Not Pretty Everyday

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I was flattered when they asked.

I was twenty years old, already clear about my path to ministry, but I had never done a wedding before. I had preached for a few years already, and was good friends with the groom to be, and so I agreed.

They were a sweet couple and very much in love, and the planning went well. Now I was a long way off personally from my first marriage, and was still dating, exploring love.

One day the groom came to me with serious doubts. It was a simple case of anxiety, a simple case of coming up against the conflict, the deep questions inherent in any committed, covenanted relationship.

"What if she's not the one?" he asked.

And now, I know that I would assure him, ask skillful questions, get to the feelings underneath his question. I would take time and diffuse his anxiety, reassure him of the solidness and goodness of their love.

But at the ripe, wise age of twenty, with no experience and no training, I said, "Well I don't know, I think you have some thinking to do. Maybe you would know if she was the one."

What followed was some grueling soul searching for them both, he retreating for some alone time, she deeply worried about what might be going on inside his head.

Happily, he came to realize that his questions were good, that they were a part of their growing love. They married in a beautiful wedding, are happy together.

The first time I came to their house, I noticed this reading on their fridge. We incorporated it into their wedding, and many other couples I have worked with have used it in their weddings since then.

It's called, The Invitation, by Oriah Mountain Dreamer. It begins,

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.
It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain! I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.
...
I want to know if you can see beauty even when it's not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence.

In this month on beauty, I was struck by that last part.

None of us are pretty every day.

Far beyond any sense of physical beauty of any bad hair day, of any breakout, of anything exterior, none of us inside are pretty every day.

Our relationships are not easy every day. By design we will be pushed and pulled into hard times, into difficult moments where we face our fears, where we are invited to rise to meet newer and deeper levels of relationship.

And this is good, even though for many of us it is counter-intuitive.

Most of us want things to be pretty, to be smooth. We want to know joy and love and friendship.

But deeper and deeper love with our friends, with our beloveds with our families will mean that we will find ourselves in difficult moments, that we will find ourselves in conflict.

And how we react, how we either open to those hard times or close from them can determine not only whether or not we stay close friends, whether we stay married, whether we remain tightly woven with our families, but also whether or not we grow.

From our first breath, we are shaped by our closest of relationships, for many of us our family, for good and ill.

I do the cooking in our house, and just the other morning I was plating breakfasts for Lauren and Ben and myself when I heard over my shoulder,

"Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben! Ben! What are you doing?!" Lauren exclaimed.

"But I have a booger!" Ben protested.

"You may not use your brother's finger to pick your nose."

Ben is thick in the midst of his becoming, in these toddler years of boundary exploration, of figuring out the growing limits of his freedoms, learning what it means to love and live, to be a brother, a son, a person.

And so much of his learning right now is about Jack, about our growing family. So much of his learning will continue to be about Jack for the rest of his life.

So much of all of our learning right now is about this growing, changing dynamic of family. For Lauren and I how to stay connected to one another, how to continue to cultivate love in the stolen moments left over once babies and work are done. How to be sure to talk about more than schedules, to be more than complementary child care partners. We are learning so much.

This work of spiritual growth and transformation happens sometimes in worship, sometimes in prayer, sometimes in communion with what we hold most holy and most dear, but it also happens in community, in relationship, especially when we come up against resistance.

Buddhist teacher and writer, Pema Chodron, writes, "It's very helpful to realize that the emotions we have, the negativity and the positivity, are exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, fully alive."

This life, precisely as it is, this partnership, this family, this friendship, this brother and this finger, this moment is our path.

Opening to it, learning from it is our purpose.

In his book, "Wise Heart", Jack Kornfield tells this story.

Nelson, an earnest middle school teacher came to talk to me during a retreat. His mother had recently died, and he was in a struggle with Albert, his retired stepfather, over money... Albert had moved into Nelson's childhood home when Nelson had left for college. For eleven years Albert and Nelson had a cordial relationship, but now Nelson was outraged because his mother had left the house and much of her money to Albert. Every time he talked to his stepfather their conflict got worse. There was a great deal of blame, recrimination and bad feelings on both sides.

...As we sat together I asked him to sense what was present in his body and mind. Immediately, waves of grief and feelings of loss for his mother arose. As he wept, he felt a sense of abandonment. He could see how the feelings of abandonment intensified his depression and anxiety and exacerbated his conflict with his step father. I suggested that Nelson practice compassion and hold the whole experience of loss grief with kindness. After a time, I asked him to open his compassion to any others around him who might also be experiencing loss and grief.

First a friend whose dog had just died came to mind, and then a neighbor whose daughter had lost a child. Gradually a flood of others arose. He thought about the images of huddled tsunami victims...he remembered his cousin in Baltimore with leukemia. His pain became a part of the human pain, the losses carried by the world. Finally, even Albert, his stepfather, showed up. Nelson could feel how Albert was suffering from the loss of his wife, just as Nelson was missing his mother."

This was not the end of his work.

But it was the turning point. Holding in love and compassion himself and his situation, a new way of being opened.

Now some of us when we hear this story, think that whoever is playing the villain in any one of our current personal melodramas would do well to commit to such a practice.

It would be really good for my brother, partner, friend, it would be good for them to do this work.

But our whole lives could pass by waiting for other people to step up to the work of their living. Our whole lives could pass by without us doing the good, soul stretching work before us.

It is our work to do.

This becoming, this transforming.

It is the fullness of life and love, the fullness of growth and being.

Especially in our closest and most cherished relationships in our partnerships, hard times will come.

I have come to expect storms, moments of growing pains, generative conflict in my marriage.

I was not such a huge fan in the beginning, but I have learned to open to that first whiff of coming rain. Instead of closing off, of pulling back, of retreating, to acknowledge, however begrudgingly, the approaching opportunity for growth.

As it turns out how we react to the coming storms of generative conflict largely determines whether or not we will stay married.

Dr. John Gotman has even almost proven it.

Along with his research team he decided to interview hundreds of couples to find out if there were any common themes among those who made it, who stayed married and happy, and those who did not.

They began the research with all sorts of ideas commonly held true at the time about relationships. Maybe couples who fought less, or who used I statements would stay together. Maybe those who had the most in common, those who were most passionate, most deeply in love.

But as it turned out, recording and listening to fight after fight, heated discussion after heated discussion, it was the couples who listened to one another, who, even in the thick of conflict could hear one another whose partnership endured.

He gave an example of a couple in a frustrated conversation who remained open. They might be in an argument and say,

"Will you shut up and let me finish!"

"All right finish!"

"It makes me crazy that you are always late!"

Even though they are angry, they are still listening to one another.

In a couple who may be closed off a similar interaction could sound like,

"Will you shut up and let me finish!"

"Oh. I don't get to finish until you finish. Is that it?"

"Yeah!"

"Well that's just like your mother!"

"Oh, so my mother now?"

Escalation and contempt. Neither person is really there, is really open to the other.

Diane Sollee runs a clearinghouse of marriage research called Smart Marriages in Washington DC.

In compiling the results of years of marriage research, they found, and I find this fascinating, that all couples disagree about the same amount.

Even about the same kinds of stuff.

Money, kids, sex, others and time.

Others are who you're jealous of at the office other people who effect your relationship, and time is what you do with your weekends and vacations.

We all disagree the same amount about the same stuff, the question is how we disagree.

Rains come.

To all of us, in all our relationship.

The poet, Rainer Maria Rilke writes,

How shall I keep my soul
from touching yours? How shall I
lift it up beyond you to other things?
Ah, I would gladly hide it
in darkness with something lost
in some silent foreign place
that doesn't tremble when your deeps stir.
Yet whatever touches you and me
blends us together the way a bow's stroke
draws one voice from two strings.
Across what instrument are we stretched taut?
And what player holds us in his hand?
O sweet song

We are here to touch souls.

To mingle the details of our beings with one another.
To know and be known.

And this knowing, if we can open to it, if we can give ourselves over to it, can be our path.

This can be the not pretty every day beauty from which we source our lives.

For what is more breathtakingly beautiful than the whole complete truth of another human being, striving, fumbling, impossibly glorious and deeply flawed, true and whole.

May we know this beauty.

May we build lives of truth and openness, may we bear the whole truth of our selves to one another, risking all that we may be known.

May the smell of coming rain be welcome, may it be an invitation to our own becoming, and when the rains come, may we stand outside and feel the whole unadulterated truth of it.

May we forge relationships of depth, of transformation, relationships which grow with us, pushing us, pulling us into fuller being.

Amen.

Not Pretty Every Day from UU Church of Berkeley on Vimeo.