“Changing the World, Changing Me”

“Changing the World, Changing Me”    Feb. 23, 2020    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”  Viktor Frankl

            

              

This photo is from that time in the early 20^thcentury when the world was in the process of losing it’s collective mind. It was 1936 in Hamburg, Germany when Germans were being taught to salute Hitler with the call to “sieg heil” . . . “hail victory” but we see in this throng of enthusiastic Germans this one lone figure who is having none of it. August Landmesser was a German in love with a Jewish woman whom he intended to marry and with whom he intended to raise a family. He and Irma Eckler did have two daughters though they were not legally allowed to marry. Eventually August was imprisoned and then forced to serve in the military where he was killed. Irma was sent to a concentration camp where she died in the holocaust. In 1951, years after both were dead, a contrite Germany formally recognized their marriage. 

It is hard to believe that such things were going on in the world within the memory of, in not those of us here in this room, at least within the memory of our parents. The world is not what it ought to be but, folks, it is a lot better than it was seventy years ago. How did the changes come about? How did we begin to turn away from the madness of prejudice, racism, anti-Semitism, and discrimination?

Surely we all know enough of history to know that it did not change in a straight line of progress. There were people like August Landmesser who saw how wrong it all was . . . even though he was surrounded by co-workers, relatives, neighbors who believed differently . . . one man, armed with the truth can become a majority.

And lest we convince ourselves that the Germans were the evil empire and that America saved the world, you should remember that in 1939, there was considerable sympathy for the Nazi movement here in America. 

On February 20, 1939, 20,000 Americans crowded into Madison Square Gardens for a Nazi rally at which they gave the Nazi salute to a large banner of George Washington. There were a 100,000 protestors outside who were opposed to the anti-Semitic rally but that does not do much to diminish the fact that there were 20,000 at the rally. My now deceased former father-in-law fought in Europe during WWII and never tired of telling war stories but in-between his tales of wartime hijinks were affirmations of how much he hated black people, Jews, and Communists . . . which made me finally ask, “Why did you fight against the Nazi’s when you agreed with all of their objectives?” Roosevelt took us into WWII but, given some of the veterans I have known, we can be thankful that he didn’t take us in on the side of the Nazis!

I have been listening to parts of a new biography about the life of Elenore Roosevelt by historian, Blanche Cook. She was first lady of the United States from 1933 until her husband’s death in his 4^thterm as president, in 1945. After Franklin Roosevelt had died, Elenore was appointed to be our ambassador to the newly formed United Nations.

The relationship between Elenore and Franklin was complicated, to say the very least. They were distant cousins who fell in love and were married but Franklin had an affair with a secretary that broke Elenore’s heart. They both wanted to divorce but they were Roosevelts and their family insisted that they remain together, which they did, but no longer so much as husband and wife but as political partners. 

They both had their paramours, but they worked together through the war years to help to give birth to what we now call the modern world. The Germans were working to exterminate the Jews but, as I have said, the Americans were not initially terribly eager to do much to protect them. 

In 1939, a ship with nearly a thousand Jewish refugees from the coming holocaust was turned away from American shores and sent back to Germany. Elenore heard of this and worked behind the scenes to make certain that it never happened again, working tirelessly to help Jews who were escaping Europe.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Elenore tried to prevent Franklin from putting American Japanese into internment camps, but failing in that, she personally visited the camps and worked to provide education for the children there and to help find opportunities for them after the war was over. 

During the war she spoke tirelessly for an end to the Jim Crowe laws that kept blacks segregated and in poverty. She insisted that the United States had no moral authority to wage war as a defender of Democracy unless it granted full civil rights to black Americans. 

After the war, she was the first chairperson of the UN’s Commission on Human Rights and she oversaw the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For her whole life, she worked to fight against racism, sexism, and religious discrimination. So, yes, she was one of the luminaries who stood up against the prevailing culture of her day, and even to her husband, the longest serving president in American history. She helped to shape the New Deal, the formation of the United Nations, and the religiously tolerant, racially diverse nation we’re still trying to get right.

But what I find to be paradoxical about this amazing, intelligent, brave woman, this diplomat and social reformer, is that she never allowed herself to come out of the closet. Elenore had a long-term love relationship with the journalist, Lorena Hickok. It was not entirely open, but it wasn’t very well hidden either. For most of their time as lovers, Lorena actually lived in the White House. 

Their relationship eventually cooled, ironically, because while Lorena was thrilled with the large number of lesbian friends they had in and out of the White House, Lorena continued to object to having Jews and black people around them. They remained friends, . . . you know, how we all have someone in our life who is still a racist and we keep the relationship, but it just isn’t the same. 

It is a bit ironic that I am contrasting Elenore Roosevelt with August Landmesser this morning. Elenore was a huge historical character who did so much to help the modern world to come to its senses and strive to become a decent civilization and August was really a nobody, his life was sad and he died in obscurity but . . . and I don’t want to sound judgmental here but the fact is, August fought for the person he loved, a Jewish woman he wasn’t allowed to marry, but for whom he was willing to sacrifice everything. Elenore fought valiantly for every right cause except for the person she loved.

Mind you, we can all be thankful that Elenore did not leave Franklin, come out of the closet and move to some place where she and Lorena might have enjoyed a more open and honest love relationship. A part of me thinks that she should have, and yet, without Elenore, I’m not sure that Franklin Roosevelt would have always had very good moral instincts.

There are passionate love letters between Elenore and Lorena . . . she could describe what it felt like to kiss Lorena in a way that makes me blush and I am not easily shocked these days. They had love, they had passion, they shared a bed, a life, and a world changing destiny, but they never got to call it what it was. 

This quote has been falsely attributed to Abraham Lincoln for a hundred years but even though Abe is not the real source, I like it a lot . . . how many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg?

Four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg. 

I trust that I am not alone in feeling a real weight of sadness that while Elenore Roosevelt did so much for the world, for Jews in the face of anti-Semitism, for black Americans in the face of lingering racism, for Japanese Americans who were incarcerated and robbed by internment . . . but she never felt safe to say who she really was, and I find that to be just heart breaking.

In the past, as I have come to the conclusion of a sermon about public morality, I have pointed at the “tank man” in China’s Tiananmen Square and said, “be like that man!” I have applauded the courage of Iesha Evans who stood up to the riot police in Baton Rouge, or Malala who was shot in the face for advocating for girls going to school and came out of the hospital still advocating for female education rights. And I have pointed at climate activist Greta Thunberg and Nazi resistor, August Landmesser, and said, “be more like them!”

And yet, in spite of all of the amazing things that she accomplished in life . . . in spite of the indisputable debt of gratitude that we should all feel for what the selfless work that Elenore did, I am tepid about suggesting that we should be more like her because I wish that she could have been more fully herself. 

The Jewish psychiatrist and holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, said, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”  Yes, do all that you kind to bring light and mercy into the world . . . to kick against the darkness of prejudice, discrimination, poverty, exploitation and abuse, but please, please, find a way to live your own life fully as who you are. 

Do not be captured by the expectations of others. Do not accept confinement in public opinion. Do not let the insincere and misinformed take away your joy or force you to deny your love. If there is someone to whom you might speak of the thrill, as Elenore did to Hickok, of feeling “the northeast corner of your mouth on my lips,” well, folks, you should proud of that and you sure shouldn’t hide it.

“Listen to the Poet”

“Listen to the Poet”     Feb. 16, 2020    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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“The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed... because people are changed by art – enriched, ennobled, encouraged – they then act in a way that may affect the course of events... by the way they vote, they behave, the way they think.”  ― Leonard Bernstein

It seems like it was a lifetime ago now, but in the mid 90’s I went through a real “dark night of the soul” that left me broken hearted and bankrupt. About the only thing I had left to my name was a bunch of frequent flier points. My old friend and former board chairman, the late Dr. David Belcher, gave me some really good advice. He said, simply, “go to Paris.”

Paris is not necessary a great place to be when you are broke, but I found a really cheap hotel room in a pretty sketchy neighborhood and armed with a week-long subway pass and a Michelin Tour Guidebook, I set out to see Paris.

La Tour Eiffel, Notra-Dame, Momartre, and Palace Versailles.

What began to become evident to me 

Was the fact that even the ordinary, the purely functional aspects of the city, bridges, the tomb of Napoleon, just to look up the Champs Elysées and see the Arc de Triomphe in the middle of a busy intersection. . .

It was, as if, the French had decreed that anything, a school, a government building, a business district, that everything had to be the most amazing, the most beautiful, the most carefully designed and painstakingly thought out use of space, light, and building materials imaginable. David suggested that I go to Paris to fill my heart and soul with beauty, to restore my life. It was good advice. 

Life is often unspeakably hard. There are illnesses and heartbreaks, there are emotional and financial disasters, there are wars, plagues, and myriad forms of human evil. Fredrich Nietzsche said, “We have art so that we shall not die of reality.”

Leander Keck, a former Vanderbilt Divinity School professor, said that because the world is so hard, because the world is so full of suffering, we should expose ourselves to beauty in order to astonish our souls. Beauty can both heal and inspire. 

I heard Professor Keck lecturing in a cathedral in Atlanta, demanding of a large assembly of parish pastors, that we not fall prey to modern pressures to dumb down our church services, to fill them with cute, trite, trivializing songs, sermons and liturgy. And yes, sitting there among the marble and stone of an amazing cathedral, it wasn’t hard to feel that astonishment of the soul but what does that say to little churches such as ours who cannot possibly afford to build a building like that?

Obviously, everyone couldn’t do what we do, but we have the good fortune of having a collection of amazing musicians and we try to infuse our services with a variety of the most creative, inspiring, challenging, and beautiful music. Of course we try to write meaningful liturgy and I do my best to deliver sermons that are educational and morally challenging, but, and this is no exaggeration, many of the people who are among my most loyal listeners on line will eventually schedule a trip to Springfield to visit us in person and many of them tell me, that the sermons brought them here but the music was the most powerful and memorable part of their experience. I don’t feel the slightest bit of jealousy about that because, frankly, I agree with them. Our musicians are amazing.

I have delivered more than 2000 sermons in my life and I can’t tell you that any one of them stands out in my mind, but I can tell you about a night in St. Louis when I lay on the grass, looking up at the stars while James Taylor sang and played. I can tell you about the first of many times when I saw Les Misérables on stage. I can tell you about an evening at Gillioz when Jackson Browne stood on stage all alone with a dozen of his favorite guitars and played everything we asked him to pay for hours. 

So, I’m not talking about just church experiences. Several of us are going out to hear our friend Kelly Osborne sing tonight. I attend life music events from opera to the blues every week. And when I can, I expose myself to great art.

Last fall I was a passenger on a ship that spent about six hours in port in New York City. My friend, Dr. William Jimenez, offered to come pick me up and take me anywhere I wanted to go to spend that narrow passage of time and I asked to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

We had a wonderful visit, as we showed one another our favorite pieces in that amazing collection but whenever I am in New York, even for a brief layover, I try

 to spend some time sitting on this bench in front of this 19^th painting of St. Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage

 He depicts the teenaged martyr at the moment in her parents’ garden when she first hears the voices that commission her to save France from British occupation.

Clinically, you may say that Joan was mad, probably schizophrenic, but even the hardest of hearts could not say that she was just mad or merely schizophrenic. It is the look on her face that brings me back to the Met time and time again to gaze at this painting. So, it isn’t about the historical person of Joan, or the technique of the artist. It is that the painting is trying to say something to me.

Look at her, do you see both the awful dread of what she is being asked to do along with the noble resolve that she is a servant of God and her beloved France. You see the iron will that tells you that this 16-year-old peasant girl will do what is asked of her. 

I keep a print of this painting over my desk where I write because that is the intensity that I want to bring to my writing. An artist friend of mine, who knew of

 my love for this painting, and rather prophetically aware of how my denominational career was going, made this small sculpture for me . . . the immolation of St. Joan of Arc, who was, historically, rewarded for her passion by being burned alive at the stake. Artists can be tough that way. Art can speak to us at a deeper level than words alone.

I was talking about this sermon with a good friend of mine who spent a few years in what he euphemistically calls his “time out,” which happened to be in a federal prison. He said, that towards the end of his sentence, he couldn’t wait to get out and go to Kansas City to visit the Nelson Adkins Art Museum. The beginning of healing from such a hard period of deprivation and isolation was to be exposed again, to beauty. Can you imagine going from prison to sit in front of this huge canvas of Monet’s water lilies?  

Or my favorite from their collection, this amazingly intricate ivory miniature sculpture from Italy of the expulsion of the rebel angels from heaven, carved from a single piece of ivory that must have sent the artist over the edge of sanity before it was completed. You don’t need to own this art, you just need to go visit it, in Kanas City, or New York, or Springfield!

I asked Sean to include this song from Bruce Cockburn in our service today, in which he sings about the imperative to listen to our poets:

Pay attention to the poet You need him and you know it

Put him up against the wall Shoot him up with pentothal

Shoot him up with lead You won't call back what's been said
Put him in the ground But one day you'll look around
There'll be a face you don't know Voicing thoughts you've heard before

Male female slave or free Peaceful or disorderly
Maybe you and he will not agree

But you need him to show you new ways to see

I think that the late Lithuanian film maker, Jonas Mekas, was right when he said that civilizations perish because we start to listen to our politicians rather than our poets. That may seem like hyperbole on the face of it, but I challenge you, listen to Donald Trump’s latest State of the Union address and then read T. S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men” or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”  and tell me which one of them is telling you the truth!

There was not much of what could be called art or poety in my rural Kentucky homelife. In fact, the principle difference between a cup of yogurt and Glasgow, Kentucky is that a cup of yogurt has an active living culture. Seriously, the zip code there is E-I-E-I-O. But in the summer of 1973, when I was 16 years old, without my parent’s knowledge, I slipped off, night after night, to go watch the newly released movie and it set my mind on fire. I don’t know how many times I saw it, dozens of times. The music set my mind free of the magical religious form of faith my church had instilled in me and it inspired to start looking at the world in a whole new way. 

Nearly 50 years later, I still implore our musicians to take on the Herculean task of presenting this musical here on Easter and if there is not a cold hard place where your heart was supposed to be, this music still thrills, inspires, and teaches us. No one is preaching that day, but it will be the best sermon delivered in this sanctuary this year. 

I will conclude where I began this morning, quoting Leonard Bernstein – Art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job . . . art cannot change events, but art can change people. If we will but expose ourselves to are, we can be enriched, ennobled, encouraged . . . and when our souls have been thus astonished, it can change the way we live, the way we vote, the way we think. 

Please, support our local performing artists in music and theater. Don’t always think of art as something you have to own and hang on your own walls. Art is something that you experience. Go to our art museum. Support our local orchestra, and opera. Turn off your TV and go hear some live music. Go back to the poetry section of Barnes and Noble and sit down and read through a few collections until you find one that you can’t live without. If you need a suggestion, start with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. 

Don’t let the harshness and ignorance of this world dull your mind and kill your spirit. You are a community of prophets and if you cannot hear the voices on your own, I’m telling you, they are calling you to save the world.

“Renegotiating Love (evolution and symbiosis)”

“Renegotiating Love (evolution and symbiosis)”      Feb. 9, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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Nancy Friday was a Freudian Psychiatrist and researcher/writer

When we grow up and fall in love, we make bargains with men based on the one we made with mother. Our adult expectations of the loved one grow out of and are in reaction to that first, most important love experience. We don’t like to think our mature, sexual lives have anything to do with the nursery, but there is no other way to explain or understand the deals men and women make. Lovers’ contracts, like the one with her, are too crucial to the love experience to speak out loud. The terms in the small print below the beautifully spoken vows of love aren’t even conscious: “Promise that you will take care of me, love me unconditionally, and never arouse in me any fear of abandonment, jealousy, loss of face, or suspicion that any of the many sacrifices I’ve made for you have been in vain. In return, I am giving my-self to you. We will be as one. If you break this deal, I’ll die (or I will kill you).”

                        

I don’t know if it was curiosity or suspicion that make the clerk at Sam’s challenge me when I was attempting to buy a couple of cases of condoms as a tax-exempt purchase for the church, but honestly, I had a good reason. 

I had been raising money for the teen homeless program operated downtown by a Catholic charity. A fairly grizzled old church member complained, “The only help I would give those kids would be something to keep them from being pregnant all of the time.” And I said, “Ironically, I think that I might be able to help you with that.” Sister Lorraine was still in charge of Kitchen Inc., so she couldn’t provide the teens with condoms, but she was smart enough to realize that they needed them, and she didn’t mind if I was the one to buy them and provide them.

Churches tend to change our rituals and our values fairly slowly, but in the world of human sexuality, things have changed pretty quickly over the past few generations. 

Progressive churches have often been called upon to try to help our society to evolve in our ethical thinking about this most personal and private aspect of what it means to be a person. The conception we have of marriage and the exclusive sexual relationship appropriate to it, is something we inherited from our more agrarian past.

For most of human history, though we have insisted that marriage was instituted by God as a holy estate, more honestly, it was a cultural institution intended to provide for stability. The marriage contract was tied up with the need for certain knowledge about who owned the land, and to provide for a safe and effective way to raise children. Most religious rules have to do with what benefits society. The God who is the great mystery of existence does not appear to mix it up to much in the affairs of people or other breeding animals, but civilization has a huge investment in stability and predictability to allow for human survival. 

A number of things began to challenge the social contract of marriage. There was the industrial revolution that brought more and more people into cities. There was World War II that brought more and more women out of homes and into manufacturing jobs. And then there was the creation of what men and women had longed for but never before had available to them, effective birth control.

The century between the Civil War and the sexual revolution of the 1960’s saw almost all of the assumptions about love, romance, marriage, and the civil contract of coupling being at least questioned if not outright rejected. It became possible for women to have careers and financial power without male family control and it became possible to have sex without having children and the need for a secure family setting. 

This, of course, frightened a lot religious people who have been the vanguards of the traditions of culture. I grew up hearing preachers often insisting that women not work, that we avoid men and women mingling outside of family settings, and, of course, the Catholic Church insisting to this day that women not use birth control because to do so gives women way too much personal power and autonomy. And, frankly, unemployed women have comprised a great deal of the volunteer work force that churches have depended on for centuries. But the world was changing and the church has never been terribly good at change.

I can get out over my skies pretty quickly on this topic but I am deeply indebted to the late Freudian psychiatrist, Nancy Friday, for her important books on women and sexuality. Where it is easy for me to see how the marriage contract has utilitarian roots in our agrarian past, Friday also examines how deeply our early childhood needs are reasserted in how we approach marriage. She says that even our traditional marriage vows are an echo of the unspoken contract that a woman has with her mother . . . a pledge of undying love.

I have never had anyone in counseling who didn’t want to flatly deny that there is any connection between their adult sexual relationships and how they felt about either their like sexed or opposite sexed parent but, the people who convincingly know a lot more about the inner recesses of the mind than I do, insist that it is universally true. Friday says that our traditional wedding vows amount to a request for a: “Promise that you will take care of me, love me unconditionally, and never arouse in me any fear of abandonment, jealousy, loss of face, or suspicion that any of the many sacrifices I’ve made for you have been in vain. In return, I am giving my-self to you. We will be as one. If you break this deal, I’ll die (or I will kill you).”

 While there are parent and child virtual divorces, for the most part, for good or for ill, we remain in our children’s lives for as long as life lasts. I have not been married to her mother for 25 years and she graduated and moved away a years ago, but there is rarely a day that goes by that we are not in contact, even though she is now in Bali vacationing with friends, there is a bond between us that neither time nor distance can challenge. Marriage, however, not so much, and yet we innately long for that. I have had an interesting life with lots of wonderful opportunities and experiences, but my life’s greatest regret is that I have never had a successful marriage or even a long term successful romantic relationship. We all inherently want it, but most of us never have it. 

It is interesting to me how often our comedians are able to get at the truth of our experience better even than our priests or our therapists. One of the most common jokes among older people is for a man or a woman to say, “I’ve never seriously considered divorce, but I have often contemplated murder.” I think Nancy Friday is right on the money… no matter how secure you may be in your sense of yourself, you would really rather have a life-long love relationship that can survive all of the changes that come with age and the evolution of life.

Friday’s work speaks at length to the problem of symbiosis. That is, early in life, sameness is interpreted as being love. Mother and daughter relationships become especially volatile when a daughter expresses independence and separation from mother’s values, beliefs, and behaviors. That’s what adolescence was invented for . . . managed open warfare . . . but it usually ends in friendship. That confusion of symbiosis is often translated into marriages in which the connection is rooted in sameness. “If you love me, you are like me, and you will not change.” That’s obviously pretty toxic, isn’t it? Successful parenting involves allowing our kids to be different from us and still love one another and the same must hold true in marriage.

It is very difficult for us to pull apart the threads of our prejudices that we learned in church, what just came to us through our culture, and what we actually feel simply because we are human. And all of that is complicated by the fact that those of us who are comfortably heterosexual, are often clueless about the nuanced differences which exist in gay, trans, or queer relationships. 

I was scolded by a listener this week who took umbrage with a disparaging remark I recently made about polyamorous relationships. Again, I tried to couch that comment in my own experience, acknowledging that others have different experiences but, when a listener wrote and described his situation in which he is a bisexual who is married to a woman but who also has a boyfriend and that his wife also has a boyfriend and that all four of them are a family unit with mutual respect and care . . . what reason, other than a thousand years of religious prejudice and patriarchy, do I have to judge that arrangement negatively? 

I don’t want an open marriage. But then, I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be bisexual, or gay, or trans. 

And if I have no existential point of reference to comprehend the lives of those who are differently oriented, what on earth would put me in a position to judge the merits of their family arrangements? Isn’t it obvious that such dismissive judgements, the imposition of straight, sys-gen expectations on everyone else is just wildly inappropriate?

And when I say that I have never seen open marriages work, implicit in that is a time stamp . . . I am reminded that in my work with addiction, at least in the VA system, we defined six months of sobriety as a successful treatment. It isn’t what any of us want for our clients, but, hey, six months for a lot of our patients was a definite win. Just because some relationships only last for a few years rather than a lifetime does not mean that they were failures. 

I can affirm that though my marriage only lasted for 16 years, that for the first several years that relationship was salvific for both of us. We both emerged from families with issues that were crushing us, and together, we survived our need to break free and become more fully ourselves. It just so happened that when we had emerged from our relatively dysfunctional families, that we were just not a good fit for each other nor were we together suited to parent our daughter. Recognizing that a relationship that was a good fit during one part of your life is not a good fit in another part really doesn’t have to be filled with rage, mutually denigrating accusations, and lawsuits. In fact, it seems crazy to me that any two people can love each other enough to commit to marriage and not end up as at least being friends. Anything less seems like a failure of civilization. 

I love the way that the recently deceased editor, Louis Howland, put it: “It is not that divorce is necessarily bad. It is that loving people for long periods of time is good.” You don’t have to have an affair, you don’t have to break down into physical violence, or create any kind of a crisis to bring a toxic relationship to an end. You can at least try to have a civil, honest, meaningful conversation, real communication, in which you respectfully work out how to go your separate ways while leaving one another intact with mutual friendship as a minimal goal.

Look, I am not single now because I couldn’t have gotten married a dozen times over the past few years. I’m single because I would like to have a meaningful match that is intellectually, spiritually, politically, and romantically a meeting of equals. I have never had that opportunity. And until that opportunity comes along, some of you guys are going to have to keep making a place for a fifth wheel in our social settings.

But just because I have a firm idea of what my expectations are does not mean that my expectations are normative. Just because you know what is right for you in your marriage, does not mean that your marriage is the standard by which all other relationships are to be judged. 

James Carville and Mary Matalin have been married for 28 years. I couldn’t share a home with Mary Matalin for a 2-week vacation. But more than that, Kellyanne and George Conway are married, and I am not sure that I could be alone in a room with Kellyanne and not wind up being charged with homicide in matter of minutes. . . I am not a violent man; I just have a passion for honesty.

So, what I said about symbiosis earlier . . . even that has boundaries.

Both the church and our society have been very prescriptive about how and where love and marriage take place. I think that we can safely say that both have been wrong, especially since they have tried to impose a patriarchal, heterosexual, monogamous relationships into a once size fits all pattern which is clearly a kind of emotional and sexual terrorism for most people. 

There are a few things that apply to all love relationships no matter how the family lines are drawn:

1)   Everyone should take care not to hurt anyone and to try to foster the growth, health, and happiness of the other or others.

2)   There should be honest and open communication and where there are formal agreements about a relationship contract or commitment, that contract or commitments should be held sacred and changed only through honest communication. 

3)   I might add a third observation that is something of a corollary to the communication issue: be prepared to renegotiate your contract. People change. The world changes. What fits in one decade might not fit in the next one. So, talk about it. How you are married when you are starting out in life will not be what your marriage needs to be when you are raising children. And how you are married with you are both working and how you are married when you are both retired is not the same thing.

Marriage is not static. Change is not bad, it is inevitable. 

The list of things that can bring a relationship to an end remain: dishonesty, addiction, violence, infidelity, or any kind of child abuse or neglect. The world and our understanding of marriage and family are changing but this rule remains: don’t be a jerk. 

Love is only easy in fairy tales. The real thing requires a magical combination of hard work and dumb luck. If you had enough dumb luck to have a chance at the real thing, then don’t fail to do the hard work. 

I will leave you as I often do on Valentines’ weekend, with the wise counsel of the poet, Langston Hughes: 

“Folks, I'm telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean- so get yourself a little loving in between.”