“Love in the Time of Pandemic” Feb. 14, 2021 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
I am not sure when you would say that civilization began. Humans started to plant crops about 12,000 years ago. Settled farms called for the development of walled cities about 10,000 years ago. We began to develop written language about 5,000 years ago.
About 3000 years ago we emerged from the bronze age into what we call the iron age, but it wasn’t just the discovery of how to make iron, it was about that time that we learned how to weave cloth, and Greek philosophers, poets, and playwrights began to write works that we still read today.
But then, since the insurrection on January 6th, it has been difficult for me to have confidence that agriculture, walled cities, a written language and such things as iron, the wheel, electricity, computers, and spaceships all add up to civilization. Maybe we are not there yet.
To understand our push towards civilization, we really have to look back a couple of million years to our evolutionary ancestors. As humans begin to evolve with larger brains, and therefore, much larger skulls, the females of our lineage had to evolve to give birth sooner and sooner in order to be able to pass these, not quite fully formed, beings through their cervix, and, by all reports, it is rather more painful for humans still than it is for other mammals. I’m going on hearsay here;
I got my kid at the Memphis International Airport and there was no screaming or pushing involved. I understand that it can be quite difficult. All I had to do was remember where I had parked the car.
Newborns of other species, even animals as large as horses and elephants, can stand and walk the day that they are born. Not so for modern humans. Human babies have to be carefully protected, carried, fed, guarded and trained for years to survive.
Every species evolved with a powerful instinct to reproduce. But simply mating would not perpetuate the human race. The anthropologist, Margaret Mead, has said that marriage was invented by females who needed the father of her children to stay and protect and provide for her and the infants while they were so vulnerable. That is not a very romantic thing to say on Valentine’s Day, but the family, marriage, the whole social structure of human civilization, begins at the point where babies have to be born long before they can even do the basics of survival on their own.
Other mammals have gestation periods that can go for 15 or 16 months, or elephants, nearly 2 years. Sure, baby elephants, camels, and horses are born with mad skills but, they don’t have the brain capacity for written language, forging steel, or getting into political arguments on FaceBook. So, who’s civilized now?
It may be a bit clinical to talk about coupling as a matter of propagating the species and then having to hang around to gather nuts, berries, and firewood, but that is just where romance begins. There is function before there is poetry.
For our ancient primate ancestors, it may have started out from the impulse to reproduce and the necessity of forming a family to raise young, but, as most of us know already, when the process of reproduction and child rearing is in the distant past, there remains both a capacity and a need for connection, love, romance.
In fact, possibly my favorite priest, rabbi, and minister joke goes like this:
Don’t stop me if you have heard this before: So, the priest and the minister are arguing about when life begins, with the priest insisting that life begins in the womb when the egg is fertilized. The minister is trying to argue that human life is not a zygote or a fetus but a baby that is viable outside the womb. The rabbi finally interrupts them and says, “You’re both wrong, life begins when the kids are out of college and the dog dies!”
There is obviously a vital element of lust at the beginning of any love relationship, and there is a tremendous amount of bonding in the shared experience of having and raising children. But, in the 21st century especially, after the kids are out of college, and without casting aspersions on dogs, maybe I can say, in retirement, there is still a great deal of life left, and where there is life, there is the potential for true love.
It has now been a year since the corona virus began to change history in the United States and all over the globe. When we were first called into a pre-emptive lock down to avoid the spread of the virus, David Ketchum and I believed that a lot of people would panic, suffer from depression, or turn to drugs or alcohol, or that there may be instances of domestic violence.
We did what good pastors do. We put together some reassuring meditation videos to encourage people to accept a brief interruption in life and to live with a new set of disciplines for a couple of months. Of course, it wasn’t a couple of months. It has been a year and the pandemic has steadily gotten worse with the numbers of deaths and new infections only now trending down, though, with a half a million deaths in the United States, we can hardly find much to celebrate. And though the current trend is promising, there are new strains of the virus that may yet plunge us into deeper and deeper health and economic crisis.
Though our meditation videos were almost entirely ignored, there has been a spike in drug and alcohol abuse. There has been a huge spike in suicides and gun related deaths. Still, it has been hard to tell exactly who has the hardest time enduring Covid-19. I have lived alone for more than a decade now, but I didn’t know what “alone” really meant until this past year. I have gone from “cabin fever” to full blown “house bound leprosy.” It has been crazy lonely, and it is not getting any better. But I have known that there is an entirely different set of challenges when you are not alone, especially if the kids are out of college and you aren’t going to the office anymore.
Two people who love each other and have spent decades together are now spending decades together every week or two. I do get lonely in my homebound isolation, but I regularly talk with people who would love a little alone time.
Where life had been a pleasant blending of time together and time apart in separate volunteer activities and hobbies, now, there is mostly just a lot of time together. . . and that takes a whole different set of skills. And, frankly, every marriage will not survive the stress, depression, and challenges that have come from a year in quarantine. And some of the ones that are not making it are ones that I really wanted to see survive. I’ve done a lot of weddings over the past 42 years, but I have never gotten good at predicting who was going to stay together and who wasn’t.
In marriage, as in evolution, it is important to realize that we have mischaracterized Darwin when we speak of evolution as a matter of the survival of the fittest. It is not the strongest or even the smartest of the species that survives to reproduce, it is the one that can best adapt to change. In any marriage that has lasted for 15, 20, or 25 years, anyone can tell you that it was not just one single marriage, but it was probably three or four, if not five or six. People don’t stay the same and sometimes two passionate lovers who were inseparable a decade ago, cannot stand each other now. People change, and they either change in complimentary ways or they arrange to give almost all of their life’s savings to a total stranger, commonly called a divorce lawyer.
Libidinal appetite may play a huge role in why people are initially drawn to one another, but that is certainly not why they choose to stay together, 5, 10, or 50 years later. I could hope that no couple gives up on intimacy entirely but, statistically, I know that it happens.
About 15 to 20% of couples live in sexless marriages and that includes about 10% who are under 40. This can happen for a lot of physiological reasons but mostly it is psychological. I will not say much more about this, but I will leave you with this one thought, researchers tell us that couples that are sexually intimate at least once a week, live much longer than those who do not. So, friends, take your vitamins. And that goes for gay couples as well. The stats on your sexual frequency are even more dismal than among heterosexual couples. All of which, can be complicated by the stress of the pandemic.
As these months have drug on, I have noticed a distinct increase in people’s willingness to be rude or even cruel, in entirely unnecessary ways. I can only imagine what that must be like when you are around the same person 24/7.
In the early days of the pandemic, I was in the habit of talking with a physician friend in New York nearly daily, as he was seeing many patients die and he was experiencing the growing stress on New York’s whole healthcare system. But we sometimes talked about family and it has always seemed to me that William and Cristina have the kind of marriage that everyone would love to have. At some point, I said to William, “It is a shame that Cristina doesn’t have a single sister.” To which he replied, “Oh, she does, but she is a professor in Brazil. She doesn’t speak English and I don’t think she likes men.” Well, he was half right.
In the early days of our internet courtship, I picked up this novel, thinking that it would offer some catharsis from the challenge of being in a budding romance facing the barriers of not only thousands of miles and complicated language issues, but also the extremity of a pandemic which has kept Brazilians from coming to the United States and has made going from here to there something akin to inventing agriculture, walled cities, written language, and iron.
The novel was a bit disappointing in that cholera doesn’t figure into the plot nearly as much as the title would indicate. But it is about love, initially the love between Florentino and Fermina. As in so many Latin novels, their love was forbidden by Fermina’s family and in the end her father took her far away to end the relationship, but they secretly stayed in touch through the early 20th century version of FaceBook messenger, the telegraph.
When Fermina was old enough to leave her father and return to Florentino, she discovered that though they had imagined a great love affair, they were, in truth, total strangers. And so, she broke off their engagement and returned to her father’s home. There she was eventually courted by and married to a very beloved national hero, a physician, Dr. Urbino, whose passion, oddly enough, was the eradication of Cholera. How romantic!
He was, however, a sincerely good man, and he loved Fermina and was almost entirely loyal to her. Fermina forgot all about Florentino and was a devoted wife who, though not passionately in love, shared a noble and admirable life with her hard-working husband.
The plot turns when they had grown old. Dr. Urbino was called out to examine the body of a close friend who had committed suicide at the age of 60, purely out of fear of growing old. When he returned home, he found that his pet parrot had escaped and was in a tree in the lawn. He climbed a ladder to retrieve the frightened bird but fell to his death.
On the heels of Dr. Urbino’s death, Florentino shows up to proclaim his undying love for Fermina, swearing to her that he had been totally faithful to her through all of the decades when she was married. This was a lie on the scale of Donald Trump’s account of his landslide victory in the November election, but this is a novel about romance and so we will not get bogged down in the sordid details. Though she was but recently widowed, and Florentino’s advances were not entirely well regarded in the community, she gave him a second chance, and after five decades apart, they were at last given a life together.
Love later in life may seem a bit like giving out free dancing shoes at the nursing home. It may be a generous gesture but what good can come of it? All I can say, is that you don’t know everything about dancing. I have never had a fair shot at a mutually meaningful relationship and the fact that Silvia did not show up in my life until I was in my 60’s has not made it less meaningful for me.
There are stereotypes for Latin families and Anglo-American families. I would say that my family and Silvia’s pretty well check all of the boxes on those stereotypes.
I had two brothers and a sister and once we left home, we almost never saw one another short of absolute necessity. I have tried, for years, to get us to be closer and have failed at every turn. There is nothing to be mad about, there is just no desire to do any better.
Silvia has a mother, two sisters and a brother, four nieces, and three in-laws. I have met them all. All educated, interesting, colorful people, and by “colorful” I mean that they have their own issues. As Silvia’s sister, Andrea, has assured me, “My psychiatrist tells me that all 6 of my personalities are doing just fine.” They all have their issues, but the number one issue is that they all love and support one another in ways that my family not only couldn’t imagine, but I dare say, that they would hate. My siblings always preferred competition to affection which is sad since I am the youngest, tallest, smartest, and best looking of the litter.
I spent two weeks with Silvia on Florianopolis last fall, and I knew before I went that she and her whole family meet online every Saturday and Sunday night for a loud and animated family meeting. What I did not know is that beyond those twice weekly transcontinental zoom meetings, they also all call and text one another, if I use the word “constantly,” you will think that I am exaggerating. I am telling you, it is a conversation that never ends. It is like a 3-ring circus, you find yourself thinking, this is just too much, and yet you are endlessly intrigued, and you cannot look away. As Andrea says, “Our family is all crazy, but no one ever wants to leave.”
Silvia and I have no plan and no idea for how we might combine our lives. We both have compelling reasons to be where we are and yet we both want to find a way to be together. I hope that we can make it work though I can tell you this, I am not afraid of growing old and I cannot even imagine doing it alone.
When we first were introduced and she was showing me why William was certain that Silvia did not like men, and she especially did not like religion, philosophy, or even poetry, I shared with her a passage that has been broadly falsely attributed to Frieda Kahlo, that says:
“Te mereces un amante que te quiera despeinado,
con todo y todos los motivos que te despiertan de prisa y los demonios que no te dejan dormir.
Te mereces un amante que te quite las mentiras y te traiga esperanza, café y poesía ".
“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 takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.”
Through the right poem, we discovered, that while Silvia does not care for lesser men, she is willing to make an exception for the right one.
Folks, the world can beat you down. Your career, even a career like mine where it has been my honor to roll out of bed and to try to make the world a better place, to feed the hungry, build houses for the homeless, and bring comfort and moral challenge to a world beset with darkness . . . but even my wonderful, amazing, life in ministry has also been marked by irrational hatred, broken friendships, lies, and that most insidious dimension of ecclesial politics.
Life can take a toll on a marriage, even the explicit joy of having and raising children together, that too can weigh you down, turning young lovers into strangers who share a bed. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t have to stay that way.
The novel lets us peek in on Florentino through the years of his adult life, when, frankly, he had hundreds of affairs. But I like to think, even when he was being a scoundrel, that he was always wishing that it was the real thing, wishing that it was Fermina. . . until the day, when it was Fermina.
I’ve been single for 25 years. I had resigned myself to the fact that I was one of that large percentage of people in our world who was destined to go it alone. But there has never been a day in these 25 years that I did not believe that I “deserved a lover who would take away the demons, and bring hope into my life, and coffee, and poetry.”
Silvia and I do not know with any certainty what the future holds for the two of us, but what we do have is hope. I do not know where your life stands on this Valentine’s Day, this wretched greeting card holiday that has, for decades, just made me feel sad, . . . I don’t know where you are on this day, but I do know this,
“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 takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.”
Whether it happens or not, you deserve it. And if you are in a marriage that has become a roommate relationship, let me tell you, that happens a lot, but you don’t have to leave it to find love again in a new person. Although you can’t change a stale relationship all at once, you can change it.
Sometimes change comes in the form of a gesture, bring her a cup of coffee in bed and start out this way, “I found this poem, . . . may I read it to you?” And if you were to do that every morning for a week or two, well, you can thank me later.
