“Coffee and Poetry – a Valentine’s Reflection”

“Coffee and Poetry – a Valentine’s Reflection”  Feb. 10, 2019   Dr. Roger Ray

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“You deserve a lover who wants you disheveled, with everything and all the reasons that wake you up in a haste and the demons that won’t let you sleep.
You deserve a lover who makes you feel safe, who can consume this world whole if he walks hand in hand with you; someone who believes that his embraces are a perfect match with your skin.
You deserve a lover who wants to dance with you, who goes to paradise every time he looks into your eyes and never gets tired of studying your expressions.
You deserve a lover who listens when you sing, who supports you when you feel shame and respects your freedom; who flies with you and isn’t afraid to fall.
You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.”
― Frida Kahlo

Three or four cars ago, I indulged a long-postponed dream. When my daughter had become a licensed driver and had a car of her own, and I no longer had to haul her and a half a dozen of her friends around town, I traded my Volvo station wagon in for a 2-seater convertible. It caused a buzz in the church, of course, in much the way that growing a beard or wearing a suit that is not black or navy blue causes a stir. Mid-life crisis, childish indulgence, call it whatever you want . . . I loved it. 

In fact, I loved it so much that after about a month of driving it, I called the used car dealer where I had bought it to thank him for selling it to me and to tell him how happy it had made me. There was silence on the other end of the line, finally he said, “And?” “That’s it,” I said, “I just wanted to thank you again for selling it to me.” 

This gray-haired old hand in the car industry had evidently never sold a used car and had the buyer call and say, “thank you.” He was sincerely speechless. Experience had taught him to expect the worst. If you get a call from someone who just bought a used car from you, it was bound to be a complaint because people don’t call used car salesmen with good news.

Oddly enough, being a minister is a lot like being a used car salesman. No one ever schedules an appointment with me to tell me that their kids are doing well in school, that they have never had a run-in with the law, and that they are dating the most charming and intelligent people. No one ever drops by to say, “Just wanted to let you know that my wife and I are more hopelessly in love than we were ten years ago when you married us.”

In fact, for the last few months, every time my phone has rung, I feel a sudden existential angst. And there is palpable relief when it is someone inviting me to dinner and it is almost okay even when someone is calling to ask for someone’s phone number or email address… even if I had given the same phone number to them not 48 hours earlier. . .  but I don’t really want to go down that rabbit hole.

Of course, I have no idea how many married couples are really happy, or how many are just quietly tolerating one another. I’m afraid that many settle into a kind of quiet acquiescence. The thrill is gone, the passion as cooled, and, over time, even the curiosity goes away as you become so familiar with one another that you not only finish one another’s sentences, but you can become irrationally irritated by the fact that she is always losing her keys, and he never remembers to lock the back door.

Poets and playwrights have always waxed eloquent about romantic love, but in all honesty, for most of human history, being in love or being happy was not all that relevant in marriage. Most marriages were either directly arranged or substantially arranged and couples stayed together out of a survival need as much as for religious values or reputation.

When homes were lit by oil lamps, food was cooked on a wood fire stove, and clothes were washed in a tub and hung on a clothesline to dry, whether your husband had gotten a little big in the middle or your wife’s breasts sagged was not something you spent time worrying about. A hundred years ago, pastors did not hear many couples coming in to complain that there were just not happy… that their marriage wasn’t fulfilling. In the days before refrigeration, they had to worry more about whether the meat in the smokehouse was safe and edible and whether their old horse was going to make it through another winter. 

It was World War II that began to see the American family in rapid evolution. Women were forced from their homes into offices and manufacturing floors. Prior to the war, women mostly had contact with their family and a few neighbors and church members but in the world of commerce in the midst of global conflict, and their world had changed and they were not necessarily eager to go back to the old ways when the war was over. 

I wasn’t alive then but I grew up hearing sermons and religious debates that were focused on getting women back into their homes. A married woman with children who tried to keep a career was portrayed as being inherently irresponsible, wayward, maybe even sinful. 

My father came home from the war and got a job with the newly formed Rural Electrification Corporation, the REA, and for the next 40 years he was involved with stretching the copper wires that made modern life, with all of its labor-saving appliances and conveniences possible. 

This time period not only saw the divorce rate rise, but in recent years, it has seen more and more people choosing to live alone. More than half of Americans are not married now. Women no longer need a husband to bring home the bacon, chop the fire wood, and slaughter the pig and they don’t even need a husband to have and raise a child. And I don’t need someone to iron my clothes, cook my dinner, or explain to me why almost everything that I say or do is wrong . . . maybe that was just my home life. I don’t mean to speak for you. 

I am generalizing, of course, but for most of human history, family stability was largely maintained by the fact that there was no other practical choice. Families stayed together for unconscious psychological reasons, being the pack animals that we are, but we also stayed together out of economic necessity and for sheer survival. For the most part, that chapter of human history is in the past. 

Now couples largely stay together because they choose to do so. So why do they choose to do so? There is a lot of sexual impulse that we inherit through evolution and that is certainly a big part of it, at least in the beginning. But this is one thing that same sex couples and opposite sex couples have in common: sexual frequency starts at a high point and declines pretty quickly. It may be uncomfortable to talk about, but it is a nearly universal event.

There is an old Italian proverb that says: In the first five years of marriage, you are lovers. In the second five years you are friends. In the third five years you become like brother and sister. And in the next five you become like two sisters. Now, as we tend to live longer than our ancestors, the question we might pose to anyone who starts towards marriage after their child bearing years are past and when their careers have peaked or been put to bed, what is it that would make you sacrifice your independence and some measure of your self determination to enter into a seven-day-a-week partnership under one roof?  

Again, I think of this on a personal level. Having spent most of my adult life as a single person, what would make me ever change my marital status? What would make it worth it?  And I have an answer for that. Meaning. 

There was a wonderful moment in Robin William’s movie, the Dead Poets’ Society, in which he tells his students, “Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

My late parents were married for more than 60 years and I do not doubt that there were moments of real emotional connection between them, but as an observer of nearly 50 of those years, their marriage was about function. They were Puritans with a Protestant work ethic that would have killed Paul Bunyan. They worked, and cleaned, and cooked, and mowed, they planted, harvested, canned, and froze, but what I never saw them do was read to one another. If it were not for the daily newspaper that each held in silence before going to bed, I would not have been sure that they even knew how to read. And, really, if you know how to read but you just don’t, how is that different from being illiterate? 

Last year, when my good friend Dan, met Mary, and the two of them seemed to have jumped off the cliff of rational behavior in a headlong plummet of love towards marriage, I began to wonder what I would say when it came time to officiate at their ceremony.

Mary, of course, has her heart set on me doing an impersonation of a traditional Christian minister who will deliver a proper biblical sermon but you know, I am a Bible scholar and I can tell you something about the Bible and marriage, Jesus, from whom Christians draw their identity, was ostensibly never married and Catholics would have us believe that he died a virgin. In the gospels, there is no point at which Jesus utters the word “marriage” in a sentence in which he does not also mention “divorce.” And the self-appointed apostle, Paul, who wrote the largest part of the new testament does mention marriage and what he says is quite straight forward. Paul says, “just don’t do it.” So, Mary, because I love you, I promise that I will take some passage completely out of context and apply it to your wedding but we both know that Jesus and Paul were not exactly great family men. 

But I found a bit of poetry from the brilliant and sometimes disturbingly eccentric Mexican poet and artist, Frida Kahlo. The whole of the verse is magical, but it ends, as good poems always do, in breath-taking crescendo: 

“You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.”

I have never come as close to getting a tattoo as I did on the day when I read that. 

You deserve a lover who brings you coffee, the most basic and mundane act of grace in a sleepy household. The first one up brings the other a cup of  “wake up, it’s morning.” It is just the civil thing to do. But it is a hero who takes away the lies of the world, who is strong enough to bring you hope. Hope is not a cup of coffee. Hope is defiance in the face of contrary evidence. It is a reason to believe even when the world is dark and full of lies. 

But a lover who will read poetry to you, that is a lover who will share their heart. Who will let you see their weakness and their brilliance. Someone who will read poetry to you as you drift off to sleep will be there in the morning, and will bring you coffee when you are in your last days, and you will greet your mortality with the ring of their words in your ears:

Te mereces un amante que se lleve las mentiras y te traiga esperanza, café y poesía.