Romance

I’ve been pondering romance since last Valentines day. This year, Valentines day and Lent fell on the exact same date. It made me think. What’s godly, sacrificial romance actually look like?

Romance in our culture is tied into the feelings one has, usually at a young age, of love and attraction towards another person. It’s the feelings that are emphasized. And with it, those crazy things that occur out of romantic love. People will go to great lengths to prove their romantic love towards another. It reminds me of the Disney movies where guy meets girl, rescues girl, and they fall deeply in love and then the movie ends. What happens after the “romance” wears off is what concerns me. It’s obvious that the most beautiful and intelligent people in the world seem to have a hard time making romance work over the long haul. I read another news article today about a Hollywood celebrity who’d become violent towards her younger significant other; a person she was supposedly in love with. So here’s what I’d like to suggest.

Romance isn’t a feeling. And it’s not simply actions tied to the emotional (and dare I say sexual) response we have towards another person. Romance, true romance, is cultivated. It’s pursued not for its sake but for the others sake. Romance is planned. It’s paying attention to little things over the long haul. Anyone can open a car door for a beautiful woman. But to do it for that same woman 40-50 years later, that's romance! Romance is conniving in a godly way. It’s musing on how you can love other other more perfectly. And to be frank, much of the romance we have  today isn’t other oriented, its “me” oriented. It’s objectifying the other; loving the other because of how “they make me feel” or “because she’s so pretty.” In that case what we love isn’t the other, but ourselves and how the other makes us feel. It feels good to feel good. Romance feels good.

Romance can be practiced. I read somewhere about a woman who, after being married for a number of years, got super sick. While she was puking her guts out her husband held her hair back so that she could vomit unintruded. She said it was one of the most romantic things she’d ever experienced. So romance isn’t about me, its about the other. Romance isn’t a feeling, but an act that when occurring often enough, can create a feeling. Romance is tender not tough. But then again, real romance, true romance is a marathon not a sprint. Marathons are hard, especially the last six miles. But the finish line? Romantic!! The aha of the end. So what to do:

Ponder--What would it look like if you were to be truly romantic towards your significant other?

Practice--Don’t just be romantic towards the other but be gracious to all. Practice opening the car door for all women, not just the woman you love. Treat people at the check out counter as human beings created in the image of God.

Persevere--Don’t quit when the feelings are gone. Real romance when nurtured, can sneak up on you. Romance isn’t a to-do list. It’s nurtured when we treat the other, over the long haul, as a special person. 

I remember a few years ago, coming back from a game of golf and driving up to my house. I’ve practiced being romantic for a while. Jan was standing out in the front dressed in jeans and fall clothes and covering our grand kids with leaves. I immediately felt a romantic desire for her that I’d not felt in a while. Why? Romance was bearing fruit. Romance was giving me as a by-product, what our secular society mistakingly assumes is the real thing, namely that good feeling. I’ll take the by-product any day!! Ah, amore!

I'm Entitled

I saw it on the fourth of July, on a beach on the North Shore of Boston a few years ago. The crowd was poised for the fire works show. There were thousands of people milling around the beach with their blankets and beach chairs waiting for the inevitable. The place was packed. You couldn’t be alone if you wanted to. And its in that environment where I/we experienced, once again, the mindset of entitlement.

The show started and everyone took a seat on a blanket or a chair; well almost everyone. There was a small group of people, maybe ten yards from us, who remained standing. “Down in front,” people called. That did little to make them move. They huddled together a little more closely out of consideration but the message was clear, “We’re not sitting down. If we block your view, so what?!” And so the show went on and on and on and they remained standing—to the end. I guess I didn’t like that they blocked my view of the lower fireworks. It was pretty obvious that they were locals, based on how they were talking and acting. They probably had yearly beach passes. Maybe they lived in the community. I don’t know. But clearly, they felt entitled to stand while everyone else sat. They were at least middle class, white, and arrogant. They were entitled. And who they inconvenienced was irrelevant to them. It was truly amazing to watch. Irritating but amazing. They were entitled. And they let everyone know it!

It made me think about how much people feel entitled to. In America we feel entitled to compensation if we can’t work and a nice living if we can, freedom of speech and religion, health benefits, dignity, respect (even if you act disrespectfully), material goods, personal satisfaction and meaning, the right to say what you think or feel even if it hurts someone, happiness, and a lot more. We feel entitled. I’m not so sure that’s always good. I think in a democracy, there are benefits and those benefits, more than entitlements, seem to me to be more like privileges. I recently finished a book by a guy named Jamie Smith. The book is called How (Not) to be Secular. Smith’s book is a summary of a book by philosopher, Charles Taylor, who is so complex to read very few can understand him. So you read Smith to understand Taylor. At any rate, Charles Taylor (via Jamie Smith) notes that there is an individualism that haunts our modern way of life in the west. My take on it is that it erodes our ability to care for others the way we should.

St. Paul told the Corinthian church that he was entitled; entitled to compensation, entitled to respect, entitled to bring a believing wife along on his ministry if he so chose. But he didn’t. He chose, for others sake, to give up the things he was entitled to and live instead with a servant heart. Are we doing that? Am I doing that? Its easy to feel entitled. Its hard to want to serve. Jesus Christ, as the eternal Son of God, is entitled to respect, reverence, honor, and glory. On the cross He gave it all up for us. I think that means we can and should do the same for others.

Reactivity

“Why’d I say that?” I thought to myself. I’d been in a conversation with someone, a friend, and found myself reacting to something they’d said. It happened so fast it was almost automatic. In other words, the terms they used, their tone of voice, their body language, facial expressions, and the way it was said was like the pushing of a button. With that button pushed, there was an automatic reaction that was, well—automatic. It was almost like it was programmed. My father in law worked for IBM and was an electronic engineer. “Computers only do what you tell them to do,” he once told while I was complaining about my computer not working right. In other words, “It’s not to computers fault for doing what you told it to do, Dave!” I didn’t want to hear that but it was true. Within reason, the same is true of our reactivity.

Reactivity, and the corresponding fight, flight, or freeze responses often associated with it, have historical precedent in our lives. In other words, they are virtually programmed into our psyche through our family of origin, life experiences, or just plain human frailty. James and John’s response to the Samaritan village that rejected Jesus is a case of reactivity, “Lord, should we call down fire from heaven to consume them?!!” they asked. “Good heavens no!!” Was Jesus response [Miles paraphrase]. “I don’t do things like that, and neither should you.” Their reactivity to being rejected by Gentiles was tied into their Jewishness and the cultural climate of the day. The same is true for us.

Why do we react when a parent or a spouse or a friend or an enemy states an obvious opinion as if it was fact? Why do we react when a coworker blames us for something we know we didn’t do? Why do we react when our expectations, even those that are really unrealistic, aren’t met? Why do we react when people don’t act or think the way we think they should act or think? Why do we react when others do stuff that is problematic for us when we’ve never told them its problematic for us?

In reality, reactivity tells us something about ourselves. Here’s what I think: reactivity tells us that something other than God is being used to validate our worth, significance, prestige or reputation. In short, reactivity flows from idolatry. And idolatry flows from the sense that something other than God will give me joy, happiness or life. Merle Jordon in his book, Taking on the Gods, says “Essentially, persons are created in the image of God and only in being true to that inner self, linked with God, will emotional and spiritual well-being flow. When a person takes his or her identity from that which is less that the Ultimate Source of Being, then the sense of self is distorted. Various defenses [emphasis mine] and emotional and physical symptoms may appear over time which are covert modes of communicating that one is out of touch with one’s true self and with the true God.” (pg. 24)

Truthfully, we all do this. Some of us are just more overt about it than others. We may react by quietly stewing for weeks over some perceived slight. Or we may explode or become caustic or gossip or trash another person behind their back. All of this tells us more about ourselves than we are often willing to admit.

You Look Radiant

No one’s ever said that to me. “Dave, you look, well—just radiant! I mean really. Today you are radiant.” I think people have said it to my wife. Not me. Not that I can remember.

But the adventure of marriage—and probably any good friendship—is to end up with that. Again, I can’t help but view this through the lens of my Christian worldview. I realize that I’m tainted, but in St. Paul’s letter to the people who lived in Ephesus he describes what a marriage relationship can look like. After commanding people to “submit to one another” he describes what that would look like in a Christian marriage (Paul isn’t applying this to those who are not Christians). The husband is to love his wife sacrificially as Christ loved the church and the wife is to respectfully submit; that is, to put herself under her husbands mission to love her that way. When he doesn’t love her like that, she’s obligated to say something. That’s my take on it. That’s the way I read it. Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think so.

So true submission, in my opinion, can look more like conflict, than the door mat style submission I’ve run across on some occasions in religious circles. When husbands just check out or don’t care or do things that create anxiety or fear or hurt in the life of a wife, or when wives show disdain, contempt, or scorn for their husbands, nobody’s looking radiant. And there’s a lot of that going on behind the closed doors of a home and the frequent, outward attempts at the facade of marital health and bliss are at best deceitful. Both men and women are very good at keeping stuff hidden. There’s a lot of ways to lie and most of us are good at all of them.

The ultimate goal of this respect giving, loving, submissive behavior is radiance. I think this means that ultimately, both partners seek to present the other radiant before God. I don’t see why a wife can’t do the same thing for a husband. That is exhilarating! So we have marriage, the adventure. Marriage, the epic (as one person has said)! Marriage, the quest, the journey, the voyage! The goal: to love the other well, so well that you present him and her radiant before God and others. Frankly, I want to do that for my friends and relatives as well.

Friendship, Romance, Marriage, and the Journey of Love

Romance. It’s what drives American movies. It captures the heart of our western minds. We want romance. We want to be desired by a significant other. We want to be pursued. We want to feel “in love.” Traditional societies don’t work like that. I recently spoke to a friend of mine, a missionary in Africa, about the traditional culture he serves. “They don’t have any concept of romance as Americans would understand it,” he said,  “‘Why would you want that?’ they wonder! Love to them is utilitarian. You marry to get work done and have children. You don’t marry for romance. It doesn’t make any sense to them.” It caught my attention.

In December my wife had a heart issue that sent her to the hospital in an ambulance with difficulty breathing. She’d nearly passed out on her job. Her speech was slurred. Her blood pressure was super high, and her heart was racing. I received the frantic call, with that description as I remember it, from my oldest daughter while sitting in an airport, of all places. (One of these days I’m going to make a post of airplane/airport stories) The point of the call was pretty clear. “Dad, this may be the end.” My first thought was, “Oh, no. What I feared, is happening to me. It’s happened to one of my friends. Now its happening to me. What will I do?” That’s a totally selfish response, I’ll admit it. I thought I was going to be single again, and it wasn’t pleasant. Very dark. Fortunately I got a grip on myself and started thinking rationally. Reactivity is never helpful. It wasn’t a false alarm because there really are issues and, at this posting, we still don’t know what they are. But Jan is very much alive and has been allowed to cross country ski, etc. so it can’t be all that big a deal—we hope. One of my life long friends wasn’t so fortunate!  

It’s been on my mind ever since and made me ponder marriage, lean into Jan, and appreciate the gift of life. So while I actually try to fuel the emotional side of our relationship (I really do, believe it or not), it’s not really romance in the sense that western people seek romance. It’s the romance of choice. It’s rooted in more than a feeling but definitely involves wonder and emotion. It’s the choice to love another person really really well over the long haul. After years of marriage, while the romantic and emotive side of things is still a reality, it’s tempered by reality, familiarity, and sometimes fatigue. Let’s face it, its exhilarating but exhausting to operate on a romantic kind of emotional level for a long long time especially when there are children involved. Loving well doesn’t have to be romantic—I want to love lots of people well and I don’t want it to be romantic with them all—which is probably a good thing. But I do want to nurture the emotive side of my marriage relationship.

I think Christianity actually lends itself to that. Here’s why: Christianity uses the joy of a wedding to describe the consummation of the relationship between Christ and the church—the bride groom and the bride—at the end of the age as we know it. It’s the start of something really really good that gets increasingly better over time. Weddings are romantic. Everything is so fresh, so alive, so full of joy and future hope and love and emotion and fun and the expectation of fulfilled desire, etc. Now that’s romance! So marriage, and frankly all of life, lived under the Christian gospel actually points to what romance is and what it can be; the celebration of a life that flourishes over the long haul as it should. Furthermore, marriage lived under this gospel, will be full of grace, forbearance, and forgiveness, all of which lends itself to romance. It’s life giving to have someone say with total sincerity, “Hey, you screwed up but that’s okay. I mess up to and I love you anyway.” That can be said in a cheesy, or even false, way which stifles romance, friendship and love, but when said with integrity, it does something to someone. It’s life giving, which leads to deep emotional attachment.

Furthermore, marriage as it’s supposed to be, points to what our relationship with God is supposed to be. I believe that this theology lived out, over the long haul, can feed romance in a marriage because marriage is a pointer to God. So while we are far from perfect, it tells us that there’s a lot more to come and motivates me to discover it, to pursue it, to seek the wonder of it all at all costs in the life of my spouse. So while the freshness of new love may be absent after ten or twenty or thirty years of marriage, the challenge to love deeply, and plumb the depths of another person’s soul can always be fresh to the brave soul who wants that kind of joy. It will take a little work, and creativity, but it can happen. And, that is motivated by the future reality of Christ’s kingdom—the ultimate marriage. It’s thought provoking.

Here’s some things to create romance in a marriage. This will also work on the development of deep friendships that need not have all the bells and whistles of a marriage:

1. Look for the fresh and the new. To plumb the depths of another person’s soul and personality will always be new. There’s just too much there. Look for it. 

2. Be others absorbed, not self absorbed. This means you treat “the other” as primary, not secondary, in your life.

3. Laugh a lot. Look for the humor in the relationship and celebrate it. 

4. Be generous with praise and gratitude. No one likes to be critisized all the time. There’s not a person on the planet who is perfect or doesn’t struggle with things. Overlook it. Be forbearing and forgiving. 

5. Celebrate the past but look forward to, and plan for, the future. You can’t live in the past but you can celebrate the joy and beauty of the past! My experience is that when people just live in the past, its like an anchor around their present and future relationships. 

6. Own your stuff. Be aware of your issues and work on them. Quit blaming your stuff on others. Really! Stop it. It will kill a marriage or a friendship.

7. Get creative and try to surprise people. I’ve been able to do this over the course of my marriage and frankly, even as a young man I did it in dating relationships and even just ordinary friendships. Planning surprise outings, vacations, and get togethers that are creative is a lot of fun and builds deeply into a friendship. For the life of me, I don’t know why people don’t do this more. 

8. Keep your promises. If you say, “Hey, I’ll call you.” Then call. If you promise to do work around the house, do it. Integrity goes a long way towards building a marriage and a friendship.

You Gotta Get Along

People just don’t know how to get along. I mean, really! People don’t know how to talk to each other, don’t know how to be civil. Take, for example, the most recent tool for contlict—email. Some of the email messages people send out in the name of "caring" are horrific. I can’t imagine what they are thinking when they send them. But they do. Here’s a list of things to do to learn to get along. I’ll admit this is somewhat moralistic and doesn’t connect to the reason behind the reason for the list, but that’s for another post. You do the following, you’ll be better able to get along—with anybody!

Don’t send complaints to people via email—EVER! You’ll be more likely to be nice in a phone conversation or face to face and you’ll probably get better results too.

When you find yourself upset, ask, “How did I contribute to this?” If you are really brave, ask someone who knows you well to help you understand. But count the cost. If you are married, your spouse will be more than happy to tell you. I guarantee it.

Listen well. Don’t assume you know whats going on. You probably don’t. In fact, repeat back to others what you hear them saying. Most of us love to talk and we’re lousy at listening. More often than not people need to be cared for, empathized with, and heard. This takes a lot of maturity because some of the conflict we experience has little to do with our actions towards another and a lot to do with their perspective.

Realize that your perspective is your perspective and that’s it. You have only a part of the truth of what happened. This is hard to communicate to those who think that “they are right.”

People really do bad things. You do bad things. So be careful to not be overly judgmental. Another thought along these lines would be that people do what they do for reason. Try to figure it out and you'll often solve the conflict. 

Hang on to yourself. By that I mean that even people of faith, who believe that they are created in the image of God, have a uniqueness to them that reflects that image differently from anyone else. Some conflict has to do with differences with reference to that uniqueness, that others cannot reconcile with, and will invariably attach moral attributes to. Be careful here. And don’t read behind the lines. I'm not trying to hide anything in this sentence. Keep this in mind: sameness doesn’t equal intimacy. Think about that for a while. It could change your life. The conflicts I’ve often seen in church are not so much over issues of morality, as issues of culture or difference or preference.

Submission doesn’t mean subservience. By that I mean that being submissive to authority doesn’t mean you’ll do what those in authority tell you to do all the time. For example, the boss or your husband or your wife doesn’t have the right to tell you to do something wrong. Its not submission, biblical or otherwise, to do evil in the name of resolving conflict. For that reason, sometimes truly solving a conflict feels like conflict. Which leads to another thought….

Disrupt the false peace. You read it right. There is a peace that is a false peace. That peace isn’t peace at all but conflict disquised as peace. Disrupt it. If you are at a restaurant with a group of people and you order $20 worth of food and others order $40 worth of food and someone comes up with the bright idea to “split the tabe equally” then say, “Nope. I’ll pay $20 and that’s that.” You’ll have disrupted the false peace and maybe even created an argument but you’ve resolved a conflict. There are miriads of these kinds of examples.

If you are uptight with someone, go talk to them. Don’t go talk to someone else unless that person is needed to help you gain perspective. To bring someone else into the conflict is called Triangulation and its death. Run from it.

When talking to others say something like this, “Help me to understand the reason you….” Then listen. Nine out of ten times the conflict will be resolved.

If that doesn’t resolve it then say, “I notice….. and I feel…..I’d prefer….. Then you let them respond. By putting things in the “I” you’ve taken away much of the ugly attack that comes when people say, “You did….” This is tough to do and demands maturity. Good luck.

If they won’t negotiate a solution, or even acknowledge a problem, and you are in authority, then you use your authority to address the issue. If you have no authority to address the issue further, avoid escalation by holding firm to the scerenity prayer, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Lots of conflict is rooted so deep in people’s lives and cannot be resolved apart from an act of God. I’ve come to accept this in recent years.

Much of this comes straight out of the Bible. But there is a lot of common sense things that people can do to make relationships work. The bottom line is this, because Jesus resolved our deepest conflict—the conflict we have with a holy God--those of us who are Christians can too. That’s the bottom line. But for everyone else, these simple guidelines (which are coming off the top of my head at this writing and which I’ll update on occasion) can work quite nicely. Peace!

A Song for Lya--A Review

Just finished reading A Song for Lya by George R. R. Martin. It’s a 1973 Sci-Fi book about a couple of para normals (I think that’s what we call them today) who can read others thoughts, feelings, and past histories. They are not “normal” to use their vocabulary and they know it. They are registered Talents. As such, they have the capacity for deeper relational intimacy than a Normal. That’s a key part of the book. Relational intimacy is a huge theme in this book. It was given to me by a friend.

The book’s plot is about a group of humans on the planet of Shkeen somewhere in the universe. The Shkeen’s however, have a unique feature to their culture. They all commit suicide before they are fifty by means of a religion the humans called The Cult of the Union. Every Shkeen is a member of it. There are no heretics. They are Joined to the religion at forty and go to Final Union before age fifty. Missing out on Final Union is considered tragic. Final Union is consummated by submitting oneself to a parasite like creature called The Greeshka which, in the end, consumes the willing participant. The consummation completed, the Shkeen are in union with each other and with the universe in general and receive a universal feeling of love, good will, and understanding. The human authorities don’t mind Shkeen religion but some of the humans on the planet are now joining the religion and passing into Final Union. They call in the Talents to figure out why. That’s when things get interesting. I’ll not tell you how the book ends.

The book is fascinating. Their definition of morality is particularly interesting as their sense of righteousness insists that they love everyone. But, as the author states, “…they can’t do it, they’re too human…They wind up [for example] in monogamous relationships, because a really deep sex-sharing with one person is better than a million shallow physical things, in their culture. The ideal Shkeen would sex-share with everyone, with each of the unions being just as deep, but they can’t achieve that ideal.” The book is also a study on sex, and frankly, its shallowness as viewed by the west (my interpretation).

This book tugs at what we all want—intimacy, love, being understood and understanding, caring for one another, being happy for what fulfills ourselves and “the other”. It’s a pretty good book. It taps deep into human desire. But like all other religions, the Shkeen religion (and the one I think the author is advocating) is radically different from Christianity. Even in its Sci-Fi backdrop, the author couldn’t create something uniquely different from religion in general. For one thing, in the end, Final Union leads only to pantheism, where you are simply part of a greater whole—a body of nothingness which is something dream like, and relational, and loving, and caring. Its awful is to miss out on that. It is dark, lonely, unfulfilling—almost like hell without the punishment and fire parts. Interestingly enough, hell is described as outer darkness in the New Testament (Jude 6).

There’s also no resolution for their “immorality” however they define it. There is no atonement, no forgiveness, no resolution for the problem of evil, no judgment of evil, no righting of wrongs done. They become what they want to become through the Greeshka—the parasitic organism with no ability to think or feel—but apart from being consumed by it, that union, and the freedom and love that comes with it, doesn’t occur. It’s submitting to the Greeshka’s consumption and parasitic growth—it gets bigger as it consumes Shkeens—that brings relational wholeness and love.

I liked the book. But here is where Christianity and Shkeen religion diverge. In Christianity sin is dealt with by someone else. Sin is what keeps us from being everything we can be. Sin robs us of the our freedom—in fact it enslaves. In the Shkeen religion sin is present but frankly, never really addressed. There is no final judgment or escape from sin, there is no righting of all wrongs by a just and fair judge, there is just deep darkness and loneliness when Final Union is missed. Again, as in any other religion, its dependent on what you do to gain Final Union, whereas in Christianity, our union with God isn’t accomplished by something we do but by what Christ has done for us on the cross. Instead of consuming us, God in the person of Jesus comes to be consumed. Instead of becoming part of God, we enter what theologians call union with Christ through Gods Spirit, and worship a God who is much bigger than we are. Instead of something we do to gain great joy the joy comes from something God does for us, and from who he is. The celebration isn’t rooted in us joining to each other in some great Union—the Greeshka doesn’t think or live or interact, it just eats. But in Christianity, we are joined relationally to a God who at his root is love. Ironically, that union in Christianity is celebrated by eating and drinking of Jesus flesh and blood—also known as the Lords Supper, the Eucharist, or Communion (1 Cor 11:23-26).

I found the book intriguing. But there was no solution to the universal problem of evil, no recognition of the Holiness of God, and no sense that God is anything personal. But the idea that we can know, be known, and loved beyond our wildest imagination is compelling which is why the author wrote the book. Isn’t that what we want? To be fully known and fully loved and to do so with others. Only through the person of Jesus Christ will that actually take place. There is a great article in the NY Times August 21, 2013 entitled A Pact to Make the Heart Grow Fonder in the Fashion and Style section. Its about a couple that spent a year testing their love for one another. The relationship ended for a variety of reasons but it was a compelling compliment to the book.

For the record, sex played a big part in the authors attempt to explain intimacy. And interestingly enough, it proved faulty and incomplete. It makes me sad because there is so much more to love than sex. By the way, this is not an erotic book!