A couple of you asked me to post this sermon on my blog. Here it is:
Picking Up the Oars
Foxborough Universalist Church—February 14, 2010
Katie Lawson, Minister
From Poetry and Marriage—Wendell Berry
The meaning of human relationship begins in the giving of words. We cannot join ourselves to one another without giving our word. And this must be an unconditional giving, for in joining ourselves to one another we join ourselves to the unknown. We can join one another only by joining the unknown…we are never given two known results to choose between, but only one result that we choose without knowing what it is.
Because every relationship is worldly and its meaning communal, no one party to it can be solely in charge. What you alone think it ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. It is going where the two of you—and also time, and life and history—will take it. You do not know the road. You have committed yourself to a way.
READING 2
West Wind 2—Mary Oliver
You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt. I talk directly to your soul Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks—when you hear that unmistable pounding—when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and streaming—then row, row for your life toward it.
SERMON
So it’s Valentine’s Day. I don’t know if you’re a fan or not or what this day means for you in the midst of a twenty-year marriage or a break-up or a real disdain for commercialism or after an all-nighter making enough Valentines for everyone in the second grade class or, lucky you, at the threshold of a brand new exciting love. Some of you might remember last year my telling the children the story of St. Valentine, the patron saint of lovers and of prisoners (go figure). I want to tell it again, not because I’m certain its true, but because it puts this day that can be fraught in so many ways with expectation and red hearted hoo-ha in a slightly nobler context. While not much is known about St. Valentine, the most common legend associated with him paints him as the Gavin Newsom of his time, fearlessly marrying couples who wanted to be married despite the laws that forbade it. As the story goes, the Roman Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, and so he outlawed marriage for young men. Outraged at the injustice of being denied so basic a right, a priest named Valentine continued marrying couples in secret and eventually was imprisoned and executed. So whatever your associations with Valentine’s Day, maybe it is an appropriate thing to use this occasion to consider marriage, this right for which St. Valentine died and that is the topic of so much heated conversation lately.
Whenever a couple, no matter their age or whether or not they’ve been married before, comes to me with this idea that they want to get married, the first question I always ask, in so many words, is “What for?” I don’t ask because 50% of people get divorce or because so many more people are cohabitating or because marriage is a silly idea. It isn’t a cynical question or flip or even confrontational. Really, at root, it’s practical, because these days we can’t assume why people decide to get married. People’s reasons are as varied as the couples themselves and likewise their marriages will be. Eventually, in that initial conversation, sometimes after some muddling around in the post-modern morass, a piece of the truth comes out, “It just seems like what happens next” they’ll say or “We are ready to have children” or “We have children and we want them to be able to explain our family in short hand” or “We just want to have our families—everyone—know what this is to us” or sweetly, “We have run out of ways to say I love you.” I say a piece of the truth, because there is always something there that they can’t quite get at with words and that’s all right too.
In amongst all these answers, never has any couple, gay or straight, said to me: “We are looking forward to 1,800 legal privileges awarded us by the state when we sign this agreement.” Some of them ARE looking forward to those, but that doesn’t get to the heart of why they have come with tender hearts to ask if I will be there to bless their marriage.
Because I am a free-wheeling Unitarian Universalist minister, many couples begin by telling me either explicitly or implicitly that for them the wedding itself is a formality, a piece of theatrics for grandma, and a party. As ministers, we have to acknowledge that, more often than not, we fall well below D.J. on the list of important players. However, even the most cavalier couple, with the exception of one that I can remember, all have said by the end, that the wedding…the marriage had come to have unexpected significance to them. That for those who had been living together for ten years something shifted and for those with domestic partner status and reams of other legal documents securing their household, something was different. E.J. Graff describes her commitment ceremony with her partner, Madeline, this way:
It was nearly a delirium: by accident we’d spilled into something sacred. To our utter surprise, the ceremony did bring us closer, pulling an invisible cloak around us that has warmed us during difficult times. We’d thought ourselves as committed as any couple could be: how else could we have exposed ourselves to the world’s ridicule? But now even the most subtle traces of doubt dissolve instantly, chased away by the memory of that day when we made our declarations so publicly, placing our love in the hands of God and everyone we knew.
For the couples that I have counseled and married and known so far—and for most of us—it seems there is something to marriage—the ones that begin in churches, the ones that begin in backyards, the ones that begin in city hall, the ones that are de facto, the ones that end—beyond the many legal and financial privileges a civil marriage affords. This must be true or we wouldn’t have a 32% approval rate for same-sex marriage in this country but a 57% approval rate for civil unions.
So if marriage isn’t exclusively about access to a list of legal privileges and other practical advantages like being able to have a second driver on your rental contract for free, what IS it about, what is it really for? E. J. Graff spends over 250 pages answering this question in her book What Is Marriage For? and I feel like we don’t have that kind of time here, it being Valentine’s Day and all. But if I may summarize her findings in her own words that appear near page 250: “Today’s marriage—from whatever angle you look—is justified by the happiness of the pair.” This isn’t to say that you can’t be happy without it or that there aren’t unhappy marriages. It is only to say that the basic driver for marriage these days has to do with individual happiness and, to the extent that love and happiness are related, love. It wasn’t always thus. As one historian puts it, “Marriage for love has traditionally assumed to be the dubious privilege of those without property.” This would be when both Martin Luther and John Calvin, for example, both thought the church shouldn’t have anything to do with marriage—that marriage had no more to do with religion than, in Calvin’s words, “agriculture, architecture, shoemaking and many other things.” But sometime, in the midst of the rise of industrialism and individualism and democratic ideals and reformed Protestantism, what had been traditional marriage became more than just a contract and became imbued with the sacredness that our culture prescribes to notions of freedom, love, and the pursuit of happiness. Even the state has said that marriage is more than just a notarized civic event and is closer to one of those inalienable rights with which we are endowed by our Creator. Consider the 1987 Supreme Court decision that inmates, who are stripped of so many other basic rights like to free speech, to earn money, and some cases to vote, should be allowed to marry because, in the words of the majority opinion, “inmate marriages, like others, are expressions of emotional support and public commitment… having spiritual significance.”
It was the premise that marriage in a democratic age is principally about the happiness of the individual parties that led to all sorts of reforms since the mid-19th century, the most controversial of which, by the way, was to give women the right to own property within the marriage. THESE were such controversial pieces of legislation, inspiring far more controversy than the discussions we are having right now, that even once they were passed, judges all over Britain and the United States refused to enforce them. In the words of one Maryland judge: “What incentive would there be for such a wife ever to reconcile differences with her husband, to act in submission to his wishes, and perform the many onerous duties pertaining to her sphere? Would not every wife…abandon her husband and her home?” One New York legislator pleaded with his fellows to remember “the complexity and fragility of marriage as a social institution…If any single thing should remain untouched by the hand of the reformer, it was the sacred institution of marriage…[which] was about to be destroyed in one thoughtless blow that might produce change in all phases of domestic life.” Apparently the reports of marriage’s death were greatly exaggerated because here we are.
I have always loved the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” because you can easily picture happiness skipping lightly away while we doggedly pursue it like baying hounds. And that pursuit is so much of what being human is about and, by all reports, what being married—or promised to another person in any way—is about. It is a sacred act when we promise ourselves—dedicate our lives—not just to pursuing our own happiness but also to join with someone else’s pursuit. We sense that the joining, and the promises we make and that are made to us in the process, are elemental to the pursuit AND to what we are here to do. Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams says, “Human beings, individually and collectively, become human by making commitments, by making promises.” The moment that you decide to make promises on behalf of love—to give your word—is the moment, I think, you begin to row.
Mary Oliver, was with her partner Molly Malone Cooke for 50 years before Ms. Cooke’s death a couple of years ago, and she writes:
You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing…When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks—when you hear that unmistakable pounding—when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and streaming—then row, row for your life toward it.
Of course, Oliver doesn’t tell us what happens after we’ve rowed for our lives when we fall over that edge and into the great roiling waters. She doesn’t tell us this because she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know if our little boats will pop back up to the surface and meander around a couple of bends before we to make the choice to row all over again OR whether we are still disoriented and turning in the mighty pounding OR whether our boat has been pushed out damaged and leaky and maybe too far from us to ever reach again. Wendell Berry reminds us, “We can join one another only by joining the unknown… You do not know the road. You have committed yourself to a way.”…the way of the current and of rowing.
And the rowing is hard work. Remember the old joke that marriage is a three-ring circus: engagement ring, wedding ring, suffering…This may be why Disney’s movies always END with the wedding, as if this is when the rest of us discretely leave the room, because from here on out it can get a little complicated and messy. It is true that our intimate relationships are deeply private. Robert Bly talks about a third body: one that the rest of us “know of, but have never seen.” However, it is also true that no marriage, no relationship, is born or survives in a vacuum. Wendell Berry says, “without a community to exert a shaping pressure around it, [a marriage or any kind of household] may explode because of the pressure inside it.” This gentle hold is provided by our families, our congregations, our friends and our laws, all of which in so many ways bless and re-bless our churning oars. So, more often than not, we begin by asking someone—the state, our religion, our family, a minister standing in a rainy park, God—to tell us that this relationship belongs to a broader weave of love and will be held by it…that this relationship, born of love and sustained by love—this pursuit—also belongs to the larger love of which we are all a part. We ask for the people around us, dearest to us, to promise to hold us when the rowing is hard. Those who joined the church this Sunday made a similar promise and then asked for promises to be made to them—that their journeys, there struggles would be held in this community of love and respect. We ask for and make these promises—inspired by love, nurturing love—over and over again, because, really, this is what we are here to do.
