In the Shelter of Each Other
Given by James Covington on February 11th, 2007
Last Sunday was a special day. If you were here you experienced a wonderful intergenerational celebration of family and congregational life and UU history. Now we are approaching Valentine’s day. So on the heels of the service last Sunday and with Valentine’s day on the calendar this week, I feel compelled to talk with you this morning about the family—the place where love begins or at least where it’s suppose to begin.
Interestingly, two of the more prolific writers on family issues are Unitarian Universalists. Mary Pipher, who wrote “The Shelter of Each Other,” and William Doherty, who wrote “The Intentional Family,” among several other books, have eloquently addressed the changing conditions in family life in our culture.
Both believe that today’s family is in crisis and that many diverse factors have combined to weaken its structure in American society: the conflicting needs and schedules of dual working parents; the ongoing fragmentation of our civic, cultural, and religious communities; the prevalence of divorce and remarriage; the advent of technological distractions like video games and computers and sex on line.
Pipher argues that by glamorizing sex, drugs, and violence and regarding children as consumers, our society teaches children inappropriate values. She condemns institutions that glorify independence to adolescents who desperately need adult guidance. In short, she believes our culture is tearing apart the fabric of the American family and community
So with so much emphasis on the crisis of the family these days, what can one realistically expect? Why is the family so important? I see the family as a source of powerful connections, bridging us with each other, with our past and with society as a whole. Volumes could be written about this. I will attempt to boil it all down to a 20 minute sermon.
First of all, the notion of “family” is deeply tied to the sense of who we are in the world. The generational legacies of family provide a connection to our selves and to our past. We resemble other members of our family. Their quirks and gestures are similar to ours. They have been there (or we believe they should have been there) at all the important occasions of our lives, –births, marriages, graduations, illness, deaths. Moreover, we feel very deeply that if our families cannot acknowledge us, love us and support us, no one else will. I believe the sad and tragic life and death of Anna Nicole Smith is indicative of that hard truth. The distance from her own family compelled her to seek love in all the wrong places.
So, no matter how old we are, no matter how distant emotionally or physically, we seem unable to get away from the importance of family.
Family will inevitable come back to haunt us—in our relationship with our spouses, our children, with our friends and even at work. More than a hundred years ago Abraham Lincoln, who did so much for our country to create the “right relationship among things,” refused to be in contact with his dying father whom he had not visited in 20 years, saying that “if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.” Lincoln’s frank hopelessness about changing his relationship with his father, who seems to have been abusive to him in childhood, is familiar to many adults today. In spite of Lincoln’s brilliance and clarity on so many issues affecting our nation as a whole, his pessimism about his father devastated his other family relationships. It is little different today, when many outwardly successful people seem incapable of relating to members of their own families, unable to look into their fathers’ hearts so they do not die as stranger.
In a way there is nothing more real or earthy or grounding than the family, because the experience of family includes so much of the particulars of life. In a family you live close to people that otherwise you might not even want to talk to. Over time you get to know them intimately. You learn their most minuscule, most private habits and characteristics. Family life is full of major and minor crises, the ups and downs of health, success and failure in career, marriage, and divorce,–all kinds of characters. It is tied to places and events and histories. With all of these felt details, life etches itself into memory and personality.
The point of all this, is that the family is a microcosm of humanity—with both good and bad—both light and darkness with a host of characters—heroes, victims, jokesters, and villains. The temptation is to run away from the darkness—from the abuse, neglect, abandonment, family illness and never more have anything to do with them.
But perhaps we do this at great expense to ourselves. I am not suggesting that one should forgive one’s parents and go on in life as though nothing ever happened. That notion is as absurd as thinking that you can one day change your family of origin into the loving nurturing support system you believe you never had. But I am suggesting that no matter what the abuse or neglect or disappointment there are important stories behind the lives of all the actors—there are myths, secrets, tragedies, misgivings—all of which are important for one to know. As one of my patients a few years ago–a young woman sexually abused by her grandfather and who had begun to recall the trauma and relived it through nightmares and the painful, raging realization that her mother had also been abused but never admitted it, and also never protected her own daughter from the mother’s father said: “I don’t think I can ever forgive, but at last I am beginning to understand the mystery, to know who I am and where I come from and now who I want to be.” These events and stories, whether you know it or not, are instrumental in your life, shaping and forming you into the person you are. In spite of the pain and suffering and disappointment, there is a richness in your family history. I say rich, because it embodies all the complexities of humanity. Knowing and respecting that history, I believe can only fill your life and help you know who you are and where you come from. Otherwise, I suggest there will remain a sad and painful void in the soul that you and even those closest will be aware of but never able to touch or to know.
The family, in all its many configurations, embodies the mutual promise of a group that loves and cares about each other. We are creatures who make promises—and break them—and try to make amends. Keeping a promise to love is altogether different from mere romance. It requires an irrational commitment over time and trouble.
One of my favorite stories about that kind of family covenant is the tale of “The Peach Seed Monkey” told by Sam Keen. It is a quintessential father-son story—the epitome of trust, patience and loyalty. The father carved charming monkey figures out of tiny peach seeds. He gave one to his wife, Sam’s mother and promised one to Sam. Sam forgot the commitment until many years later when his father was near death. His father, eager to leave his life in love, struggled in his dying days to fulfill his promise, and did, though he broke one of the peach seed monkey’s arms. He died two weeks later, as Sam put it, “only at the end of his life.” Sam writes: “A peach seed monkey has become a symbol of all the promises which were made to me and the energy and care which nourished and created me as a human being. Each of us is redeemed from shallow and hostile life only by the sacrificial love and civility which we have gratuitously received. . . We are the animal who makes promises.”
Now it goes without saying that an important connection in many families is the marital connection, a relationship also grounded in a promise. I want to emphasize “connection” here. I counsel a good many married couples in my office. I start with the premise that a good marriage is dependent on the strength of the emotional connection each spouse experiences with the other. We undermine that emotional connection in many ways, of course, and I always look to see how I can help couples stop undermining that connection and restore it to a more nurturing reality. A good marriage is the anchor of any family. When it is not working, havoc always ensues in one form or another–parents become over-focused on children, a child starts acting out, the environment becomes chronically toxic, or someone becomes gravely ill, depressed, dysfunctional.
For any good marriage to work I believe a couple must remain emotionally connected most of the time. I read a book recently entitled, “How to Save Your Marriage Without Talking About It.” I find it interesting that men love this book! The author claims that the two major negative emotions operative in most difficult marriages are fear and shame, with fear being the most dominant in women and shame, being the most pervasive in men. But neither of these feelings are ever admitted. Women are fearful of not being cared for, protected, or feeling lonely in the presence of her husband, whether it is in the kitchen or the bedroom. Men are fearful of feeling inadequate, berated and criticized, and thus will often become emotionally distant or belligerent. The worse thing a man can feel is “shame” from perceiving himself as a failure in whatever he pursues, love or work.
I encourage all couples to become intentional about connecting with one another. By intentional I mean remaining “mindful” rather than just emotional, that is, mindfully stopping all behaviors that they know will undermine their marital connection with fear and shame. In other words, you can “choose” to remain connected or disconnected. So I teach couples to be mindful, not just emotional, about how they connect with each other and touch each other. It is by mindfulness and touching that we feel cared for, protected and cherished. This, after all, is the essence of the promise you made on the day you married.
Another connection family provides is with our children. It goes without saying that parents are responsible for bringing up their children. I believe it is important for a child to have his or her emotional life responded to with respect and care and that a child be guided by his parents to express and articulate what he or she is feeling. These days, we call this process the engendering of emotional intelligence.
I believe that it is important for a child to be disciplined, that boundaries be set and that limits be clearly defined and that consequences be paid for breaking the rules in a consistent manner. Otherwise, how can a child ever define herself?
But perhaps more important today, I believe parents need all the help they can get to protect their children from the culture, as I have noted at the beginning. In many ways, it is the family that must serve as the counter-culture for today’s young people who are bombarded by a consumerist society in every way—from clothes to sex to violence. The crisis of the family is not necessarily because we have lost the traditional values of love and caring—one instead may marvel how healthy many families are despite the stresses of the world; the crisis is because the wider society has made these values almost dysfunctional in a headlong rush to —where? Why, in the name of God, when we live in a land of plenty, we have to live as if everything would be taken from us tomorrow and so we must get more and give less—is more than my poor brain can comprehend.
Finally, the family offers a connection to the larger community. The family needs to be involved in life outside itself, but of course that needs to be done carefully and with balance. The problem for many families today is that there is too much going on outside the family so that little time is left for the home itself or for church on Sunday morning for that matter. Bill Doherty, a Unitarian Universalist family activist writes, “Today’s families are sorely lacking time for spontaneous fun and enjoyment, for talking over the day’s events and experiences, for unhurried meals, for quiet, bedtime talks, for attending religious services together, for participating together in community projects, and for exploring the beauty of nature.”
Nevertheless, connection to the larger community is important for a couple of reasons: 1) To avoid become isolated from the larger needs of society; 2) to teach one’s children by involving them outside the family in worthy groups and causes so that they will learn they are not the center of the universe, that there are others outside themselves who need help.
That being the case, I do believe that the UU community should be a dynamic bridge to families and between families and society. I am also inspired by a growing interest of parents within our Fellowship to form support groups that will address the demands and challenges of parenting, small children in one group and adolescents in another. I am very pleased about this and I truly hope that participation in these groups will grow.
I believe we have a great opportunity to provide a meaningful, relevant approach to religious faith for hundred of young families turned off to traditional dogma but who still long for a religious home they can relate to and where relationships, community and progressive values can be shared. Our children, youth, and—yes—even our adults, need real community in their lives these days. And unless we make this a priority, unless we put it darn near the top of the list of reasons for our existence as Unitarian Univeralist congregations, we are letting people down.
This Fellowship should stand as a bulwark of families—all kinds of families—the two parent, two children families, the single-parent families, be they led by Mom or Dad; the gay and lesbian families; the blended families with children from previous relationships; the single persons among us who seek community and wholeness. One does not have to be married to be whole. This fellowship in its best moment at least is family—family defined as a “group of people who love and care for each other.
This Fellowship is not a perfect family. Yours is not a perfect family, nor is mine. We are all flawed and faulted, and walk with feet of clay. The Mulla Nasrudin in the Sufi parable sought the perfect wife and found her, except she was seeking the perfect husband. All of us will be frustrated in that search for perfection. Families are fragile, but we know that we need that center of intimacy in which to fashion our lives. These ties of intimacy surely are stressful from time to time, and painful—often. But we know we need that love if we are to survive. We survive in the shelter of each other. And we have promises to keep.
In one of my wedding ceremonies I ask the couple this question: “Knowing what you know of each other and trusting in what you do not yet know, are you now ready to be married?” We know so little about each other no matter how long we have been together. And so as we cast our lot with others based on trust—can we be mutually committed over time, come what will? Can we make an open-ended covenant that stretches to circumstances we cannot know or control? That is THE Question of Valentine’s Day.
Robert Fulghum, Unitarian Universalist minister and author, explored that question at the Orthodox Church Academy on the Island of Crete, and spoke about marriage with its director, Alexander Papederos. The custom of arranged marriages continue there. “The Cretans think romance is nice enough when it happens, but it is not a particularly good basis for marriage,” Fulghum writes. “Papaderos had stumbled over a concept he had found in Western literature. ‘Making love.” It confused him. ‘What is this making love?’”
Fulghum explained, as delicately and discretely as he could. Papaderos replied that for Cretans “ ‘making love’ is a serious notion summarizing the process of marriage and families. When two families agree that a son and a daughter would suit one another, it is expected that over time the man and woman will work at becoming compatible partners in the same spirit one might work at achieving competence in a life’s vocation. This is making love. . . love is not something you fall into. Love and marriage are ‘made.’ Thus, in Cretan terms, when a married couple have been overheard arguing or fighting, the Cretans smile knowingly and say, ‘Ah, they are making love.’”
Fulghum experienced this understanding of making love that New Years on Crete as an 88 year old grandmother, blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, and shriveled by time and a hard life, through mountain living, world wars, and civil war, challenged her children—men and women of middle age—to a can-you-top-this singing contest, and sang all the rest into exhaustion. It was a joyous and exuberant family occasion. When dinner was over she went into the kitchen, insisting on helping with the dishes. She came to the kitchen door with a bag of garbage and barked at her husband of sixty years. He groaned up out of his chair to do his duty, and she barked at him some more and he groaned back some more.
“What’s going on?” Fulghum asked Papaderos. “Well, it seems her husband did not eat all of his salad and was singing off-key,” he explained. “They are still making love—it takes forever.”
And so it does, whether in the arranged marriages of a traditional culture or in the freedom of ours.
And so I leave you with just one question now on the eve of Valentine:
If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, whom would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?”