The Ability to Love

My grandson Ian, two years old, my one and only grandson, so far, was visiting briefly last week, and I took him to the zoo and we had a marvelous time.

I could not help but notice how above average he is. A bright and cheerful child, he throws only an occasional tantrum, and when he does, it does not do it half way!

Ian has taught me a great deal about love. Just by being a beautiful child, who looks so much, everyone says, like his grandfather…

Or perhaps I should say that Ian’s mother has taught me much about love. My older daughter, Tanya, who lives with Ian and her husband, Darrell, outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.

She, they, have taught me much about love. And I was not a fast learner.

I know enough about parenting to keep my mouth shut when I disapprove of something…for at least five minutes. And so it happened that Tanya and I had occasion over the last two years to discuss Ian’s upbringing.
I raised Tanya and my other children, on Dr. Spock. I knew Dr. Spock. We marched together to protest the Vietnam War. Ben Spock gave me advice on raising my children.

And Dr. Spock, author of the phenomenally best selling and influential volume called “Baby and Child Care” was very clear about some things.

From very early on, boundaries need to be set, children need to be encouraged to independence, and under no circumstances should babies sleep in their parents’ bed.

Tanya did not read Dr. Spock. When I started to observe her parenting practices, I could not figure out WHAT she was reading.

Ian was being breast-fed, certainly, which I knew had been reestablished as a healthy practice, but she said

she intended to breast feed for…years. Years?

And yes, contrary to Dr. Spock, Ian was sleeping in his parents’ bed. And Tanya had absolutely no intention of going back to work until her son was at least two years old.I learned, as I should have years ago, that all this is called Attachment Parenting.

Now I am not a pediatrician, nor am I a psychologist, and I try not to preach popular psychology, so I will not attempt to give you a technical definition of Attachment Parenting. I suspect some of you here this morning could do that much better than I.

But I’ll let the description I’ve given you from my own family stand. Attachment parenting seems to involve, well, attachment. The development of a healthy emotional attachment between parent and child.

People who write knowledgeably and perceptively about such things say things like this:

“Attachment occurs when a child has repeated experiences of feeling connected, understood, and protected.”

And: If parents the other hand are not mindful and emotionally present with the child, “the child will come to experience the world as an emotionally barren place.”

If parents are ambivalent and unreliable, “the child will come to experience the world as a place filled with uncertainty.”

And, those who have studied the matter continue: “Longitudinal data have proven that responsive parenting confers apparent personality strength.”

And, quote, “The emotional fate of children is inextricably bound to the ability of their parents to love one another—a skill that is falling into disrepair.”

And so I study the literature, and I study my grandson, and I reflect back on my own upbringing, and on my own parenting….

And it occurs to me that…Dr. Spock was wrong!

And, yes, it does cause me some discomfort to think that I was wrong, too. But I am convinced that I was, and I have to accept that and move on. No guilt, some regret, but then grace happens, and life gives us another chance: called grandchildren. I can support my daughter in Attachment parenting, in the skills and patterns that actually produce love.

Didn’t someone used to sing back in the seventies: “love is just another four letter word?” It is so powerful an idea, can have such powerful meaning, yet become so meaningless. Be tossed and flung around carelessly, coated with sugar, made into a meaningless abstraction.

It sometimes seems that we teeter close to that in church: into making love a meaningless abstraction.

We sing about it and proclaim it as an ideal, and then confuse it—love—with being nice, or with caring about people we give money to but don’t ever have to actually encounter,

or we listen to the minister explain that in our tradition, there are thee kinds of love, with appropriate Greek words,

the kind of love that manifests itself in community,
the kind of love that manifests itself in friendship

And erotic love, which we don’t talk about all that much in church.

But maybe we should.

And so we do in fact talk and sing quite a bit about love, but do we ever actually DO anything about it?

Yes, of course you manifest love in caring for one another where there is crisis or illness or a new baby, and in caring for the poor and marginalized of the community and the world,

And those are beautiful things, not to be by any means taken lightly.

Yet, I have been thinking, it is time we looked at love as if it were another one of our causes. You serve a lot of causes here, and you do it well, and you make a difference.

So, how about love?

And let me be not all over the place trying to advocate for all types of love at all times—but rather allow me to suggest that the ability to love can be taught, promulgated, measurably increased by certain skills and practices.

Now, if we want a loving society, filled with loving, emotionally healthy people,
If we believe that such a society would be more likely to care for the poor,

Care for the earth,

Reduce domestic violence, and violence of all sorts…

And seek peace rather than war…

If we believe that a better society of that sort would be significantly served by more love,

Then would we not want to make love a cause?

My own experience leads me to want to do exactly that…to make the teaching and support of those things that lead to emotionally healthy childhood… a cause.

My own experience. No only the marvelously positive experience I’m having with my grandson Ian, but the traumatic experience I had in my own childhood.

I told you a little about that a couple of weeks ago. The theme of my childhood, and sometimes it has felt—the theme of my life, could be taken from Hebrew scripture, where it says: “God is a longsuffering God, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the sins of the fathers upon the sons to the third and fourth generations.”

And by the way—if you run into any of those poor, mislead folks who are fired up in their anti-Semitism by Mel Gibson’s movie—do quote their own Bible to them, and point out that it clearly says that God will punish only to the third and fourth generation, and it’s been a lot longer than that since the crucifixion, so let’s get back to the original intention of God, whose nature is forgiveness and mercy. You might just win a convert.

My own interpretation of that passage about the sins of the parents being visited on the children for generations--is that this is not about what should be, but rather about what is. It’s a fact.

Parenting that produces insecure, emotionally disabled children who think the world is emotionally barren or uncertain will not easily go away in one generation.

I go back three generations in my own family’s stories of struggle. I think about the violence and emotional damage that I trace back to my Great grandmother.

She waved goodbye as her husband and son set out from Missouri on the Santa Fe trail in a wagon loaded with goods to sell at a handsome profit in New Mexico.

And after my great grandmother waved goodbye, she sent her brother to follow the wagon, at a good distance, and when the time was right, to murder her husband.

The time was right in Santa Fe. The murderer fled, careful not to show his face to the ten year old he left fatherless, my grandfather, ten years old, who had to make his way back over a thousand miles by himself.

My grandfather whom I remember as a sweet old man, but who I know from reliable aunt and uncle sources, beat my father regularly, demanded so much of his eldest son, and was so emotionally distant.

And then my father, a brilliant and charismatic man whom I miss very much, who nonetheless was as emotionally distant from me as I can imagine anyone being…my father who twice attempted to kill my mother, and who succeeded at killing himself…

Counting back to whatever deficient parenting practices my murderous great-grandmother must have had, I count myself as the fifth generation in this saga, and so have attempted to declare that the curse is lifted. That I will live a life of non-violence, seeking ever to be good.

And yet, I know what emotional damage has been done, and how hard I’ve had to work to compensate. How hard it has been for me to learn to love. How flawed my parenting was.

A character in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov utters the now famous line: “Fathers and teachers, I ponder, what is hell? I maintain it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

In my emotionally shut-down bringing up and into my adulthood, I have struggled to get out of hell—to know the joy of being able to love. .

I remember one of those seminars we did in the seventies, a sort of encounter group in which each of us was challenged to tell the rest of the group that we loved them.

I did. I knew I did. And I could say the words. But I went to the bottom of the class, forced to try over and over again to say it persuasively:

“I love you.”
Not even close, David.
“I love you.”
No, we don’t buy it.
“I love you!”
Not louder, David, truer!
“I love you.”

I finally got it. It was not easy.

Sometimes, I think this is why I do this specialized kind of ministry, this interim work—work in which it is generally accepted that the interim minister should NOT be loved, should not form an attachment to or with the congregation, should remain somewhat distant, should never be ingratiating nor strive to be popular—all this so that it will be easier for the congregation to attach to, bond with the new real, called and settled minister.

And I’m a natural.

But sometimes it gets old.

Sometimes I want to tell you that I really do love you, and to let you know that it’s alright to love me.

But that’s not the way I was brought up.

But it is the way my grandson is being brought up--The way he is being parented, the way he is growing in emotional health—THAT is becoming a cause for me, the cause of love.

So yes, I do believe that there is something we can DO about love. We can support the parents and children of this church, this community. In attachment parenting, in any good brand of parenting.

We can support values and practices in parenting that may sometimes be a bit of a stretch for progressive people…find ways to support parents spending more time with their kids.

Daycare is a liberal value, yet if it is not daycare of very high quality, well-funded with a great staff and little turnover, which describes almost no daycare in this country—if it is not those things, it is not suitable for a small child. And that would include the daycare we offer here at church, although lord knows we try.

If we were to make love a cause, we might have to challenge some progressive convictions—how very important it has been, the struggle for women to be treated equally in workplace. But if we make love a cause, we may have to consider how they can leave the workplace for motherhood for considerably longer than has been the norm among folks like us.

If we are to make love a cause, we might have to take a hard look at how church resources can be used to support parenting, religious education, and relationship counseling. How we can make volunteering a family activity, so that child care is less frequently needed. So families can do church together.

The Dostoevsky character calls to me, to us: “Fathers and teachers I ponder. What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

Let us remember...that we do not believe in hell.