"Two of You Held in One Moment"

Rev. Susan Maginn

March 15, 2009

Wy'east UU Congregation

Readings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

- e. e. cummings ~

View #8

(excerpt)

Sometimes

the world is merely

empty, except for its refuse,

and goes nowhere, like a

cul-de-sac. And sometimes

it's empty but wide open,

the fruitless winter vines

dreaming of a vintage season.

You don't need anything

that isn't yours to keep going.

If someone is holding you

inside themselves

the way you're learning

to hold them, so much

the better. Sometimes

there is no difference

between a mind and a mind,

a heart and a heart, a mind

and a heart. Sometimes

the world won't move

unless you move.

Won't hold its course

unless you show it how.

And sometimes, the world holds

the two of you in one moment

and whispers: Yes. Now.

~ Thomas Centolella ~

The sermon begins....

NY Times article...

Pastor's Advice for Better Marriage: More Sex

Rev. Ed Young, the pastor of the evangelical Fellowship Church, issued his call for a week of "congregational copulation".

"Today we're beginning this sexperiment, seven days of sex," he said, with his characteristic mix of humor, showmanship and Scripture. "How to move from whining about the economy to whoopee! We should try to double up the amount of intimacy we have in marriage. And when I say intimacy, I don't mean holding hands in the park or a back rub."

Ed Young and his wife, both 47, have been married for 26 years and have four children, including twins. They have firsthand experience with some of the barriers to an intimate sex life in marriage, including careers, exhaustion, outside commitments, and "kids," a word that Young told church members stands for "keeping intimacy at a distance successfully."

But if you make the time to have sex, it will bring you closer to your spouse and to God, he has said. You will perform better at work, leave a loving legacy for your children to follow and may even prevent an extramarital affair.

"If you've said, 'I do,' do it," he said. As for single people, "I don't know, try eating chocolate cake," he said.

This is not a gimmick or a publicity stunt Rev.Young says. Just look at the sensuousness of the Song of Solomon, or Genesis: "two shall become one flesh," or Corinthians: "do not deprive each other of sexual relations."

The real "f word" in the marital boudoir, he says, is "forgiveness."

One parishioner, Rob Hulsey, 25, said after a week of the sex challenge he and his wife who are expecting a baby and have two older children, could not stop holding hands during the sermon. His wife, Madeline Hulsey, 32, said she was just as thrilled to spend a week focusing on her husband. Usually, "we start to kiss, and it's knock knock knock, Mom!" she said.

Others found that, like smiling when you are not particularly happy, having sex when they did not feel like it improved their mood. Just eight months into their marriage, Amy and Cody Waddell had not been very amorous since Cody admitted he had had an affair.

"Intimacy has been a struggle for us, working through all that," Ms. Waddell said. "This week really brought us back together, physically and emotionally."

It is not always easy to devote time for your spouse, Pastor Young admitted. Just three days into the sex challenge he said he was so tired after getting up before dawn to talk about the importance of having more sex in marriage that he crashed on the bed around 8 p.m. on Tuesday night.

Mrs. Young tried to shake him awake, telling her husband, "Come on, it's the sex challenge." But Mr. Young murmured, "Let's just double up tomorrow," and went back to sleep.

So... if you are in a committed relationship, your spiritual homework for this week is to be sexually engaged every day for seven days...and I'll repeat what the good Reverend said...holding hands and back rubs don't count.

Throughout our life, regardless of chronological age, we experience cycles of rising and falling, coming and going, dying and resurrection - and all the murky in betweens. If we only value one phase of the human experience - like perfection and confidence - then we are bound to feel frustrated and even shamed when we are not there.

We may also feel frustrated when our best beloveds are not in the phase that we most value. And may even try to make our beloveds feel ashamed for moving through these cycles of life that may be challenging or 'unattractive' to us.

Unfortunately most of us are stuck in adolescent romanticism. We don't need to look far beyond a magazine rack to know that our culture values the youth and beauty cycle of life. We value sexual activity even if it means taking drugs like Viagra to charge us up sexually. There is a sense that if you do not have a sexual relationship then you are not whole or that if you are sexually active, then you are whole.

Despite lots of evidence to the contrary, we cling to a belief that the view of romantic love that we had when we were 13 should work. And we even are so bold to hate the person who continues to try to teach us that our 13 year-old theory may not hold water. The clashing of two people's adolescent romantic expectations is not to be trivialized, as silly as it sounds. After all, expectations are premeditated resentments.

Most life-long relationships are made of two adults who have the capacity and willingness to do great damage to one another. One psychologist goes so far as to call life-long partners: "intimate enemies." This happens when the gap between what one person has to have and what the other person can give is unbearably wide. And we are left with knowing, "Surely, this can't be right. Surely, my life would be better without this relationship."

For whatever reason, we are hard wired to try to duplicate what was good in our childhood or get what was missing in our childhood. We come into a relationship with our own needs and very often we are not even conscious of these needs as particular to our life experience. For our not so humble world view, it is simply 'how things should be.'

We will also feel that if that raw sexual attraction is not there, then the relationship is trash instead of seeing that the relationship is evolving. Sexual energy can draw people together, but obviously it is not enough to keep people together through the many cycles of life.

Sexual energy is very powerful - yet it is a relatively fragile pleasure - not to be demonized, but not to be glorified either.

There is a former Buddhist monk named Kittisaro. He describes how living in a monastery as a celibate, there is still sexual energy.

The practice was to not to repress it (the sexual energy) but not to follow it either. We tried to open ourselves to it and feel it, even though it is a powerful energy that can carry one away. With practice, little by little, that energy is transmuted into an understanding of our feverish attempts to get somewhere we're not.

Not shaming the feeling but not letting it rule you either - noticing. When we do not act on our sexual desire, we need to be careful not to repress it or judge it with shame. This is how sexual abstinence can backfire. This energy can also be used well -for creativity and passionate engagement in the world.

During my time in the forest, alone in silence for months at a time, I would often feel close to the whole world, as if all beings were inside me. So, to me, intimacy doesn't require physical contact.

One can't assume that, because you have had sex with a person, the two of you are close, or conversely, that if a relationship isn't sexual, it lacks intimacy. What makes sexual contact truly intimate is a quality of presence and mindfulness, of honesty and tenderness and love. And what steals away the sacred and makes sex profane or exploitative is when it's tangled up in a feverish grasping without regard for consequences.

Do not expect sustained spiritual fulfillment from singular sensory experience.

This is from Kittisaro's wife, former Buddhist nun, Thanissara:

Keep working with how things are, rather than with our expectations of what one should get out of a relationship, focusing on the enormous benefit of a relationship - the sweetness of having a good friend who knows you well, someone with whom you can stumble along together. Perhaps it is not all fireworks and stardust, but it's sustaining and nourishing...

I'm sometimes overwhelmed by inner chaos and despair, and having him by my side has been a balm and a source of strength. At one point, when I was struggling, we went on holiday to take a break from everything. Standing by the Indian Ocean, which is filled with shards, I wanted to walk into the dark sea, into oblivion. He didn't say anything; he just took my hand. That was all he needed to do. I realized at that moment what a blessing it is to have someone to be with me while I work through my pain.

A dear friend of mine just told me that he met a woman and he is pretty sure this is the woman he will marry. Throughout his adult life he has prayed for certainty when it comes to finding his life partner. He told me, "Let's just say that prayer has been answered."

Even though they were spending most of their days together, they both acknowledged that there was an intensity in their relationship, a sense of destiny that she said she was not ready to talk about yet.

I sent my favorite Rilke passage...

"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."

A couple days later he called and told me they were able to speak what had gone unsaid since they met: that they both feel certain that they will spend the rest of their life with each other. He said he feels like he has won the cosmic lottery.

I sent my favorite Tagore passage. Some people send flowers. I send my favorite words....

"It is for the union of you and me that there is light in the sky. It is for the union of you and me that the earth is decked in dusky green. It is for the union of you and me that night sits motionless with the world in her arms; dawn appears opening the eastern door with sweet murmurs in her voice. The boat of hope sails along on the currents of eternity towards that union, flowers of the ages are being gathered together for its welcoming ritual. It is for the union of you and me that this heart of mine, in the garb of a bride, has proceeded from birth to birth upon the surface of this ever-turning world to choose the Beloved." -- Tagore

My husband and I were on a date the other night. We were walking home, reflecting on how amazed we are by our relationship. We have both changed so much throughout our almost 18 years together.

We agreed that what inspires us most about our relationship is that regardless of how much we change individually we have continued to find our way back to each other. We have gone through many phases where the connection between us was fragile, even times when neither one of us wanted to stay together. And yet we have continued to return to each other, to claim this relationship as the foundation of our lives.

Over the years we have tried many things to intentionally keep our connection strong. We have meditated together, said our vows every morning, been in couples counseling. We have supported each other through graduate school. We have gone through phases where we are surprised to rediscover a sexual attraction to each other and phases where sexual connection falls away. We have adopted animals. We have moved more times that I care to remember. We are raising two children.

What keeps us together now is our weekly date nights and our family's renewed commitment to be "gentle with our words", to be generous with our attention and our care of one another.

What I have learned in all these years is that nothing is going to fix us once and for all. As we said in our vows, 'We will stumble and we will restore each other.'

Our relationship is always changing - as we are - and we reach out to each other in different ways through the years. We have come to accept that there are going to be times in our relationship of profound connection. And there will also be times, sometimes for long periods, that are not fulfilling, sometimes heartbreakingly so. But if we can accept such a time as a phase that we are going through - just a phase and not the truth about us or the truth about life-long partnerships, then we can get through the heartbreak together. We have so much evidence to teach us that we emerge from such phases with a deeper understanding about love.

Our prayer today comes from George Kimmich Beach:

Let us pray.

Giver of being and freedom, thou who touches our lives in unforeseen ways, who unsettles our ease and upsets our self-satisfactions: We wait in these moments of stillness to let the hidden processes of healing and growth do their silent work within us, and to let the quiet work of reconciliation be renewed among us.

Because we know that the ultimate issues of life -- healing and growth, reconciliation and renewal -- cannot be forced, neither by excess of activitynor by tumult of words, we seek out this stillness. We seek the quiet -- the resting place -- of our restless hearts.

Because we live with mystery, we trust that which is deeper than we know -- which touches our hearts -- which steadies us and rekindles our spirits - which, finally, in faith, may be named the love that has laid hold upon us, and will not let us go. Amen.

Go in peace and do your homework!