September 8, 2013
On their Diamond Anniversary – celebrating 60 years of marriage – a couple was asked, “What’s your secret?” The couple answered, “There is no secret. The first 50 years of marriage are hard; after that, it’s easy.”
So the bad news is that most of us experience committed love relationshipsas hard. Some have decided that they’re so hard they’re not worth having. Put two humans together expecting that the other will meet their needs and tolerate their craziness, and there is bound to be a lot of friction and/or disappointment. But marriage does not have to be hard.
What can make it easier and more fulfilling?
Spirituality and emotional health.Continually working on ourselves to heal from the past, create gratitude in the present, and envision a beautiful future. We at 8th Day are so fortunate in that we have spirituality. Even if you are saying to yourself, well, I don’t really know if I have faith, it doesn’t matter. Seeking to have faith makes you a spiritual person, and that fact that you are here shows that you are open to having faith.
I am going to use the terms “committed love relationships” and “marriage” interchangeably in this teaching. I believe that the highest form of commitment in romantic love is marriage, but I want to be clear that I am speaking of all forms of committed romantic love, including same-sex relationships.I will also alternate the uses of the masculine and feminine pronouns, but these can be understood to be applicable to either gender.
Committed love relationships can be the best crucible in which to develop ourselves spiritually and emotionally. Now what exactly is a crucible? It’s a container that can withstand very high temperatures and is used for metal, glass, and pigment production. In other words, if you want to make something useful, like metal or glass, or something beautiful, like color, you are going to have to accept that the process requires being strong enough to withstand a high temperature. Since marriage often raises our temperature to create something useful or beautiful, it’s an amazing opportunity to grow spiritually! But let’s be clear, you are only a crucible for that process if the temperature is not too high for the material that you are made of. Some relationships can never be healthy for us, and the healthiest thing is to get away from the heat before we crack.
Our Gospel reading today advises us that unless we hate our parents, spouses, children, and siblings, even our own life, we cannot be disciples of Jesus. Hmm … Many of us already hate our parents, spouses, children, at least at times, and I can say definitely that this is not a recipe for spiritual success. But luckily, I’m Catholic, and we don’t believe in taking the Bible literally. Instead, we believe the Bible is a divinely inspired document that needs to be taken in historical context.
In the context of the ancient Middle East, and even in the Middle East today, family was everything: your source of identity, self-esteem, and credibility. So Jesus is saying that there is something higher than our attachment to our egos and to life itself.
Buddhism teaches that the source of all suffering is attachment. Pain is a normal part of life, but suffering is caused by resistance to what is that we don’t want or attachment to what is that we want to hang on to. But the nature of life is change. Only by continually surrendering to the fact that we can neither avoid pain nor capture pleasure do we liberate ourselves to experience all of life. Only by putting God first and continually surrendering to the fact that our parents, spouses, other family members, and ourselves may not behave as we wish can we be set free to appreciate all the good that is in them and us and to reach for spiritual excellence.
I want to make a complicated subject, how romantic love can catalyze spiritual growth, a bit simpler by focusing on theBiblically-based point that the two greatest commandments are to love God and love your neighbor as yourself.
Let’s look at the Bible passage: Jesus was asked, “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”(Matthew 22: 36-40) So the greatest commandment is to love God. Wow, as if loving your spouse were not already hard enough, there is something even more difficult being asked of us? Yes. But the nice thing is that God is not our roommate, so we can have as much space from God as we need.
I’ll get to us singles in a minute, but for the people in committed love relationships, put God first and your marriage will benefit. Now one of the reasons my marriage failed was that God was not first in it. My ex and I were married in an Islamic ceremony, as the Catholic Church in Palestine – where we had to marry because the State Department had canceled my ex-husband’s visa – refused to marry me to a Muslim. In Islam, marriage is an agreement between two consenting adults that is signed in an Islamic court. So we made no vows, and to me, our marriage lacked the sense of a sacrament. We had planned to have a Catholic ceremony once we got to the States, but by the time we arrived two years later and got one of us a job, I had more interest in divorce than making a sacramental commitment to the marriage.
Moreover, we had failed to come to an agreement of how we would raise our children religiously. I was willing to compromise on this issue, and although my ex had promised this, he ended up refusing to do so. He even objected to saying grace together before meals. If I had put God first instead of my need for an exotic romance to compensate for a career disaster, I would never have married this man, knowing that the marriage would detract from my relationship with God and not enhance it. This is not to suggest that inter-religious marriages cannot work, but they require a great deal of spiritual maturity.
On the other hand, the couple that prays together, stays together. How bonding it is for my parents, whose marriage has been very difficult at times, to do centering prayer (a Catholic form of meditation) together every morning. In the spoken part of their prayer, they hear the other asking for his or her needs and those of others they love and asking God to forgive them for their mistakes. How can you be mad at someone who is asking God to forgive him for just the thing that you too find annoying or who is asking God to help with a burden you didn’t even know was on her heart?
But how does loving the Lord God with all your heart, mind, and soul help the single person? Well, for one thing, it gives you something to focus on other than looking for love in all the wrong places or feeling sorry for yourself for being single – or, a favorite of mine, being mad at all the singles you know for not being your soulmate. For another, we need to recognize that loneliness is not a creation of our relationship status; it is a question of the state of our hearts. Let me say that another way: Loneliness is not the result of being single; it is the result of not being present to the love that is freely available to us. I’ll get back to the single person in a minute, but let’s first take a look at loneliness in relationships.
If you are in a committed love relationship and feeling lonely, which is entirely possible – in fact, I think the loneliest people are those who are unhappily married – consider these four possibilities: (1) You may be blocking your partner’s love. The great Sufi mystic and poet Rumi wrote, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” (2) You may be looking to get all the love you want from your partner and not realizing you can get love from all the people in your life, not to mention new people you could befriend. (3) You may be looking to get love instead of putting your focus on what is under your control, giving love. It is in giving that we receive. If we give love with an attachment to getting it back in a specific way, we will likely become angry or frustrated. Instead, we can have faith in the universal law of generation: that giving love is the most likely way of generating love coming back to you.
The last possibility to consider, once all others have been exhausted, is (4) you have chosen a partner who is incapable of giving you the love that you need. For example, your partner shows no empathy toward you when you are in pain. This may be a function of overwhelm, and you may be able to elicit more empathy by expressing your feelings in a different way. But there are also people so wounded that your getting it right is above your pay grade of spiritual or emotional development. Maybe Jesus or Buddha could figure it out, but I’m not either, and it would take me years to get there if that’s even a realistic ambition. I once was committed to saving my marriage, and then I realized that a marriage is not a living, vulnerable being, but I was. Sometimes you need to save yourself by getting out.
Now back to the single person who may or may not want to be in a committed love relationship: Developing a passionate relationship with God, especially through a church community, can meet many of your emotional needs. When you find peace and joy in your relationships with God and your community, you will not need a committed love relationship. Paradoxically, not being needy is the best way to attract a soulmate, and if you then establish a relationship, your soulmate will add to your peace and joy instead of being drawn into the whirlwind of your unmet needs, which can be experienced as demands or burdens. And this of course equally applies to how to have a healthy relationship. Show up in your relationship as someone who is already whole and happy so that what you get from your partner just enhances the beautiful life you have. This is easier said than done, of course, and being whole and happy requires daily spiritual and mental discipline, like building a muscle by exercising it regularly.
So now we come to the Second Great Commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This is often interpreted to mean that we should stop being selfish. Yes, we get to love others well, but the point is also this: You can only love others as much as you love yourself.
Do you have the belief that it’s a zero-sum game, that any attention given to loving yourself means that there’s less left over for your partner and any children you have? How’s that working for you? A more empowering belief to choose is that the more true love you give yourself, the more love you will have for others. The converse is also true: The more true love you give others, the more love and peace you will have for yourself. But remember, for it to be true love requires that love for others doesn’t come at your expense and isn’t tied to expectations, and that love for yourself is meeting your true needs, not just indulging your desires of the moment.
What makes a loving partner? You take care of your partner’s physical needs. You help your partner laugh and enjoy life. You make sure you speak kindly and gently with your partner, even when the person is being difficult. You spend time with your partner. You try to help your partner manage the burdens and disappointments of life and celebrate wholeheartedly that person’s successes. You speak only good things about that person to others. You work together on shared goals, like raising responsible, well-adjusted children. You support your partner’s prayer life. You support your partner’s doing things that serve his well-being, like guys’ night out or her having time alone.
So now I ask: How much do you do those things for yourself? Are you the partner who nags the other to eat better but doesn’t take the time to get eight hours of sleep at night? Do you take the time to do the things you enjoy? Do you berate yourself when you make a mistake? Do you force yourself to keep working when you need a bathroom break, a vacation, a meal, a glass of water, or exercise? (If you think you need coffee instead of water, consider that your body has already given up on getting what it needs from you.) Do you focus a laser on what you think are your physical imperfections? Do you live beyond your means or in a state of disorganization so that you end up being burdened by debt or chaos? Do you put yourself down out loud or in your own head? Do you reject compliments? Do you pocket your successes without taking time to celebrate? Do you forget about God six and a half days a week? Do you neglect to make time for yourself?
More often than not, the person hurting because the partner does not do things that he needs to feel good is not doing those things for himself either. One of the major reasons for unhappiness in relationships is that we are depending on the other person to do for us what we need to be doing for ourselves. We come to our partners with a half-empty glass and demand that they fill it or even get angry that our partner didn’t fill it without being asked.
Are you feeling superior right now, knowing that you don’t do that? You might be at the meek opposite extreme – you ask nothing and tell yourself it’s OK that your needs are not being met. It is not OK. You have heard the maxim, “Treat others as you would want to be treated?” Let’s turn it on its head: Expect for yourself to be treated as well as you treat others.
So I am going to suggest a radical treatment for all of us: Court yourself. In her book The Soulmate Secret, Arielle Ford says that in order to attract your soulmate – and you may need to re-attract that person if you are already in a committed relationship with someone you love – you need to be in love with yourself. Again, in order for your soulmate to love you deeply, you need to be in love with yourself.
When I read this, I thought to myself, I like myself, I respect myself, I finally trust myself, but am I in love with myself? Definitely not. So how am I going to be in love with myself? I thought, well, let’s start with dating! My first date with myself I went to a zoukfestival. Now zouk is a French Caribbean partner dance that I love. But because I had other things going on, I did not leave until the festival was winding down. Note to self: You would not go out again with someone who almost made you miss a cool festival. Be more thoughtful next time. When I arrived, I was cranky because the zouk bands were finished and they were playing reggae. Then I checked myself. My date had planned this outing to please me. If I were with a man, I would make an effort to enjoy the event anyway to show appreciation for his effort. So I improved my attitude.
Then I noticed I was hungry, but the food was expensive for a non sit-down meal. I thought, I don’t want to spend the money. I’ll be OK. Then I thought, this is a date! Would you date someone too cheap to buy you a relatively inexpensive meal?Of course not! I got myself some yassa chicken, which tickled me because it was the food I had eaten when I was stationed in Africa. Next I started to bury myself in my iPhone, a habit I’ve used to defend against loneliness and all other feelings. But I soon realized I was being rude to my date. So I got out on the dance floor and started dancing. I noticed with gratitude that the band was fantastic, and the setting was lovely. I noticed with gratitude that I was among a crowd of Caribbean and African people, which to me is like chill plus joy. Instead of hunting for men, as I usually did, and being disappointed and annoyed that none of them showed up like my soulmate, I appreciated the people there for their enjoyable company.
I drove home smiling and listening to good music, and then it hit me: I usually didn’t like to go to things alone, because I was figuring that if people liked me, I would not be alone. It was an old childhood wound: I had the belief that people didn’t like me, thatI didn’t fit in. I was judging and condemning myself as a social failure. No wonder I hadn’t enjoyed my own company! Had I not decided to court myself, I might not ever have noticed and rooted out this piece of self-hatred. Now you can be as attractive, smart, and fun as all get out, but if underneath it you think there is something wrong with you, you either will not attract a partner, or you will attract one who agrees with you that there is something wrong with you.
If you love God with a passion, court yourself, are consistent with your self-care program(you have a self-care program, right?), and do fulfilling work, your life will be good whether or not you are coupled. Then what you create with a partner will make both your full cups overflow with the goodness and abundance of life.
Now since this is a teaching, I’m allowed to give homework, right? OK, here’s the homework: Go home and make a plan as to how you’re going to change your partner’s exasperating behavior or find your soulmate this week and then report back after the service next week. No? OK, you’re right. That would be too hard. The real homework is this: Think about what I’ve said today and what support you need, if any, to create a beautiful, healthy love relationship. Then next week at the potluck, I invite you to discuss this in small groups and report back so I can see if there is an interest and need for a Love Mission Group that would help people both within and beyond our community with these issues.
By loving God passionately and loving our neighbor as ourselves, we literally reparent ourselves. Our limbic system, the primitive part of the brain that was programmed in our childhood to defend us from familiar threats by reacting with fear or anger, literally rewires itself through our kindness to ourselves. You can also help your soulmates rewire their limbic systems by gently responding to theirupsets and requests. Seek always to give yourself and your partner lovingly what you each need. Who knows? We might find that marriage is only hard the first 50 years if we make it hard. By loving God, ourselves, and our partner, we can create miracles of personal transformation.