Take Heart:  Deepening Relationships, 3
A Sermon by Rev. Nina D. Grey

“I thought of that old joke,” Woody Allen said in the film, Annie Hall. “You know. This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, `Doc, my brother's crazy. He thinks he's a chicken.' And the doctor says, `Why don't you turn him in?' And the guy says, `I would but I need the eggs.' Completing the joke Allen concludes: Well, I guess that's pretty much how I feel about relationships. You know, they're totally irrational and crazy and absurd . . . but I guess we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs.

I imagine many of us have experienced the irrationality, or craziness or absurdity of a relationship and yet also our need, and I imagine we have also experienced other sides of relationships, their unfolding, their comforts, their beauty, or joy, or surprises, and their sadness too, their disappointments, their failures, their endings, and ultimately their sorrows.

Today we ponder relationships: the ties that wind us up us with lovers and spouses, with partners and friends;

The strands that tie us forever, no matter how we feel about them, to parents and children, brothers and sisters. We think of those who are close and who are far, the ones we talk with every day, or once a week without fail, or once a month or hardly ever, the ones whom we love with ease, and the ones whom we love with struggle. We think of those who touch our lives now, those who cast shadows over our pasts, our formers or exes or estranged ones, and those who have gone before whom we can’t see or touch any longer but who dwell in the recesses of memory and dreams. For relationships live within us even past the point of death. Today we acknowledge the courage it takes to weave our lives with other lives, the bravery it takes, in the face of loss, to open our hearts to the unknown, and risk love again.

Woody Allen’s character says, “We need the eggs.” We need what it is relationships create. But what do they create? What are the purposes? Why do we need one another?

Living single myself for many years, my loved ones being heart-felt but not dwelling in the house where I hang my hat and scarf most every night, I joke about the challenge of washing your own back. I say It’s clear God must have intended that we are meant to love one another . The evidence is that there are places on our back we can’t reach by ourselves. But only sometimes do partners, lovers or spouses wash each other’s backs. Mostly we’re on our own getting our backs clean. And humans being ingenuous, we’ve invented long handled tools that can help us clean our backs.

No. It’s not our unreachable backs. The main reasons we need love relationships have to do with our human condition. We need folks who will encounter with us the terror and wonder of life’s mysteries, we need folks who will companion us in our sorrow and joy; who will help us puzzle out who we are, who we can be, how we can live in the face of illness and dying and uncertainty, and why for this brief time we are here.

Between birth and death we are like drops of water, we come out of the sea and return to the sea. And first we know only our submergence in the oneness of all life but then we recognize our separateness.

We discover our dependence on others, to feed us and care for us, to teach us what we need to know. And eventually we gain competence, we discover we can feed ourselves, we learn skills, and we move beyond the family.

We realize we have gifts and limitations. I can ride a bike but not throw a ball, I’m good at math, not science. We become conscious of our apartness. We become aware as the Buddha did, that life is sometimes hard, that there is suffering. And we question who am I, why am I here, in the face of the suffering and unfairness of life, how should I live. And though we seek meaning in our solitariness, we cannot find it entirely alone. We discover our evolving selves, our meanings are revealed,  through interaction with those whom we love and who love us;
who comfort and affirm us, who trouble and make us crazy, and whom we make crazy too; we are revealed in the eyes and through the insights of those who delight us, who test us and mirror us back to ourselves, who confound us and stretch us to grow.  This is some of why we need each other..

There are many kinds of love: erotic love, romantic love, platonic, agape or altruistic love, Love between partners, between parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins and friends. Some love is simple, but many relationships are complex, sometimes predictable, and othertimes mysterious, sometimes delightful, othertimes troubling, even devastating. Our relationships range from the very healthy to the very destructive, and everything in between but even the least healthy, if we survive them, may be crucibles of our growth. And sometimes we have to reach out for help and sometimes we have to take steps for our healing, or even our safety.

No relationships are perfect and most , if reflected on, invite our growth. And growth is why we need one another. Growth, in wisdom, in our senses of self and our calling in the world; growth, in our ability to endure  life hardships, in our seeking of truth and deepening of spirit, growth in the journey of becoming more fully human and whole.

Let a few relationship of my relationship stories be invitations to your own memories and the stories of your growth.  The first is about me and my father: My father taught me a vision of a world more fair, with all her people one. His death when I was very young was an overwhelming loss and I wandered in a kind of spiritual wilderness for years, but later I had an experience that renewed meaning and my father’s vision of a compassionate world was re-born in my heart. It had been waiting as a seed needing nourishment, and even now this vision of human possiblity points me toward a hopeful future. Let my story invite your story.

And my sister has stretched me to see myself as she has seen me, and thereby has helped me grow. One particular day years ago we were walking around at a huge outdoor yard sale in Maine.

Not much of a shopper and tired of hanging around I strode over to her, grabbed her arm and said, ok, Susan, let’s go. She just looked at me, and slowly pointedly answered, “Would you speak to a friend that way?” It is rare for my sister to speak out like that. Through her daring to risk my displeasure she made me aware that I still thought I was the boss of my baby sister. Only she wasn’t 8 and I wasn’t 11. In her bravery she shone a light on that controlling shadow part of me, and once aware, I could be more intentional, I could become aware of my wants and share them in an invitational way. Not that even today I remember always to do that, but I have that option now. I can say, I feel ready to leave now. Are you ready? Would it be alright with you if we go?

In Harriet Lerner’s book, the Dance of Connection, Lerner challenges the notion that women are always the listeners and men always the fixers, the ones who jump to solutions. She invites us to move beyond stereotypical labels and reinvent ourselves. My daughter helped me expand my options about who I could be and how I can respond with something other than fixing.

Walking together on a beach she was telling me about a relationship problem. And soon I started to give her advice. She stopped abruptly where she stood in the sand and faced me. “Mom, let me finish. Just listen to me! That’s what I want.” By rushing to fix things I could avoid my daughter’s painful feelings or my own feelings of helplessness.  It is heart-hurting but not, I discovered, heart-breaking to listen to my daughter’s pain, and to feel my own responding pain. I am learning to do this, making room for her real feelings and my own.

I have to let myself be in a discomfort zone to just let her be, but in doing so I grow in self-understanding, in compassion, in appreciation of the inner Kim and the inner Nina.

In that beach encounter, my daughter found her voice and spoke it clearly. And sometimes it’s scary to voice our concerns and express our needs. You, like me, may have learned to fear conflict, or rejection and loss. And so we sit tight and keep our thoughts to ourselves. Lerner says. Sometimes it is good to keep quiet. We have to choose what we will say to whom and when, and how. We have to use discretion. But when for the sake of preserving a relationship, we hide truth with persistent silence, we diminish the quality, the intimacy and vulnerability and strength of our relationships, and we may even lose what we are trying to save. Daring to voice difficult, painful or simply different truths, Lerner says, and I have found, we honor who we are, what we feel and need, we nourish our spirit and enhance our lives and relationships. My brother risked such honesty with a dear friend one day, asking that friend to respect his and his family’s need for more distance. Their negotiation was not easy, but by staying with it, they strengthened their relationship.  Sometimes though others can not hear us.  And sometimes relationships fray, strain or break under the weight of truth.  And sometimes we need to lighten up or just let things go.

Ann Shapiro and I supported each other through school and parenting, and it wasn’t until midlife that we dared to have our first fight. Now we know our relationship can sustain discomfort and is stronger for it. Let my stories invite your stories.

Lydia Diamond and I saw a movie together about the horse Seabiscuit. We talked about it later and it turned out that through the lens of her African American experience she saw that black jockeys were underrepresented in that film and that awareness affected her enjoyment of it. Through the lens of my white American experience I missed that altogether. In light of our unique life and cultural histories our visual and emotional experiences were different. Hearing her truth she helped me see what I was blind to before.

Lerner says, being brave in the face of fear and voicing our different needs, our insights, our pains, sorrow, griefs, even angers, though difficult, also frees up our compassion, our love, and our joy. Listening, letting go of always needing to be right, we can hear another’s truth and be changed. Sharing insight in the cross cultural cross generational friendship our lives are enriched.

Such sharing with beloved others can free us to transcend who we were and discover more of who we can become, can help us uncover the whys of our existence and that to which we’re called, can help us discover, in the face of suffering, and life’s unfairness, more about how we shall live. All our lives we are in need of others. And others are in need of us.

In a short while the offering will be taken. During the offertory and through the day I invite you let my stories invite your stories of stretching and growing in relationship. Reflect on the courage of love, and just possibly how you and others you love have helped and can help fill each other’s baskets with eggs.