Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Dr. Roger Ray, Pastor
Romans 13:8-10At the entrance to the Buddhist Temple in Kansas City where I spoke on Friday evening there is a large open book. The book has only one word on its pages and that word is "love." People who seek out a Buddhist community in Missouri are often the same sort of people who seek out a Progressive congregation or who go to Unitarian or Unity churches.
8Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. 9The commandments, "You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet"; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, "Love your neighbor as yourself." 10Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.
They are people who are wounded. They are refugees from abusive religions that were marked by guilt and fear, judgment, manipulation, and threats. To at least symbolically imply with this one-word book, that love is the entire content of their sacred texts is a comforting and reassuring symbol.
In talking with Nima, the Buddhist nun who is that pastor in that faith community, we realized that while we both essentially have a ministry of welcoming and trying to love the wounded into health, that we also both see a lot of coming and going in our membership.
There is a very important proverb in the 12 step recovery movement that says, "Hurt people, hurt people." I am often shocked by how often the most wounded people will demand love and acceptance but respond to being given love and acceptance with criticism and hostility.
I learned that lesson very vividly at a very young age when my friends and I heard tires squeal and a dog yelp. We ran to see which of our pets had been injured and it was the very much beloved dog of my next-door neighbor. The dog was seriously injured but alive. We wanted to help, wanted to pick the dog up and take it to the vet, but when we got close, he bared his teeth and menacingly snapped at us. We had the solution to his pain available to us, we might have saved him, but his pain made him so hostile that we were powerless to be of any aid.
Hurt people, hurt people. They do it unconsciously. Often unintentionally and they will create a narrative around it in which they can describe the people who tried to help as if they were their tormentors.
We say that God is love. We sing that love is our religion. We insist that we can reject dogmas, creeds, even sacred texts because love is the path, love is the point, love is the goal of our spiritual lives.... That all sounds great and it is nearly impossible to implement.
Though I do not believe that the resurrection accounts in the gospels should be taken literally, one of the most important symbolic messages present in the very metaphorical accounts is the fact that the resurrected Jesus was, in Luke's and John's accounts, resurrected with the nail and spear wounds of the crucifixion still visible.
Your wounds, your failures, your defeats are a part of you. You can heal, you can start over, you can experience resurrection in your life but you don't start over without a limp and a few scars.
Last month, at our conference with Bishop Spong, the most fascinating woman I have ever met drove up from Dallas to attend. The two of us realized both a common attraction and a host of common interests and so we are, I'm very happy to say, in the midst of a life changing romance.
But I am 58 years old. I've been single for a generation and have had more failed dating relationships than I care to remember. So, I asked Heather if we could just avoid talking about our past relationships for a while. I'm not trying to hide anything but I didn't want to carry any old baggage into a new relationship. I wanted to give the two of us space to figure out who we are as a couple before the room gets too crowded with the ghosts of all the people who had been unsuccessful contestants in the past.
I still think that was a good suggestion, as a method, but what we have discovered in hours and hours of phone conversations is that it is nearly impossible to say who I am, what my hopes are, what my image of love, marriage, family life is without some accounting of just how I got all of the bullet holes and knife scars that still show in my resurrected life.
No matter how much you want to put the past behind you, there are hot buttons, emotional tender spots that are a part of us. Heather, as I feel compelled to remind her at times, wasted several years of her life dating lesser men and now that she has traded up, there are a lot of things that she can just let go of.
I have had to realize that even though I consider myself to be very progressive and to have very egalitarian views about gender roles, that some of my past experiences have left me with some anger that sometimes comes out in the form of humor that isn't, in the final analysis, all that funny. This has not been a comfortable realization for me but I can see it and I don't want it but these shadows lurk about in our psyche.
We want to connect with people. We want to have friends. We want to experience community, but the fact is that once you are out of the sandbox, life happens and we end up with some tough scars.
It was inaccurately attributed to Meryl Streep but it is actually a kind of declaration made by the author, José Micard Teixeira. It is simultaneously liberating and guilt provoking.... He says, in part:
"I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I've become arrogant, but simply because I reached a point in my life where I do not want to waste more time with what displeases me or hurts me. I lost the will to please those who do not like me, to love those who do not love me and to smile at those who do not want to smile at me. I no longer spend a single minute on those who lie or want to manipulate. I decided not to coexist anymore with pretense, hypocrisy, dishonesty and cheap praise. In friendship I dislike the lack of loyalty and betrayal. I do not get along with those who do not know how to give a compliment or a word of encouragement. And on top of everything I have no patience for anyone who does not deserve my patience."I have no idea how old that Teixeira is, but I can sympathize with his unwillingness to waste anymore precious time in life on relationships that mimic love but are not, in fact, loving. I'm uncomfortable with the suggestion that so many people are expendable.... People should never be regarded as something to simply dispose of but you lock your car doors in public parking places and you lock your doors and windows in your home to keep people from stealing your things .... So what sense does it make for us to allow emotional thieves to take our days, our weeks..... to take our joy... to steal from us the opportunity to experience real friendship, intimate family affection and true love?
What I am personally realizing is that clearing the emotional clutter out of my life is not so much a matter of saying that I have lost patience with those who take away our real love relationships but rather that I have to get rid of the things in me that keep people at a distance, that make it hard to be in a close friendship with me.
We do have to protect ourselves from emotional bank robbers but we also have to stop polluting our own emotional environment. I like most of Teixeira's declaration, I just think that we need to look in a mirror and say it to ourselves before we step to our front door and say it to the world.
Love is our religion. Love is the only word we need in our sacred text. Love is our healing, our path and our goal and every step we take that is defined by dishonesty, manipulation, revenge, resentment, competition, judgment, and intolerance is a step in the wrong direction.
I don't want you to be rejected or to feel guilt. I just want for myself and I want for you to be better at loving.
You learn to ride a bicycle by riding a bicycle. You learn to sing by singing. You learn to love by loving.
I would say more about that but I am kind of eager to get on the road to Dallas right now.
