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The Two Sides of Love
An address delivered by The Reverend Don W. Vaughn-Foerster
at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Grand Traverse
Traverse City, Michigan, May 8, 2005

Another part of the reason we can be a bit quirky is that we want to be rigorously honest and not appear to celebrate something with which we are in fundamental disagreement. This is the problem some UUs have with Mother's Day. Many of us have positive reasons to celebrate this day -- to venerate our mothers as wonderful influences of love and support in our lives. Most of us are grateful -- even extremely grateful -- for our mothers. We know them or remember them as loving and supportive. We like to think of them as having sung us to sleep, whether they did or not. Most of our mothers really did -- and do -- care for us. And they worry about us. They always have. I ran across a quote from a 4,000-year-old Egyptian papyrus that demonstrates this point. Some ancient person hierglyphed (or is it tele-glyphed? -- by Camel Express, I suppose), “Dear mother: I’m all right. Stop worrying about me.”

But, others have come from dysfunctional families in which either the mother or father -- or both -- behaved in ways that children spend a lifetime trying to transcend. For persons with this kind of childhood history, Mothers Day and/or Fathers Day tend to be times when the rest of us, unknowingly, rub salt into their wounds. They did not feel loved by their parents when they were growing up nor can they muster much love for their parents now. To witness the good fortune of others only reminds them of what they missed.

Because this is so, and because I have found it to be fairly widespread in UU ranks, I want to talk pointedly about love. Love is, perhaps, the greatest virtue, as Paul and many others within the Christian and other major religious traditions would have it. But, I want to explore some aspects of love we usually tend to ignore -- aspects that, while they not only help explain why parenting sometimes fails, also suggest that love can be present even while destructive acts are going on. This is something that most parents know and their children sometimes learn.

Love, of course, is basic to all human relations. It is basic to life triumphing instead of going down to defeat. It has its bright attractive side -- a side of promise and joy. But also, love has a difficult, a dark side -- a side that can put us off, disconcert us, even threaten us with what we think will be our own destruction. It has a side that, sometimes, leads persons who think they are loving people to do the opposite of what they say they are doing. It can lead them to inflict or to experience agony instead of joy. It can generate injury and hate instead of compassion and care.

Although we don't often remember this, love has within most of us a natural and unavoidable Catch-22 to overcome or transcend in some way before it can do its positive thing. This is largely because, for us truly to love, we must relate to other whole persons as whole persons ourselves -- that is, as persons who are, ourselves, maturely integrated personalities. But, and this is the catch, it is equally true that it takes love to make us into such persons. In order fully to love we must be whole persons, but in order to be whole persons, we must be able to love. Given the dis-integratedness within most people, given the estranging fear we often have of one another, and given the deep suspicions it is so easy to have of the purposes of existence itself, it should not be surprising that love, sometimes, has a hard time making itself real in our lives. Almost of necessity, in its effort to make us "healthier” and "more whole" than we are, love often hurts us as much as it gives us joy.

This is no new observation. It was as well known to the ancients as it is to modern psychologists. Greek mythology depicts love as occurring after we are wounded by Eros' arrow (Cupid in Roman myth). That is, we must be pierced or even injured by love before we can be fulfilled by it. Love hurts, or at least, it opens us up to hurt. In another sense, this is a strong message in both Christianity and Judaism, and in other ethical religions. This is the message of the life of Jesus. The Christian cross is a powerful symbol that loving may involve suffering. In Judaism the prophet Hosea's metaphor of God remaining faithful to a faithless Israel (as Hosea remained faithful to an unfaithful wife, is another such symbol. In Hinduism, Krishna’s periodic return to life in order to fight evil and, in Buddhism, the Bodhisattva refraining from entering Nirvana in order to save others are still other symbols. All these positive forms of love have negative implications. They all are grounded in pain as much as joy.

We all, in some way, have had the wounding effect of love demonstrated in our own lives. Both parents and children find that, sometimes, the affection they share makes insistent demands beyond their capacity to cope with each other. Actually, family bargains could be struck much more easily, if love did not enter in but only agreements and contracts mattered. Husbands and wives learn early in marriage that the affection, loyalty, and respect they must have for each other, if their marriage is to work, can make excruciating demands. Love can demand that they forego their own desires, pleasures, and even needs for the sake of the other. Certainly "mothering" and "honoring the mother" may, sometimes, create inconvenience and can even cause distress not just for the children but for the mother as well. There is, after all, some justification for the old joke: a Roman Catholic, a Jew, and a UU were asked, "When does life begin?" The Roman Catholic said, "At the moment of conception." The Jew said, "When the first breath is taken." The UU said, "When the youngest child leaves home and the dog dies."

Why is this so? Why must Eros’ arrow wound us while it seeks to fulfill us? One obvious reason is that it is sometimes necessary to allow others their way with us if we love them. But there is a deeper reason. It is because, in our pursuit of wholeness and fulfillment, love may remind us of how incomplete and empty we sometimes are.

James Hillman, a longtime Director of the Carl Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, (in his book Insearch) put it this way: To talk of love is to talk of human encounter. Every human encounter occurs along two axes. One is the horizontal axis that connects two persons with each other; the other is the vertical axis within the individual that connects that person with the person’s own self. The first (the horizontal) is the outward axis; the second (the vertical) is the inward axis.

The horizontal is our active reaching out for one another – the result of our need to be unified with some other. We all send out constant feelers along this axis to see if they will return to us with the warmth that we need to overcome the coldness of our inward isolation. The vertical is our meditative, quietistic, inward reaching toward ourselves – that axis of inner communication which assures us that we are connected to the ground of being within ourselves -- that we have the depth within ourselves to experience love. It is the axis of that inner communion which assures us that we are present and worthy and are rooted securely enough in our own sense of self that nothing outside us can disrupt our identity or damage our soul.

Since love requires the whole person, it cannot develop along one axis alone. Should we seek it only on the horizontal, outward axis the best we can do is exchange superficial and transitory satisfactions, for there is then no inward channel to connect us with the other person. Should we seek it only in the vertical, inward axis then we are in danger of going beyond healthy self-love and self-respect to a diseased preoccupation with ourselves that leads to narcissm. For love truly to fulfill us and draw us together into communion, the outward axis must carry sincerity and the inward axis must be rooted deeply enough within us for us not to fear that we will lose our identity in the others’ needs.

Eros is forever sending out arrows in flat trajectory along the outward axis. We should not be surprised that we endure more agony than joy when one pierces us and our inward axis is too short. Such an arrow opens us up to that which is outside ourselves before we can handle it. It reveals our inner state to others and to ourselves before we are prepared for it to be revealed. There is an injunction in The Song of Songs, the Old Testament book that celebrates human love, that goes like this: “I adjure you that ye stir not up nor awaken love until it please.” This command is repeated four times in what is a rather short book of the Bible.

If we are not yet able to respond -- and yet let loose arrows from our quiver or too soon become their target -- we "stir up" and "awaken" love before it "please." When this happens all our inadequate past experiences with love, all our past disappointments -- with persons and ideals that we had sought to love but which responded by trampling our self esteem -- pass before us: the mother who made us into mannequins and handled us without warmth; the father who boasted of us but ignored us; the friend we trusted but who used us only as a tool; the religion to which we would have given our life but which cheated us of our human identity. All this passes before us when love's arrow pierces us before it "please.” If our inner lack is great -- that is, if our vertical inner axis is too short -- we cannot fully respond to love but must regard it with anxiety and fear until it proves its healing power to us. And if the arrow is insincerely flung or used only to control us, it is no wonder that we may develop a deeper capacity for distrust of others and hatred of ourselves.

This is a deep agony that love inflicts: when it is insincerely offered to persons not yet equipped to endure disappointment or when it is aggressively pressed on them, it destroys their faith in love.

And yet, even when love is sincerely intended, the response can be much the same. Perhaps our experience with people has produced so much fear, anxiety, and ill will that even the most sincerely loving person may not be able to get through to us. We simply may not be able to trust what our senses tell us, so foreshortened may past encounters have made our inner axis. If people have not been honest with us or trusted us, we may no longer be honest with or trust ourselves. And if we cannot trust ourselves, how can we trust another person? Little wonder that love should put us off! Little wonder that we should crucify its prophets! After all, the more gracious and unconditional their offering, the more we fear they will destroy us. This fear, I believe, is at the root of the politically conservate Christian right’s contradictory use of Jesus. They want to love him but they are afraid that his love condemns them, so they act the way they believe they have been judged and become destroyers and condemners in the name of Christ.

That’s why it is our insides that love has most to deal with. Love has as its primary task the “filling full”, the lengthening and strengthening of our inward axis -- that truncated inside part of us which is the key to the way we respond to people and to life. But the obstacle it must overcome may seem almost insurmountable, for it is most often the obstacle of our own fearfulness -- our fear of love itself, based on our past disappointments with love.

And so, the path of love in this world proceeds along a strenuous, uncertain way. It appeals to us because it offers the glitter of a happy, joyous existence with spouse, with mother and father, with friend, with God or Reality. But, at times, it dashes our hopes because it requires from us a sense of rootedness, of identity, of security of self that we may not have. Love requires of us the very thing it is love’s function to create. It requires us to be able to give love in order to receive it. This Catch-22 is written deeply into our human predicament. It is one of the most important paradoxes we ever have to resolve. How many mothers have failed to recognize its existence? How many children have not understood the stress that being “loving" places on the psyches of us mortal human beings? It would be helpful if eulogies to love would point this out more clearly. Like I Corinthians 13, they usually say that love is patient, kind, and humble, rejoices in the right, and is grateful, reverent, and loyal and that it never ends. These psalms to love point out that people are incomplete without love, that it will endure all things. They say that love never fails. But they never seem to acknowledge that, when we are not prepared for love or when hypocrites proclaim it, love can hurt, can draw blood, can fill us with such agonies of self doubt that Cupid’s arrow can cause our hearts to bleed to death.

What this situation requires of us is that we not lose heart when love's effect seems to cause more hurt than hope. We must remember that love comes to us with both a bright and a dark side, that it is both an attraction for our hearts and an arrow to pierce our soul. It carries both ecstasy and agony in its train. We must remember that the success love has with us depends on the depth of our inner capacity to receive and return love -- a capacity that is only as large as we are. If love is a thin presence in our lives, it is probably because we have become thin people. We must remember that it is only as we grow in our capacity to love that the dark shadow is made light.

If we remember these things, our response will be more adequate and sincere, for we will not expect the other person to be the only agent of love. If we remember these things, we can help one another to fuller expression and joy of love. On this Mothers Day Sunday of 2005, it is good to remember that many mothers have either consciously or unconsciously understood these things. Many have guided their children toward healthy, fulfilling lives. We celebrate the love they have given us that has enabled us to share love with others.
 

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