Ministry

February 14, 2010

Love Me or I'll Kill You Reverend Don Vaughn-Foerster

Considering that today is St. Valentine’s Day, a day when we ordinarily give sweet things and say sweet things to one another, today’s title may be somewhat disquieting. Love Me or I’ll Kill You, it reads. That is not what the sign outside says. Perhaps because of a desire not to be as explicit out there as we can be in here, it says The Dark Side of Love. That points to the same subject matter but in a bit softer way on the assumption that people driving down West Saanich aren’t as comfortable with bluntness as Unitarians are. Come to think of it, though, some Unitarians may not be as comfortable with bluntness as some other Unitarians.

The reason the Love Me or I’ll Kill You title is important to me is because in my youth I was assured that, although God was a god of love, if I didn’t profess belief in him, I would spend eternity in hell. In the blunt recesses of my young mind that translated into “love me or I’ll kill you!” There seem to be some requirements imposed on love that don’t square with love itself. In a (somewhat) lesser way, this morning’s anthem (I Can’t Give You Anything But Love) imposes another requirement by implying love may have a purchase price – diamond bracelets and “all those things you’ve always pined for.” The song ends before I can find out whether the person who wants those “bracelets and things” loves without getting those “things.”

Throughout most of my life I have tried to understand what love is in the first place and why people who claim to be loving also can be hateful and mean and greedy about it. Love, it seems, does have a dark side. That’s a day to day problem in human life and that’s what started me on this sermon. Let me assure you, however, that I have no intention of debunking love or minimizing the pivotal place it has in our lives. Rather I want to bring more clarity to the nature of love and its limitations. If there is something out of whack about it, I want to find out what is the “whack.” By the way, theology will have little to do with what I say, although something you might call existential psychology will.

Love, of course, is basic to all human relations. It is basic to life triumphing instead of going down to defeat. It has its bright attractive side but it has a side that can disconcert us or even threaten us with our own destruction. It has a side that, sometimes, leads persons who think they are “loving” people to do the opposite of what they say they are doing.

Although we don't often remember this, love has a natural and unavoidable Catch-22. This is because, for love truly to be present, we must relate to other whole persons as whole persons ourselves -- that is, as persons who, ourselves, are maturely integrated personalities. But this is the catch, it takes love to make us into such persons. In order fully to love we must be whole persons, but in order to be whole persons, we must be able to love. Given the estranging fear we often have of one another, and given the doubts we may have about life itself, it should not be surprising that love, sometimes, is not as real as we think it is. Almost of necessity, in its requirement that we be "healthier” and "more whole" than we are, our effort to love can hurt as much as give joy.

This is no new observation. It was as well known to the ancients as to modern psychologists. Greek mythology depicts love as occurring after we are wounded by Eros' arrow (Cupid in Roman myth). That is, we must be pierced or even injured by love before we can be fulfilled by it. If love does not itself hurt it, at least, opens us up to hurt. In another sense, this is a strong message in both Christianity and Judaism, and in other ethical religions. This is the message of the life of Jesus. The Christian cross is a powerful symbol that loving may involve suffering. In Judaism the prophet Hosea's metaphor of God remaining faithful to a faithless Israel (as Hosea remained faithful to an unfaithful wife, is another such symbol. In Hinduism, Krishna’s periodic return to life in order to fight evil and, in Buddhism, the Bodhisattva refraining from entering Nirvana in order to save others are still other symbols that point in this direction. All of these positive forms of love have negative implications. They all are grounded in pain as well as in joy.

In some way, we all have had the wounding effect of love demonstrated in our own lives. Both parents and children find that, sometimes, the affection they share makes demands beyond their capacity to cope with each other. One psychologist has observed that family bargains probably could be struck much more easily, if love did not enter in but only agreements and contracts mattered. Husbands and wives learn early in marriage that the affection, loyalty, and respect they must have for each other, if their marriage is to work, can make sometimes excruciating demands. Love can demand that they forego their own desires, pleasures, and even needs for the sake of the other. But, sometimes, pining for diamond bracelets – or a Ferrari – seriously gets in the way of the grace of love. Love is a grace, you know, and grace is an unsolicited gift, not the result of a demand.

Why is this so? Why must Eros’ arrow wound us while it seeks to fulfill us? One obvious reason is that, sometimes, it is necessary to allow others their way with us if we love them. But there is a deeper reason. It is because, in our pursuit of wholeness and fulfillment, love may remind us of how incomplete and empty we sometimes are.

James Hillman, a longtime Director of the Carl Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, (in his book Insearch) put it this way: To talk of love is to talk of human encounter. Every human encounter, he says, occurs along two axes. One is the horizontal axis that connects two persons with each other; the other is the vertical axis within the individual that connects that person with the person’s own self. The first (the horizontal) is the outward axis; the second (the vertical) is the inward axis.

The horizontal is our active reaching out for one another – the result of our need to be unified with some other. We all send out constant feelers along this axis to see if they will return to us with the warmth that we need to overcome the coldness of our inward isolation. The vertical is our inward reaching toward ourselves – that axis of inner communication which assures us that we have the depth within ourselves to experience love. This is where we can know that we are rooted securely enough in our own sense of self that nothing outside us can disrupt our identity or damage our soul.

Since love requires the whole person, it cannot develop along one axis alone. Should we seek it only on the horizontal, outward axis the best we can do is exchange superficial and transitory satisfactions, for there is then no inward channel to connect us with the other person. Struggling to relate deeply with others on this axis is like continuing to press hard on the buttons of a remote control when the batteries are dead. Should we seek love only in the vertical, inward axis then we are in danger of going beyond healthy self-love and self-respect to a diseased preoccupation with ourselves that leads to narcissm. When we seek love only here we are like the bumper sticker directed to others that reads, The Earth Is Full – Go Home – wherever home is. For love truly to fulfill us and draw us together into communion, the outward axis must carry sincerity and the inward axis must be rooted deeply enough within us for us not to fear that we will lose our identity in the other person’s needs.

Eros is forever sending out arrows in flat trajectory along the outward axis. We should not be surprised that we endure more agony than joy when one pierces us and our inward axis is too short. Such an arrow opens us up to that which is outside ourselves before we can handle it. It reveals our inner state to others and to ourselves before we are prepared for it to be revealed. There is an injunction in The Song of Songs, the Old Testament book that celebrates human love, that goes like this: “I adjure you that ye stir not up nor awaken love until it please” – and by “please” is meant that everything should be ready for love. This command is repeated four times in what is a rather short book of the Bible.

If we are not yet able to respond -- and yet let loose arrows from our quiver or too soon become their target -- we "stir up" and "awaken" love before it "please." When this happens all our inadequate past experiences with love, all our past disappointments – with persons and ideals that we had sought to love but which responded by trampling our self esteem – pass before us: the mother who made us into mannequins and handled us without warmth; the father who boasted of us but ignored us; the spouse or friend we trusted but who used us only as a tool; the religion to which we would have given our life but which cheated us of our human identity. All this passes before us when love's arrow pierces us before it "please.” If our inner lack is great -- that is, if our vertical inner axis is too short -- we cannot fully respond to love but must regard it with anxiety and fear until its grace somehow works its healing power on us. And if the arrow is insincerely flung or used only to control us, it is no wonder that we may develop a deep capacity for distrust of others and hatred of ourselves.

This is a deep agony that love inflicts: when it is insincerely offered to persons not yet equipped to endure disappointment or when it is aggressively pressed on them, it destroys their faith in love. And yet, even when love is sincerely intended, the response can be much the same. Perhaps our experience with people has produced so much fear, anxiety, and ill will that even the most sincerely loving person may not be able to get through to us. We simply may not be able to trust what our senses tell us, so foreshortened may past encounters have made our inner axis. If people have not been honest with us or trusted us, we may no longer be honest with or trust ourselves. And if we cannot trust ourselves, how can we trust another person? Little wonder that love should put us off! Little wonder that we should crucify its prophets! After all, the more gracious and unconditional their offering, the more we fear they will destroy us. This fear, I believe, is at the root of the politically conservative Christian right’s contradictory use of Jesus. They want to love him but they are afraid that his love condemns them, so they act the way they believe they have been judged to be and become destroyers and condemners in the name of Christ.

That’s why it is our insides with which love has most to deal. Love has as its primary task the “filling full”, the lengthening and strengthening of our inward axis – that truncated inside part of us which is the key to the way we respond to people and to life. But the obstacle it must overcome may seem almost insurmountable, for it is most often the obstacle of our own fearfulness – our fear of love itself, based on our past disappointments with love –a fear that makes us demand love rather than give it.

And so, the path of love in this world proceeds along a strenuous, uncertain way. It appeals to us because it seems to offer the glitter of a contented and joyful existence with spouse, with mother and father, with friend, with God or Reality. But, at times, it dashes our hopes because it requires from us a sense of rootedness, of identity, of security of self that we may not have. Love requires of us the very thing it is love’s function to create. It requires us to be able to give love in order to receive it. This Catch-22 is written deeply into our human predicament. It is one of the most important paradoxes we ever have to resolve. How many mothers have failed to recognize its existence? How many children have not understood the stress that being “loving" places on them? How many husbands and wives and lovers and friends have not acknowledged the stress on their spirits that loving another can impose? How many fully realize that you cannot threaten another person into loving you? You can only love them and welcome their love in return if it comes.

It would be helpful if tributes to love would point this out more clearly. Like I Corinthians 13, they usually say that love is patient, kind, and humble; rejoices in the right and is grateful, reverent, and loyal; and that it never ends. These psalms to love point out that people are incomplete without love, that love will endure all things. They say that love never fails. But they never seem to acknowledge that, when we are not prepared for love or when hypocrites proclaim it or when people who are trying to shape the world according to their own liking demand it, love can hurt, can draw blood, can fill us with such agonies of self doubt that Cupid’s arrow can cause our hearts to bleed to death.

What this situation requires of us is that we not lose heart when love's effect seems to cause more hurt than hope. We must remember that love comes to us with both a bright and a dark side, that it is both a promise to our hearts and an arrow to pierce our soul. It carries both ecstasy and agony in its train. We must remember that the success love has with us depends on the depth of our inner capacity to receive and return love -- a capacity that is only as large as we are. We must remember that it is only as we grow in our capacity to love that the dark shadow is made light.

If we remember these things, our response will be more adequate and sincere, for we will not expect the other person to be the only giver of love. If we remember these things, we can help one another to fuller expression and joy of love. On this Valentine’s Day of 2010, it is good to remember that many people, mothers and fathers, and lovers and friends have either consciously or unconsciously understood these things. Many have created together healthy, fulfilling lives. We celebrate these graces that we have given to one another and that have enabled our own love to be.