May 22, 2016 Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor “Spiritual Love (try
giving a damn)”
Rumi, 14th Century Sufi Mystic - Your
task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers
within yourself that you have built against it.
Emmet Fox - “There is no difficulty that
enough love will not conquer: no disease that love will not heal: no door that
enough love will not open...It makes no difference how deep set the trouble:
how hopeless the outlook: how muddled the tangle: how great the mistake. A
sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all. If only you could love
enough you would be the happiest and most powerful being in the world...”
Back when Caitlin Jenner was
still known as Bruce Jenner and Chelsea Manning was still captive in a prisoner
of war camp known as Bradly Manning, the local Human Rights Commission asked me
to write an essay for our paper promoting sensitivity towards the transgender community.
I had to admit that I knew very little about the topic. So the commission was
kind enough to arrange some interviews for me with a couple of young
transgender activists.
After some research and the
interviews, I wrote a short essay in which I basically tried to tell our
community that, though fairly rare, the whole transgender thing is a real
issue. Some people are born with ambiguous genitalia and the physician and
parents have to make a choice…. And about half of the time they make the wrong
guess.
For others the struggle is
entirely internal, a soul and spirit virtually captured in a body that is the
wrong gender.
Like everything else about sex,
gender roles, and self-understanding, it is complex, confusing, and some people
end up going back and forth as they struggle to discover themselves and the
role that is right for them.
And, like every other essay I
have written for the Springfield NewsLeader, there were several people who were
eager to point out to me why I was wrong, and not Christian, and un-American,
and whatever… but they were not very enthusiastic about it because, like me,
most of them had either never met a transgender man or woman or if they had
they didn’t realize that they had…. Which is almost always they way that works.
But now, with Catlin Jenner
very publicly and very often demanding that we accept her, both as a woman and
as an out of the closet Republican, and with even President Obama getting into
the fray over school restroom policy, I find that even I keep changing the
channels every time the news wants to update me on who said what ridiculous or
uninformed thing today.
I am interested in reports on
what is said in the Georgia and North Carolina legislature in the same way that
I want to go to the sewage treatment plant and watch what is coming out of the
spillway. I’m sure someone does have to
worry about that but I just don’t want it to be me.
Social media, the magical Book
of Faces, is where we go now to take the pulse of our culture and it was there,
after I made some comment which I am sure was absolutely appropriate,
insightful, and informative; a southern gentleman assigned himself the task of
politely correcting me.
He told me about how he had a
gay uncle whom he loved but his uncle had never made a public issue of his sexual
orientation. He didn’t expect everyone to have to deal with his private life
and his partnership with another man.
And who among us, whether we
have ever said it out loud or not, has not felt that way. I get tired to being
told not to use certain words, or to be expected to get engaged in a topic that
just doesn’t involve me, or my family. And it’s especially difficult for a
white, male, heterosexual, in the middle class…. How many of you in my
situation had to have “white privilege” explained to you four or five times
before you ever started to get it?
This particular critic was a
white, male, heterosexual who would never be denied a marriage license, no
matter how many he wanted in the course of a lifetime. He would never walk into a public restroom
and nervously look around to see if anyone was going to beat him up just
because he needed to pee. And yet, he was just a little too precious to be
bothered.
It would not surprise me if I
have already lost the majority of our online audience just because I have
mentioned the trans issue and some of you who are here may be staying just
because you are too polite to walk out on me, but substantively that’s not
really what I am talking about. What I really want to talk about is love.
Beyond all talk about romance,
intimate affection, or whatever Victoria’s Secret could possible be…. I mean,
really, what on earth could she be hiding? … I want to talk about love as that
spiritual dimension, that decision to give energy to others that a self-serving
narcissist would never understand.
We began this morning with the admittedly rather
trite sounding and possibly annoying claim of Emmet Fox who says: “There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer: no disease
that love will not heal: no door that enough love will not open...It makes no
difference how deep set the trouble: how hopeless the outlook: how muddled the
tangle: how great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve
it all. If only you could love enough you would be the happiest and most
powerful being in the world...”
Let me grant that
there is a bit of over-statement here, maybe even hyperbole, but even though we
might poke holes in this grandiose claim, still, can you give him the leeway to
see that it is, in fact, mostly true.
A lot of the
self-help gurus who write popular books, who get TV shows, or who run retreats
for wealthy people to go to exotic places and feel sorry for themselves, are as
devoid of substance as a bowl of onion soup…. Leo Buscagalia couldn’t hug away
a real problem, Deepak Chopra tries to string together important sounding words
but if you tried to actually analyze a sentence of his speeches you would want
to stick a pencil right through your eyeball, and I don’t have time to get
started on Tony Robbins who is, in my estimation, the king of con men, but here
is the really frustrating thing: Every
one of these guys has actually helped a lot of people.
Yeah, I have to act
like I am happy about that fact because they are so irritating. All of these self-help gurus are, no matter
how much they fumble and lie along the way, giving people encouragement to stop
thinking about how they have failed, how they are broken and in need, and they
are giving them permission, in many cases, to drop barriers and love others, to
express caring, vulnerability, sincere concern for the welfare of others… and
when they do that, their lives do dramatically improve.
And though I think I
have some fairly sophisticated training in pastoral counseling, I know that the
single most important part of any counseling appointment that I conduct is not
my blazingly insightful advice or amazing diagnostic skill, it is the fact that
I listen and give them the impression that I care about the problem and that I
want for them to get better.
I would hate to see
the statistics comparing the success rates of a caring bartender and
professionally trained psychiatrist but, in many instances, I’m going to say
that a caring friend is the most helpful and meds dispensed by the bartender
are often better than what the physicians writes down in her or his notes and
what the pharmacist putts in a bottle.
You may not have ever had to deal with a
controversial sexual identity issue in your immediate family but we have all
experienced sorrow or loss that took us out of the normal path of our lives.
When you lose a parent, or a spouse, or, God forbid, one of your children… if
you go through a divorce or a bankruptcy or an extended unemployment, you often
find out how thin the sincere empathy of your friends can be.
People may be very sympathetic and attentive for
a week, maybe two, usually no more than six weeks, but six months later it all
still feels like it was yesterday to you. And if you can remember how that felt
to you, when the phone never rang when you needed for it to, when people were
not available when you needed them, when you were not being included the way
you used to be… then you know what I mean when I say that there simply is not
enough love in the world because it is love that gives us the energy to respond
to needs that are not necessarily our own.
It is love that keeps us from being impatient.
I’m not talking about romance or any warm fuzzy feelings, I’m talking about the
clear and sacrificial, determined decision that you are going to give a damn
about things that don’t happen to hit you personally right between the eyes.
Substantive love was always more about the
decisions you make than the emotions you feel. Feeling is easy, doing the right
thing when you are tired, stressed out, bored, or annoyed, that is hard. It is
a lack of love that makes us feel the need to retreat, stop caring, to insulate
yourselves from any demand that you care about the people who are the victims
of discrimination or who, due to illness, broken relationships, finances, or
race are standing at the margins of a society that would be helped if you just
cared a little more.
Love is, at its core, a generous emotion.
Healthy marriages should strive for mutuality but that is not the basic nature
of love. And while I don’t want to throw any unnecessary insults in the
direction of Hinduism, I want to say that Karma, if it exists at all, is
unreliable. Most of the good that you seek to do for strangers will not be
rewarded if it is acknowledged at all.
In fact, my older brother is fond of reciting to
me the proverb, “no good deed goes unpunished.” In my 35 years of parish life,
I have found my brother’s philosophy to be much more reliably true than the
karmic sense that good intentions render good results in return.
As progressives, we’re not trying to infuse the
world with love because we are trying to storm the gates of heaven with our
virtue, nor do we seek to gain adherents to our faith, nor personal reward… we
do it because, if I may be allowed to say it twice, we are trying to give a
damn. I’m just saying that we could probably do a little better if we tried.
