“Love’s Stories”
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Rev. Bruce Southworth, Senior Minister
The Community Church of New York Unitarian Universalist
Readings
For this day, with Love’s many themes, blessings and consternations, I begin
with a poem by Marge Piercy. It is titled Many, Many loves:
So many things we can love:
a man, a woman, a friend, a cat.
We can love a sugar maple
turning orange from the bottom up;
we can love a weeping beech
with its twisting arms, the lush tent
branches make sweeping the ground.
We can love a pond, a shore, a boat.
We can love a painting, a flag,
abstractions like honor and country.
We can love icons and temples.
A house, a yard, a woods, a path
that leads us wandering toward
the place we’d most like to be.
Some can love a car – I never could –
a book, a doll, a necklace or ring.
Some can love family and some can’t.
Some – the luckiest – can love
themselves without narcissism
just saying, Well I am this, I could do better now and probably I will.
[The Crooked Inheritance, p. 112]
In another poem, she writes about love as “Half luck, Half work, falling uphill”
(Crooked Inheritance, 125), and she knows also that love transcends gender. As she
says,
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In earlier times and different cultures
and tribes, men married men and women
married women, and the sky never fell.
People loved as they would and must
And the rivers still ran clean and the grass
grew a lot harder and more abundantly
than it does now…
To those offended, she asks,
“What do you hate when you watch lovers?”
“Love’s Stories”
Rev. Bruce Southworth, Senior Minister
In taking up the multi-layered, challenging and awesome themes of Love,
Valentine’s Day, intimacy found or lost, and our human heartaches and longing… in
offering some of Love’s Stories, to begin I return to the poet Nikki Giovanni. She is a
writer, educator, activist, and commentator, known around the world, author of 30 books
for children and adults.
Now 71, she came to the fore as part of the Black Arts movement in the 1960s, is
recipient of the NAACP Image Award and the Langston Hughes Medal. She is now a
University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA, as well as being
among Oprah’s 25 “Living Legends.”
I have long enjoyed Nikki Giovanni’s memoirs and poems. She has a volume
titled Bicycles – Love Poems with many moods of love.
Nikki Giovanni writes,
I talk to myself
People think I am on my phone
In simpler days
I would have been considered strange
People would feel sorry
For me
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And called me Crazy
I would have walked down the street
Carrying brown paper bags
Arguing
laughing sometimes
Humming a tune
I am alone
At the kitchen sink
Or behind the wheel
Of my car
Taking the roasted chicken
With root vegetables out of the oven
It’s easy to see
The delight I am taking
In this life
I am always smiling
I am in love.
(“In Simpler Times”)
On a different note, she begins another poem:
Every now and then
We all fall in love
With a totally inappropriate
Person
Maybe not all of us, but… she continues,
You sort of see someone
And you don’t want to notice
That ring on his finger
Then, she acknowledges, “And I would not be different…. [even though] all the
world knows/This cannot work.”
Well, maybe not all of us, but she is evocative of what may happen to some of
us.
She speaks of passion when she …. “Stepped on that third rail” and of safety.
One poem is about a Drunken Phone Call; another gentle one about dancing…. And
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social witness and justice for Huey Newton of the Black Panthers… killed by the
government out of fear…
Nikki Giovanni also protests, “I don’t do duets” even as she awaits her partner’s
return.
Love includes honoring family. She writes,
I am a mirror
I reflect the grace
Of my mother
The tenacity
Of my grandmother
The patience
Of my grandfather
The sweat
Of my great-grandmother
The hope
Of my great-grandfather
The songs
Of my ancestors
The prayers
Of those on the auction block
The bravery
Of those in middle passage
I reflect the strengths
Of my people
And for that alone
I am loved
(“I Am A Mirror”)
“So many things” – so many ways –“we can love.”
Among Oprah’s 25 “legends” is Ruby Dee, who died last year:
I recall, at the time of the death of her husband Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee spoke
about their partnership, their life. Married for 56 years, they joined in the larger struggle
for human freedom, as socialists and activists working with those like W. E. B. DuBois,
Paul Robeson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. They were of course pioneers,
exemplars, and giants of stage, film, and television.
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It was Ossie Davis in speaking in turn about Ruby Dee who said, "We were in
love, head over heels, and stuck with each other forever!" But later he would add, “As
we went along, we became aware of something [else]…. It was from the struggle itself
that we gained our true identity. It was the struggle itself that gave us cause to stay
together as long as we have." (USA Today, 2/4/05)
Love is… well it’s many things… Love is curious, and we embrace, lose it, live
with it in different ways.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, our Unitarian saint and Transcendentalist provocateur,
married his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, when she was 18, even though she was
already ill with tuberculosis. She was only twenty when she died on February 8, 1831,
and Emerson grieved for her deeply. He would visit her grave daily, and a little over a
year after her death (March 29, 1832), he wrote in his journal, “I visited Ellen's tomb &
opened the coffin.”
This apparently was not uncommon for those in mourning.
Emerson would marry again, to Lydian Jackson, and their son Waldo died at age
5 of scarlet fever, leaving a lasting mark upon him. In a poem about his loss, Emerson
wrote,
I mourn
The darling who shall not return.
I see my empty house…
I see my trees repair their boughs;
And he, the wondrous child,
… Has disappeared from the Day's eye;
He observes, “Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain.”
(“Threnody”)
And surely we know for those who have loved and suffered loss the “hearts’
loves remain.”
During seminary here in New York at Union, one summer I undertook a
chaplaincy program at Bellevue Hospital. A colleague in that, a fellow chaplain, was
Pauli Murray – an activist, attorney, law professor, and then an Episcopal priest-intraining. I met her when she was in her 70's. She had been a civil rights pioneer in the
1940s as she sought to enter segregated universities in North Carolina. She embraced
life, and Pauli had a hard edge to her; she was a fighter, a battler.
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She was also a poet with tenderness. Among a series of love poems subtitled
“No Greener Spring,” quite different from her protest poems, there is this one:
Three times I have known tears-When I loved you,
When I lost you,
When you lost yourself.
And she writes in “Dinner for Three”:
There were three who sat and drank of wine,
On food and laughter they fed,
They talked of worlds that hurtled by,
Yet of love – not one word was said.
But love was there, ah love was there –
Brighter than candle light,
The brave, the tender and the fair,
Were hosts to love that night.
These three gathered at table are God-intoxicated, Life-intoxicated, Spirit filled,
like you and me, who embrace their connections, set aside hurt, pain, and find love,
amid wounds and light, and she by her light offers me greater light.
In this spirit in both a lighter and still sacred vein, Charles Schulz in one his
Peanuts comic strips offers a summertime conversation.
At the end of summer camp, Charlie Brown speaks of the humanly possible, our
deepest needs. Out of his own loneliness and misery, he befriends another boy who is
also homesick.
“Well, so long Charlie Brown. It’s been nice knowing you.”
“It’s been nice knowing you too, Roy. Have a good trip home. Bye now!”
Then Charlie Brown says, “For the first time in my life I feel I really helped
someone. He was lonesome, and I became his friend.” And Charlie Brown concludes,
“What an accomplishment.”
We are all stardust, part of a cosmic story, greeting, laughing, longing, crying,
and sometimes connecting – cherishing the friends along the way.
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And as James Baldwin put it,
“The moment we cease to hold each other,
the moment that we break faith with each other –
the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”
Different ways to embrace the cosmos and one another…. which are the same
thing, aren’t they, at the deepest levels?
Different antidotes to loneliness…
One of the more challenging elements of our lives is this matter of love in action
that we describe as forgiveness. Perhaps, you have seen the movie Selma. One of the
powerful figures is John Lewis of SNCC, now a Georgia Congressman. SNCC was
crucial to voter registration drives in the South and in particular in Selma.
I hope you know, and I know many of you do know, some of this history. In
Charlotte, North Carolina at the National Convention of the Democratic Party in 2012,
John Lewis began his speech this way:
I first came to … [Charlotte] in 1961, the year Barack Obama was
born. I was one of the 13 original "Freedom Riders." We were on a bus
ride from Washington to New Orleans trying to test a recent Supreme
Court ruling that banned racial discrimination on buses crossing state lines
and in the stations that served them. Here in Charlotte, a young AfricanAmerican rider got off the bus and tried to get a shoeshine in a so-called
white waiting room. He was arrested and taken to jail.
On that same day, we continued on to Rock Hill, South Carolina,
about 25 miles from here. When my seatmate, Albert Bigelow, and I tried
to enter a white waiting room, we were met by an angry mob that beat us
and left us lying in a pool of blood. Some police officers came up and
asked us whether we wanted to press charges. We said, "No, we come in
peace, love and nonviolence." We said our struggle was not against
individuals, but against unjust laws and customs. Our goal was true
freedom for every American.
Lewis continued,
Since then, America has made a lot of progress. We are a different
society than we were in 1961. And in 2008, we showed the world the true
promise of America when we elected President Barack Obama. A few
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years ago, a man from Rock Hill, inspired by President Obama's election,
decided to come forward. He came to my office in Washington and said, "I
am one of the people who beat you. I want to apologize. Will you forgive
me?" I said, "I accept your apology." He started crying. He gave me a hug.
I hugged him back, and we both started crying. This man and I don't want
to go back; we want to move forward.
Congressman John Lewis, who had been left in a pool of his own blood in 1961,
offers forgiveness.
How in the world does such a thing happen? It was in 2009, a few years before
the Democratic convention meeting in Charlotte when John Lewis and Elwin Wilson, the
man who beat him, told this story together on a morning television talk show.
Congressman Lewis at that time said, “I never thought this would happen…. It
says something about the power of love, the power of grace and the power of people to
be able to say, ‘I’m sorry.’”
And sometimes, almost every day, I believe, the rumors of transcendence are
true: John Lewis…. Elwin Wilson… hugging and crying… moving forward…. like you
and me, characters in a story of hope that we create… or not.
Just a word about Valentine’s Day. It steers us toward romantic love, which Toni
Morrison, in her novel The Bluest Eye, called one “of the most destructive ideas in the
history of human thought.” Nonetheless, I am for romance, and Kay and I have our
simple rituals, but I realize not all embrace it, and relationships require a bit of work,
maybe a lot of work at times.
It is not always easy, and as we know, a good number of the messes are ones
that we create out of our own egos when there is too much me, me, me and because of
insecurities and fears. (And let’s never blame God for our messes.)
Among Love’s Stories is one told by Anne Tyler, and I turn to her novel The
Accidental Tourist. The main character is a man named Macon who writes travel books
for businessmen. His purpose is to provide all that one needs to know in a foreign city
about how to sustain American comforts and habits, from food to hotels. The goal was
to help these business travelers “pretend that they had never left home.” A helpful
comment might say, “I’m happy to say that it’s possible now to buy Kentucky Fried
Chicken in Stockholm.” Heaven forbid that you experience the culture of a country you
travel to do business. And the books sold well.
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Macon’s life seeks similar structure, order, clarity, pattern, and routine. His wife
leaves him because of it. She complains at one point, “You’re so quick to be sensible,
Macon, that you have given up on just about everything…. Everything that might touch
you or upset you or disrupt you, you’ve given up without a murmur and done without,
said you never wanted it anyhow.” (141)
When we enter upon their lives, their son has been dead for two years. A twelveyear-old boy, he had died in a convenience store hold-up when he was away at summer
camp and had sneaked off with a few other boys, and by accident became a victim
during a robbery.
Sarah, his wife observes, “I know you mourned him but there’s something so
what-do-you-call, so muffled about the way you experience things. I mean love or grief
or anything; it’s like you’re trying to slip through life unchanged. Don’t you see why I
had to get out?”
“Sarah, I’m not muffled. I . . . endure. I’m trying to endure, I’m standing fast, I’m
holding steady.”
She continues and tells him that he is fooling himself. “... you’re not holding
steady; you’re ossified. You’re encased. You’re like something in a capsule.… Oh
Macon, it’s not by chance you write those silly books telling people how to take trips
without a jolt.” (142)
Later, he thinks about his son’s death and how he adjusted so quickly. “… if
people didn’t adjust, how could they bear to go on?”
Tyler’s story is one of growth and transformation, of loss and change, loneliness
and love – something like your life and mine? Growth and transformation, loss and
change, loneliness and love?
And a woman named Muriel is a large part of it.
Asleep together in bed, exhausted after the day, Muriel “sighed in her sleep and
lifted … (Macon’s) hand and placed it upon her stomach. The robe had fallen open; he
felt smooth skin, and then a corrugated ridge of flesh jutting across her abdomen. The
Caesarean, he thought. And it seemed to him, as he sank back into his dreams, that
she had as good as spoken to him aloud. About your son, she seemed to be saying:
Just put your hand here. I’m scarred, too. We’re all scarred. You are not the only one.”
(201)
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So, we can blame God or others or dodge reality, try that! Or we can accept the
mystery, go with the changes, understand the messiness of the world, the disorder, and
still amidst the scars, know that we co-creators of our own salvation, partners with a
larger creativity, Cosmic Voyagers, with the more experiments the better. And then do
that sometimes difficult thing, to give thanks.
The scars… The country artist K. D. Laing, who grew up a vegetarian in western
Canada’s cattle country talks about her struggle as an activist and as a lesbian in that
traditional culture, and how as a public person, it was even harder. When at the end of
an interview she was asked about the rich, spiritual texture of her music and lyrics, she
answered, “I believe that you are only as deep as what has been carved into you.”
So, am I thankful enough for the scars, and the wrinkles and the weathering? Are
you? And if not thankful, appreciative of what might be learned in spite of them? And
we are not alone; “We’re all scarred.”
With Marge Piercy: “So many things we can love”… and we can love
ourselves….
We can say, “Well I am this, I could do better now and probably I will.” Or more
accurately I say, I could do [this] differently and so [that’s what] I do.
One last love story – perhaps the best! Loving Life and others and oneself,
amid the mysteries and pain… Loving the possibilities… a poem by Langston Hughes, a
friend of our church:
Gather out of star-dust
Earth-dust,
Cloud-dust,
Storm-dust,
And splinters of hail,
One handful of dream-dust
Not for sale.
("Dream Dust”)
“Full todays I wish for you, and full tomorrows.
“And love I wish for you - May you give it frequently.”
(Rev. Charles S. Stephen, Jr.)
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