by Rev. Terry Davis
Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation
on February 8, 2015
The first time I heard Margaret Brown’s classic story The Runaway Bunny, was when I was working as a resident chaplain at Emory Hospital. During my year in this program, I participated in a weekly clinical pastoral education class with the other resident chaplains. At one of our classes, we were invited to watch the movie Wit.
For those of you unfamiliar with the film, it’s a story about the emotional and spiritual journey of a college English professor who is being treated with an aggressive and experimental form of chemotherapy for advanced ovarian cancer.
Our clinical pastoral education supervisor selected this movie so that we could observe and later discuss the effective and ineffective pastoral care skills we saw modeled by the doctors, interns, and nurses.
The English professor in the movie, Dr. Vivian Bearing, is an expert on the work of 17th century poet John Donne. Vivian has spent her entire professional life contemplating religion and death as literary motifs. She has the reputation for being a sharp-tongued, no-nonsense professor who has little interest in her students’ lives or sensitivity to their concerns.
Vivian’s oncologist and his team seem to be more focused on the research opportunity Vivian’s experimental cancer treatment provides than what she may be going through emotionally and spiritually. Vivian’s nurse engages Vivian in some heartfelt conversations about her fears, but ultimately can ease only a little the daily suffering Vivian is experiencing as a result of her brutal medical treatment.
In the last scene of the movie, as Vivian is lying weak and alone in her hospital room, her former graduate school professor and mentor pays her an unexpected visit. The professor sits next to Vivian on her bed and comforts her as Vivian – sick, dying, and full of regrets – weeps. She ends her visit by reading Vivian excerpts from The Runaway Bunny, a book she had purchased earlier in the day for her grandson.
The Runaway Bunny, as does Glenn’s reflection, offer us important messages about the power of love. Both seem to suggest that giving and receiving love and compassion is an integral part of our lives. Both seem to offer the observation that, no matter where life’s long and winding road may take us, love will follow us and find us if we open our hearts to it.
One possible condition that may be necessary for us to meet order to give and receive love seems to be something that Dr. Vivian Bearing learned too late. It seems that, in order to let love into our lives, we must be willing to risk experiencing losses of all kinds.
We may need to risk losing some of our intellectual pride. We may need to lose our freedom and independence. We may need to lose our protective exterior shell of perfectionism, of busyness, of endless good humor, or social isolation and expose our true selves and vulnerabilities, trusting that others will still love and accept us when they encounter our flaws.
In my sermon today, I’d like to explore with you the subject of love and its long and winding road. It seems that the invitation to love one another can be found throughout the world’s religions and among the world’s people. And, yet – as Glenn pointed out – loving isn’t easy. We can’t be sure that the people and animal companions we love won’t leave us and break our hearts – even if we offer them a proverbial carrot. And, we can’t be sure how we’ll feel about the ones we love now in another month, another year or another ten years.
How will we manage to hang in there through the tough times, the dull times and the uncertain times? In thinking about the world’s religions, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that all put love at the center of their faith. Perhaps that’s because love is what the Dali Lama calls “the supreme emotion.” The Encyclopedia of Love in World Religions, Vol. 1, Yudit K. Greenberg, ed.[ref](Santa Barbara, CA, ABC-CLIO: 2008), p. 1.[/ref] He says that love is the one thing that frees others from our judgment and frees us from our self-centeredness. He writes:
When we act out of concern for others, our behavior toward them is automatically positive. This is because we have no room for suspicion when our hearts are filled with love. It is as if an inner door is opened, allowing us to reach out. Having concern for others breaks down the very barriers which inhibit healthy interaction with others . . . To the extent that we are able to open this inner door, we experience a sense of liberation from our habitual preoccupation with self.[ref]Ibid.[/ref]
Similar to the Dali Lama’s belief that practicing love and compassion leads to freedom and connection, Mother Teresa believed that love saves us from spiritual impoverishment. She wrote:
The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty – it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.”
In our own Unitarian Universalist faith, our Second Principle reminds us that love is experienced and expressed as “justice, equity and compassion in human relations.” Unitarian Universalist minister Rev. Emily Gage of First Unity Temple in Chicago writes:
Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations points us toward something beyond inherent worth and dignity. It points us to the larger community. It gets at collective responsibility. It reminds us that treating people as human beings is not simply something we do one-on-one, but something that has systemic implications and can inform our entire cultural way of being.
Compassion is something that we can easily act on individually. We can demonstrate openness, give people respect, and treat people with kindness on our own. But we need one another to achieve equity and justice.
In other words, I think what Rev. Gage is suggesting is that the Second Principle is saying is that love is not just a personal experience – it’s also a social obligation.
Real love requires us to speak and act on behalf of those who are not being treated with love. If we are intentional about living the values of our faith, then we can’t keep love confined to our own personal relationships. Real love is designed to be given away – radically and freely – to all people . . . especially to those who are suffering.
It’s how we liberate ourselves from the oppression of a self-centered life, says the Dali Lama. It’s how we feed ourselves spiritually and feed a society that craves spiritual nourishment, says Mother Teresa.
I know I’m not telling you anything terribly new about the centrality of giving and receiving love in a spirituality-centered life. And, yet, if love is so important, why can it be so difficult to for us to practice it? Why do we sometimes slam our inner doors shut and refuse to let love come out? After frustrations, disappointments and even intense suffering, what brings us around to trying love again?
Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s classic poem, which Glenn quoted from in his reflection, may offer some clues. Tennyson wrote the poem 1849 in memory of a dear friend and fellow poet who was engaged to his sister and died suddenly at age 22 of a brain hemorrhage. Tennyson’s grief was so great, it took him 17 years to compose it. Elsewhere in the poem, its lines reveal his ongoing sadness, even as he moved on with his life.
Yet Tennyson’s words also reveal that, although the pain following the loss of love is, has been nearly unbearable for him, he doesn’t envy those who live a love-free existence. Instead, he thinks that those persons who avoid the risks of loving live a passive and unexplored existence – much like the English bird known as the linnet that lives its life in a cage, accepts its captivity, and never experiences the joy of being set free in the woods.
Tennyson also doesn’t envy those who skip out on the responsibilities of love so that they can do whatever they please. Nor does he think much of those persons who consider themselves blessed because they’ve escaped the heartbreak of love.
Tennyson believes that people who avoid love or think they’re better off without it are living life without a conscience. And, he thinks they’re stagnating.
Ultimately, it seems that Tennyson’s poem suggests that the experience of loving someone outweighs the sorrow that may follow because to love is to live. He reminds us that, without the pain that comes with the joy of love, we really can’t know what it means to be human.
Here are his words:
I envy not in any moods
The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods:
I envy not the beast that takes
His license in the field of time,
Unfettered by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;
Nor, what may count itself as blest,
The heart that never plighted troth
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
Nor any want-begotten rest.
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
In thinking about Tennyson’s poem and the beauty and pain of love, I couldn’t help but recall a married couple that I served when I was a nursing home chaplain almost ten years ago.
Their names were Joe and Margaret. Joe was 85 and Margaret was 83. Margaret had suffered a severe stroke that left her partially paralyzed, her speech compromised, and unable to dress, walk or feed herself.
I learned that Margaret and Joe met right before he left to serve in World War II.
She was only 18 and Baptist. He was 20 and Jewish. They would take walks together in a park in Decatur near Margaret’s home. They fell in love and, after Joe returned from the war, they got married and raised three children.
When I met the two of them, Joe was living alone in their home, which was about 30 minutes from the nursing facility. Bent over with age, Joe was nevertheless driving from their house to visit Margaret. He would stay with his wife all day.
What was even more remarkable was that Joe had been doing this nearly every day for the entire seven years that Margaret had been living at the nursing facility.
I visited Joe and Margaret often, at Margaret’s insistence. And during my times with them, I witnessed a level of love and care that has stuck with me to this day.
Each morning, Joe would arrive at the nursing home with his newspaper and a sandwich and yogurt for his lunch. He would bring a cassette tape for Margaret that had some of her favorite Baptist hymns recorded on it. And, he would read to her from the Bible every afternoon, even though Margaret laughed and told me that he “didn’t believe a word of it.”
Joe insisted on feeding Margaret her meals himself rather than having the nurses help. He would lift forkfuls of food to her mouth with his shaking hand. He would periodically miss, and Margaret would laugh as he wiped her chin with a damp washcloth. Joe would comb Margaret’s hair, and brush her teeth. He helped her change into her nightgown in the evening before leaving for the night.
The love between Joe and Margaret was so tender and so real, it moved me to tears. From our conversations, I knew that they had dealt with many challenges in their lives . . . including the rejection they initially experienced because of their inter-faith marriage. And, yet, on their long and winding road together, they managed to keep their love for each other at the center.
In the movie Wit, as Professor Vivian Bearing nears the end of her life, she comes to regret her insensitivity to others. She realizes she should have been kinder to more people. In her time of greatest need, Vivian ultimately learns that human compassion is of more profound importance than intellectual wit. Love, it seems, had the last word in her life.
As Joe and Margaret neared the end of their lives . . . as Alfred, Lord Tennyson grieved the loss of his beloved friend . . . as Glenn took a second chance and married the love of his life . . . and as the little bunny decided not to run away but stay with its parents after all . . . I can’t also help but think that for each of them love had, (or may soon have) the last word.
For each of them, love was ultimately a source of sorrow and delight. It was hopeful and it was devastating. It was freeing. It was inescapable. It was steady. It was unpredictable. It was living.
As we go from here, may you and I keep finding the courage to love. And by doing so, may we find that we are indeed incredibly alive and truly living.
May it be so. Amen.