“A View of Romance from a Non-Combatant” Feb.
12, 2017
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO Roger Ray, pastor
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO Roger Ray, pastor
I will not likely make a habit
of coming to the defense of U.S. Counselor to
the President, Kellyanne Conway, but when
she was being derided in the media this week for her mention of a “Bowling Green
Massacre” I was carried back to my own time in Bowling Green, KY. I started
college there in 1974 and I feel that it is not entirely fair to say that there
never was a Bowling Green Massacre.
That fall was the first time in
my life that I was allowed to move away from my too tiny Kentucky hometown
where the zip code is still “E-I-E-I-O.” There, at Western Kentucky University,
I met and fell madly in love with the most exotic and amazing international student…. We’ll
call her “Gloria”…since her name is Gloria. The Bowling Green Massacre occurred
a few months later when Gloria abruptly broke up with me and soon thereafter
married our Sunday School teacher, David.
Some of you will be thinking
now that this unfortunate teenaged broken heart episode does not rise to the
nomenclature of “massacre” and to you I can only say, “You were not there.” The
wound found some balm a few years later when Gloria divorced David to marry her
girlfriend. The existential angst created by the obsessive question, “Why
didn’t Gloria love me?” became much less pointed when I realized that she
didn’t really love any men. That made the whole massacre much less personal.
Perhaps I should add, at this
point, Kellyanne Conway is still nuts.
Now, more than 40 years later,
I find myself on the eve of another Valentine’s Day just as single as I was in
1974. I’ve been married and during the past 20 years that I have been single,
I’ve had a couple of close brushes with the prospect of trying it again. Samuel Johnson once observed on the occasion
of the marriage of a widowed friend of his, that to marry a second time is a
sign of the triumph of hope over experience.
Like many others, I have, more
than once, foolishly tried to avoid the stigma of being alone on Valentine’s
Day by trying to cobble together a last minute and ill-conceived dinner date
but not this year. To save local singles from this fate, the Mother’s Brewing
Company is offering a deal where, for the price of admission, you can spend
Valentine’s Day at the brewery drinking as much as you can hold and then being
sent home in an Uber. I’m not saying that I am going to go there, I’m just
saying that it is none of your business if I am.
Last week I was talking about
the rapid evolution of our social connections through the various technologies
and social platforms of our modern life. The ancient structure of the time-honored
institution of “romance” has been, perhaps, influenced more than most.
I’ve spent 25 years advocating
for the rights of gay people to get married, and now that we have finally
cleared that seemingly impossible social hurdle, the whole topic of marriage
seems to have fallen out of vogue. Once considered to be nearly the compulsory
goal of adult life, fewer than half of Americans are married today.
When our society was largely
agrarian and life-expectancy was considerably shorter, marriage and having
children was simply a part of the formula for survival. As our population has
become more urban, and with the advent of more fair compensation for women,
more career options, and with the arrival of reliable birth control, marriage
is no longer deemed to be crucial to women. As Gloria Steinman said years ago,
“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
Being married, or even being in
a couple, is no longer an economic necessity and it isn’t even necessary to
have or raise children. Now that being in a long-term committed relationship is
no longer necessary, to enter into a romantic partnership is a matter of
elective choice and more and more people are just choosing to “Netflicks and
chill” by actually just watching a movie and relaxing.
The famous author and
psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, once said that without the initial lust of sexual
attraction that no couple would ever be able to give up enough of their freedom
to get married. In the absence of the moral strictures that once tightly
governed intimacy, couples now have to find a larger reason to stay together.
Of course, we would like to
think that reason is true love. And I expect that my email inbox will fill up
in response to my saying it, but I don’t think that true love is enough either.
I think that something more is needed. I think that coupling in our age calls
for a certain depth of meaning, a partnership that makes one and one add up to
something more than just two.
Springfield’s own Brad Pitt has
now divorced two of the most beautiful women the world has ever known. Clearly,
mere attraction is temporary even in the most extreme examples. In any
relationship, the cute little curiosities that first attracted you to your
partner become annoying and after a couple of decades, those same
eccentricities can become reason for justifiable homicide.
My favorite joke about a rabbi,
a priest, and a minister goes like this: The three were debating when life
begins. The priest, predictably, was admant in insisting that life began at
conception. The minister, a more progressive chap, insisted that life begins
only when a baby is viable outside of the mother’s womb. Unable to persuade one
another to budge in their opinions, they turned to the rabbi and asked him what
he believed on the matter.
The wise old rabbi said, “You
are both wrong. Life really begins when the kids are out of college and the dog
dies.” Of course, my kid is out of college and I don’t have a dog and, in a lot
of ways, you can say that I have a very enviable life. I don’t have anyone who
is dependent on me to either provide them with a home, medical care, and I
don’t have to ask anyone’s permission or consent about where I go on vacation
or what I’m going to have for dinner. And I have a few very close friends with
whom I go scuba diving and more regularly, just how to hear a live band or take
in a movie.
But I will I remember the first
time that I got to go to the British Museum in London. The British Museum is a
tribute to that incredible period of archaeology when British scholars traveled
all over the world and stole every amazing then they could find.
The wonders of Egypt, Greece,
Rome, and the Middle East are all housed under one roof in London where the
British government continues to turn a deaf ear to the nations that demand that
their treasures be returned. I have made it a point to return there every time
I have the good fortune to get to go to London but I will tell you, standing in
front of these wonders of history, as wonderful is that is, can be hollow when
you don’t have someone standing beside you to whom you might turn and say,
“would you look at that?”
I’m a pretty good cook, I can
take care of my own lawn, laundry, and I can pay my own bills and I have a lot
of freedom but I would be lying if I did not acknowledge that there is a
certain existential void when you do not have a significant other with whom to
share the triumphs and wonders of living.
The ancient witness from the 21st
chapter of Proverbs says that, “It is better to live on the corner of a roof
than to dwell in a mansion with a contentious and angry woman.” Of course,
there is also the more modern proverb quoted by women that says, “The more I
know about men the better I like my dog.”
I titled this sermon, “A
perspective on romance from a non-combatant.” After more than 20 years as a
single guy, I view romance from a fairly philosophical vantage point. I spend
part of every week serving food to the women and children who live in our local
domestic violence shelter and after a career full of pastoral counseling with
couples whose marriage had become toxic, I know how bad a love relationship can
become.
But I also know that there is
not a straight line from the altar where two peopled pledge to love and respect
one another for the rest of their lives to the night when they call the police
to break up the fight. There are, what I call the “5 horsemen of the marriage
apocalypse.” Economic stress can kill a marriage. Differences of opinion about
child rearing can become toxic. And, of course, there is drug and alcohol abuse
or related obsessions of smoking, gambling, hoarding, or compulsive shopping.
There is infidelity, and finally there is physical violence.
I have had my share of all of
those cases in the pastor’s study through the years but those are the obvious
ones. There are more subtle poisons that take people to see their lawyers. The
more quiet and insidious assassins are taking one another for granted. You can
starve love with neglect. You can steal the oxygen out of a relationship by
giving the time and emotional energy it needs to survive and give it to work,
hobbies, and all of the things that we use to put distance between ourselves
and our loved ones.
These don’t happen all at once
but no one should pretend that they don’t know what path they are following.
You don’t just wake up one day and find yourself on the east coast…. You have
to drive and drive and drive in that direction and if you invest yourself, your
time, your energy in constantly going east while your family is here in
Missouri then you cannot believably just say, “we grew apart.” When you stopped
for gas and then got on the road and kept going east, you knew what you were
doing.
Look: We don’t have to be in a
couple anymore. You can be happy and lead a meaningful life as a single person
but we all know that is probably not anyone’s first choice.
If you are fortunate enough to
share space with someone who is willing to try to make life work with you, and
you know how difficult you can be, then do what you can to feed that
relationship. You know what can poison it and you know what can make it strong.
You are not the victim of random events in your life. Your life is the sum
total of your choices.
I will leave you with the sage
advice found in my favorite Langston Hughes poem:
“Folks, I'm telling
you,
birthing is hard
and dying is mean-
so get yourself
a little loving
in between.”
