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“All You Need is Love”
This morning we attempt pay homage to the mystery that is love in recognition of Valentine’s Day, which is tomorrow. The idea of finding or being Prince Charming and living happily ever after is entrenched in our culture. I have only to ask whether any of you been following the wedding plans of Prince Charles and “the other woman” Camilla Parker Bowles to poke fun of the idea that marrying a prince with will solve anything.
My own parents loved each other very much but a long-lasting “happily ever after” was not to be for them - my father died when their toddlers were young – they had just begun. Decades later, when I was clearing my mother’s effects out of our childhood home, I found, tucked away in my mother’s underwear drawer, this classic symbol of fairytale love drawn by my dad, and underneath was written in my father’s hand a note to her. I carefully took it from her drawer and placed it in mine and it remains there still.
My parents’ love, cut short by his death was so very, terribly visible. My father looked the Prince, and all the stories reinforced that he was Prince Charming - but as I grew older I wondered - did the fairytale nature of their romance have such staying power because he was gone? Had he lived, would the relationship have looked more normal, more dented and compromised by which side of the bed they got up from on a given morning -- more like other relationships I have come to know? I suspect so.
You can’t see this very well but in my hand I have a little ceramic frog that was recently given to me by a couple who bought it on their honeymoon. I love the fact that the frog came to me from a honeymoon. We usually use princes and princesses as our symbols of true “happily ever after” love and the frog as a symbol of something imperfect that hasn’t yet been transformed. But there is an old proverb about enlightenment that might apply here: Before enlightenment you chop wood and carry water. And after enlightenment comes you may feel different within, but you still chop wood and carry water. The same is true for love. Life comes at you and keeps coming. It will still hurt like a bear sometimes. There is a certain frogginess to living.
If we deny that or if we expect true love to be perfect or to make us perfect, then we will never find it. We will never be able to develop it – because true love, mature love is about getting real and accepting the nitty gritty of life – it’s not about perfection or rising above life. And because everybody’s nitty-gritty is different, love looks and will be experienced differently for each and every one of us. And this is a very important point. Let me explain what I mean.
If I were to teach a class on love and say that you convey love by giving a marble to your loved one, you’d think I was out of my mind
Let me tell you a story that colleague Jane Rzepka picked up from Bob Doss, one of our ministers in Delaware.
“The boys, all about ten years old, were the marble shooters. The girls had more important things to do then, one imagines. But the boys seemed to play marbles all the time when the weather was dry and not too hot, but not too cold... marble season -- in a place where the earth was packed hard and flat and a good ring could be drawn in the black dirt. Sometimes, the girls would deign to watch. And the boys, in training for free enterprise, accumulated great numbers of marbles -- both by playing to win, sometimes by trading them for picture cards that came with flat, red pieces of bubble-gum, and sometimes by saving their pennies for more marbles.
George Markovitz was the best marble player. The others used to think it had something to do with his shooter. For, you see, George had a "moonie." It seemed a little heavier than other marbles -- the moonie. It was very smooth, but not glassie; pearlie looking and translucent... You couldn’t see through it. They said it was made from moonstone and it did look like that -- white, or pearl-like with a blue tinge, cool but not cold. A beautiful moonstone -- a perfect sphere.
Everybody wanted one. But they didn’t sell "moonies" at the store where the marbles usually came from. George had the only one around. And what a shooter it made. It was just about perfect.
Martha Bell, it so happened, had a birthday party. Her eleventh. And after the indoor games, and the cake, came the gift opening. And at the end of the gift opening, a small package was left, the smallest of the packages, a present from George Markovitz, and as Martha opened it, he started to blush.
She unwrapped the tissue inside the little box, and there was the moonie …. just quietly glowing there, pearlie and bluish, cool and beautiful . . . George had given his moonie to Martha. Martha became very quiet, and sort of warm and smiling-like. And she looked into his eyes - eyes so deep she was afraid she was going to fall into them. And George sat there, melting in the presence of the great thaw.”
Love for George and Martha rose up out of the details of their lives, a force to be reckoned with – a kind of enlightenment that changed everything and nothing as they still had to breath and get their homework done before bedtime. Love, innocent and pure and real but not destined to fix anything or make anything easier for George or Martha. They believe in the Prince and the Princess but instead of perfection an agony of sweaty palms, confusion and self-consciousness is about to begin.
When I asked if my parents had had more time, would their love have looked more dented and normal. I think most of us are aware of the enduring marriage of President Carter and his wife Rosalynn. Here’s the thing – they are real people who have had a lot of time together. In his book Living Faith, Jimmy Carter writes that he and his wife Rosalynn struggled in the early years of their marriage because they were radically different personalities and temperaments and came from different family backgrounds.
Their marriage deepened one year when he woke up realizing he had forgotten her birthday and he needed to scramble for a present. He decided to write something up. When he thought about it he had to admit that the biggest issue between them was punctuality. He was a military man to the bone and always on time – and he would get very unreasonably frustrated when Rosalynn would be 2-3 minutes late and he’d make them both miserable. So, Jimmy Carter typed out a certificate that he presented to her that day. It read: "Rosalynn, I promise you that for the rest of our marriage, I will never make an unfavorable remark about tardiness." Then he signed it. Over the years, Carter has tried to live up to that promise, and Rosalynn counts that certificate as the best present he ever gave her. Even the longest and most enduring relationships are a bit froggy around the edges.
Now for one final story that comes from my ministerial training when I served as a Spiritual Care Provider at a Hospice in Attleboro.
Early on I was assigned to visit a couple in which the husband, Stanley, was dying of cancer.
At every visit, Stanley would be sitting on the couch wearing only boxer shorts in the heat. Hooked up to an IV, too weak to walk but full of sarcasm and missing nothing. In spite of his sickness, he remained a powerful presence. Many years before this man had killed his first wife in a drunken rage after catching her with another man. The first I met him he indicated his current wife Lorraine and told me he bought her at a dog pound. He frequently made jokes at Lorraine’s expense, and it would be all I could do to keep from lecturing him. But Lorraine didn’t seem to mind what she called his weird sense of humor.
Although Stanley was the one dying, hospice nurses identified Lorraine’s need of pastoral care and support. She was jumpy and weepy - and Stanley seemed insensitive to the fact that she seemed close to a breakdown. Lorraine agreed to go out for a donut with me. I wanted to get away from Stanley so we could get to know each other a little bit.
Stanley hadn’t bought Lorraine at a dog pound. Over coffee she explained a bit of her story. Her parents had died when she was four. From then on Lorraine had been moved through a series of foster homes. Back then, in the old days, they thought it was harmful to let a child bond with a family while they were waiting for a permanent placement, so she’d be moved often. In between placements she’d be housed at Wrentham State School for the Retarded until a new setting could be found. She thought of Wrentham, which felt familiar and safe, as her true home until she married Stanley.
Lorraine met Stanley when she was working in the cafeteria at Wrentham. He was on a prison crew doing landscaping on the grounds. At lunch a bunch of men from the work crew would all come in at once. Stanley was dark-haired and handsome and he’d pay attention to her with jokes and make her laugh. She liked his sense of humor; she wasn’t as good at it as he was, but she felt it matched hers. The very first day Stanley got out of prison he showed up as usual at lunchtime, but this time he bought food for two and invited her outside onto the grounds to eat. This was one of the best days of her life. She would need a lot of help after Stanley’s death because he had given her the only life she had known outside of an institution.
Stanley had no use for religion or spirituality. In spite of that he seemed okay with my weekly visits, I think because he was bored. He’d keep Jerry Springer on TV and would ask me questions like, “How do you explain these jerks?” Stanley never let me “minister” to him. Although he seemed content enough to allow me to visit, I felt my time with him was a sort of spiritual wasteland.
But one day I arrived after Stanley had had a long morning of being sick. He looked sunken and hollow-eyed. When I asked if he’d had a bad morning he replied sarcastically that he should have swallowed all his medicine at once and gotten it over with.
In that moment I realized something. The cancer had had the upper hand with him for years.
“You will never do that, will you.” I said, impressed buy the truth of it.
“No, never,” he agreed.
“Healthy, you were a vital man, stronger than most – but you’ve been stuck in this apartment on this couch for years. This must be so hard for you.”
“Yeah. It is. There have been lots of times when I thought about getting it over with.”
“But you don’t…”
“I’m not going to do that to her,” he said, indicating Lorraine beside him. ‘I’m not going to choose leaving her. I wouldn’t do that to her.”
“Let me see if I understand this,” I said. You are choosing to live as long as possible, no matter how sick you feel, because you love your wife and you don’t want to leave her. Is that it?
“Yeah.”
I looked over at Lorraine -- she was looking very proud and full of love, but she was not looking surprised.
As a student of ministry I recounted the story to my supervisor later that week. – a remarkable love story, and I had almost missed it.
I don’t want to be blind to the love around me, and I imagine you don’t either. Love, is a pretty froggy thing. We can’t know what love looks like for others – true love stories –more often – arise from the invisible texture of our lives, making us out of the blue, feel whole - Very rarely does a white knight in shining armor “take someone away from all this” – whatever that means – our lives and our loves are rooted in the same reality. But the wonderful thing is that individuals whose lives are hurt, damaged in indescribable ways, can yet have a magnificent love. It’s just that love doesn’t stop the rain from falling or make the gray skies blue or pay the rent.
Tomorrow you may hand someone a card or a box of chocolates – visible symbols of love - deep, complex and true. But George’s gift of the blue-white marble, Jimmy Carter waiting for his tardy wife but saying nothing, Stanley clinging to life for the sake of another – these are in fact the truer language of the heart. We give our real-life valentines in gestures too numerous and odd to mention. We all have our Prince and Princess moments – but it is the froggy gestures that abound, and a huge portion of these pass right by us, almost invisibly. Love is all around us, manifest in quirks and kisses and tears and casseroles – in what is said and in what is not said – 24/7. Certainly there isn’t enough love in this world – yes, there could be more. But it would be a real improvement all by itself if we would just become more aware and appreciate more what is already here.
Happy Valentine’s Day