Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, October 24, 2021, at 8:00 & 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher
Compassion III:
Easy to Love, Hard to Love
“God,…increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and love.”
(Collect, Proper 25)
“With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back, I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble.” (Jeremiah 31: 7-9))
“Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy.
Those who sowed with tears will reap with songs of joy.” (Psalm 126:2)
We call on God in today’s opening prayer to increase our love. Goodness knows, we need it, and goodness knows, we know that this is what we need and what we desire. In fact, as I have argued, and I have heard none of you contradict me, love is the only thing we need and the only thing we desire. Of course, I’ll argue for you, we need food, shelter, clothing, a respectable living and many other quite desirable things. Sure, but all of these are predicated on a foundation of love and care.
“What the world needs now is love, sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of….Not just for some, but for everyone.” Remember that delightful ditty from the mid-sixties, sung by Jackie DeShannon.
And has it ever struck you as odd that this glorious commodity, which brings so much harmony, understanding, peace, and joy, can seem at times to be in such short supply? Why is that, I wonder? For there is plenty of it—love, that is. It’s like a bar advertising free drinks for life and nobody bothers to sidle up to it.
I can suggest a couple of reasons. Perhaps you can add to my list. First of all, it seems to be that everybody wants to be loved, but few of us want to do the loving. Even this reluctance to love (we could call it selfishness, the human condition), can stem from our own lousy feelings about ourselves. You know when you’re not feeling good, your motivation to be nice, even to family members, can reduce dramatically. We can, in other words, turn into bears. And many of us carry the marks of abuse and trauma and we just aren’t emotionally very healthy and so can’t be very loving towards others—since we aren’t very loving towards ourselves.
In other words, I have said that everybody wants to be loved, but the longer we nurse deep hurt and sorrow, even abandonment, the harder it may be even to want love, since we really believe that we don’t deserve love. Can there be anything sadder than this? But unfortunately, this seems to be the fate of many of us.
A second reason many of us may stay away from the fountain of love, that bar that serves free drinks for as long as we wish, is that we are stuck on stupid. That is, we have a pinched, judgmental view of our lives and those around us. I was in graduate school with a very bright man, whose father, in fact, was one of the inventors of television, and he said to me solemnly one day, “Steve, we are born, we live and we die…and that is that!” He said it with such conviction and vehemence that I have never forgotten it.
Sure, in one sense he was right. Looked at it coldly and clinically, we are born, we live and we die. But “Where’s the beef?” as the TV commercial used to wonder. Where’s the music, the color of our lives? As Auntie Mame says in that famous play, “Life’s a banquet and most sons of bitches are starving to death!”
People who fail to join in the general dance are missing out. Sure, I’m not saying that many of us do not have terrible burdens to bear; wounds too deep for words; and we are not being so cruel or unfeeling not to have heavy hearts for them, especially if they are unable to rally from their pain. I get it. Love’s deepest expression is compassion, our ability to identify with those who are the most unhappy.
For we saw last week that we cannot generate compassion until we can show some for ourselves, and we really cannot love until we know that we are loved. It’s sort of like a relay race. We must be given the baton of love in order to run with it to others.
Now that we have acknowledged that most of us want to be loved but are not so crazy about loving others, we ask ourselves the next big question? Why is that? Why do we find it hard sometimes to love? First, let’s be honest. Some people are just easier to love than others. Am I alone in thinking this? One of my favorite Cole Porter songs says it so beautifully:
For you’d be so easy to love
So easy to idolize all others above
So sweet to waken with
So nice to sit down to eggs and bacon with
We’d be so grand at the game
So carefree together that it does seem a shame
That you can’t see
Your future with me
‘Cause you’d be, oh, so easy to love
It’s easy to love those who are easy to love. But this song, a romantic song, sugarcoats the reality that the first blush of love is delightful. Check in on this same couple a short time later, and they have separated. Divorce is the name of hundreds of thousands of relationships. Forming a true partnership with another human being, putting two fallible, sinning human beings next to each other is, to put it mildly, a challenge.
You’d be so easy to love. Ok. But we all know that you’d be so hard to love as well. Very hard. Heartbreakingly hard. We can easily fall into the deep hole of self-recrimination if we are too hard on ourselves. After all, in whatever relational conflict we have had, it takes two to tango. There are two sides to most misunderstandings. It takes mutual commitment for both parties to understand each other fully, and a breakup is almost in part due to not having sufficient understanding to fully understand the other.
And there is a certain defiance and pride that keeps us from the very reconciliation and love that is our birthright.
I suppose the most reassuring insight I have been given when I am beating myself up for the thousand and one ways I am not loving enough is to realize that I am not creating more love, for love is always there, flowing in the universe with or without my participation. My only question is whether I am swimming in the ocean of love or remaining dry from my fears and hesitations.
For that ocean of love is the love of God.
O love, how deep, how broad, how high!
It fills the heart with ecstasy.
As Jonathan Edwards said, God’s love is an ocean without shores of bottom.
As John Paul Young, the Scottish-Australian pop singer sings:
Love is in the air, everywhere I look around
Love is in the air, every sight and every sound
Love is in the air, in the whisper of the tree
Love is in the air, in the thunder of the sea
Love is in the air, in the rising of the sun
Love is in the air, when the day is nearly done
How do we miss it? It is everywhere.
For God is love, and God is everywhere.
Amen.