe there is some place that will make the soul less thirsty?
In that great absence you will find nothing.
Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
There you have a solid place for your feet...
Stand firm in that which you are.
The desires that move us are not to be feared or despised. The things that allure us ignite capacities within us we did not know. The experience of desire is the beginning of love and creativity. And our desires lead us to the greatest of discoveries, the capacities and beauty that lie within us.
From Ken Wilbur, Sex, Ecology and Spirituality, 377
A thousand years from now, when atoms are understood to be pinpoint entries of a massive intelligence from the eighth dimension (or whatever the discoveries are that will shock and shake our present views, as shock they most certainly shall), we will look not so bright and gifted in our firm assurances of what the Kosmos is "actually" like. Atoms will still be atoms (no truth will be lost); but they will be set in deeper contexts that will render our narrower perspectives and interpretations . . . silly . . .
From the essay, "Love,"
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
The introduction to this felicity is in a private and tender relation of one to one, which is the enchantment of human life; which, like a certain divine rage and enthusiasm, seizes on man at one period, and works a revolution in his mind and body; unites him to his race, . . . carries him with new sympathy into nature, enhances the power of the senses, opens the imagination, adds to his character heroic and sacred attributes . . . For it is a fire that, kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames.
From the fifteenth-century Sufi mystic and poet Kabir:
I said to the wanting-creature inside me:
What is this river you want to cross?
........
There is no river at all, and no boat, and no boatman.
........
Do you believe there is some place that will make the soul less thirsty?
In that great absence you will find nothing.
Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
There you have a solid place for your feet...
Stand firm in that which you are.
[Love] . . . is a fire that, kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames.
Emerson, "Love"
Walt Whitman
I announce natural persons to arise;
I announce justice triumphant;
I announce uncompromising liberty and equality;
I announce the justification of candor, and the justification
of pride.
I announce splendors and majesties to make all
The previous politics of the earth insignificant.
I announce adhesiveness__I say it shall be limitless, unloosened;
I say you shall yet find the friend you were
Looking for.
I announce a man or woman coming__perhaps you are the one.
I announce the great individual, fluid as
Nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate,
Fully armed.
I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold;
I announce an end that shall lightly and joyfully
Meet its translation.
Go in peace: the work of peace is in your hands.
As we gather, as we bring to bear the energies of love, —
let us remember Kathryn Denny, who faces particularly serious surgery this Wednesday;
and let us remember Jason Lydon, who, for his act of protest with several other young Unitarian Universalists at the notorious School of the Americas where, in our name, so many of Central America's paramilitary terrorists have been trained — was sentenced Monday by a federal judge to six months in a particularly crude county jail in Georgia;
and all those among us who struggle today with physical, and spiritual, and practical challenges that sometimes seem so overwhelming.
Life of all living, heart and soul of all Being:
We gather our separate lives in this place called community, a congregation of caring, sharing the riches and struggles of our lives: —
and of this world of life.
May we understand our place, and find our voice, and renew our work, in this world. Let us find and embrace the great joy that comes when we know that our days, and efforts, and words, and deeds, have significance, and consequence, and worth.
Awaken us to what calls us, calls to what is highest in us, and noblest, our highest potentialities — that there might yet be brought forth in us magnificence, and splendor, and beauty.