Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths,
love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock
molten, yet dense and permanent.
Go down to your deep old heart, and lose sight of yourself.
And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently loved.
Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors.
For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depths
out of sight, in the deep living heart.
There are many different types of spirituality. For some of us ritual, prayer, and meditation are spiritual practices - or walking in nature, singing, playing music, or doing something creative. For some of us social action is a spiritual practice. For some of us, thoughts and ideas cause a sense of wonder - learning new things is part of this spirituality.
For instance, I was listening to an interview on Krista Tippett's public radio program "On Being." She was talking with a Jesuit monk who is also an astronomer, Brother Guy Consalmagno. He was talking about all the ways God can show us love. As an example, he told a story about how one rainy day his mother played rummy with him - not because she loved card games but as a way of showing her love for him. He says that he believes one way God shows love for us is providing us with a universe full of interesting things for us to discover. I loved that idea, and it made me smile for days.
When it comes to love, Krista Tippett quotes anthropologist Margaret Meade as saying that everyone should have three marriages, even if they’re all to the same person. The first marriage for romantic love - making whoopee, the second marriage is for family love - raising children or creating other types of family, and the third marriage is for companionship.
Anthropologist and brain scientist Helen Fisher studies the first phase of romantic love. She says “falling in love” evolved to help us overlook the faults of a prospective mate so that mating can actually occur. For some couples this leads to biological children and the species continuing. Helen Fisher says this stage of romantic love is strong enough to cause people to move, to leave behind their families, learn new languages.
However, as we all probably have experienced, this stage wears off. Helen Fisher says, in evolutionary terms, this is because it takes a lot of energy. If the relationship is able to evolve to include making family together, that’s one way you begin to go deeper than romantic love.
Learning to share responsibility, to work together, to back each other up - maturing together - you can learn a lot about and from one another. This can not only deepen and strengthen not only your relationship, it can also broaden your heart and your spiritual life
Now for some people when the falling in love stage wears off the relationship ends. Fisher says romantic relationships have been ending for at least 4 million years. In hunter-gatherer times one partner would simply pick up and leave, which was not such a big deal because the remaining parents lived in networks of interdependent relationships - all sorts of family and friends - who would help to raise any children from that union. She sees today’s problem not as divorce but as the loss of local community to support single parents.
However, Fisher says there’s a new type of family community developing that she calls “associations.” These are groups of friends and acquaintances, sort of like this congregation. People in these associations support one another, and the single people among them have a long time to check each other out, before they decide to get involved. That’s a good thing because you really get to know who the person is. Plus you have those interdependent relationships to support them in your relationship. Win-win.
This is even happening among older adults, who are entering into the companionship stage of relationship. Another anthropologist, Mary Catherine Bateson calls this stage “Active Wisdom.” She has a newish book about composing your life in this second phase of adulthood, which I’ll talk about in a service later this year.
For now, let me share what she has to say about relationships. Even though each of her parents, Margaret Meade and Gregory Bateson, had three marriages to different people, Mary Catherine Bateson has managed to have all three with one person - over 55 years of marriage.
“I’m working on a book, the title of which is Love Across Difference. And central to the thinking in that book is that love depends on a recognition of something in common, and the valuing of a difference. You don’t want someone just like yourself. You want someone enough like yourself so that you can learn new things from them.”
In another place in her interview, Mary Catherine Bateson says,
“… we think of marriage as a relationship between two mature people, hopefully, who love each other and settle in to constancy and continuity. And in fact, those two people are growing and changing all the time. I mean, just as you have to keep learning your infant from week to week because the infant is growing and discovering things, marriage requires a constant rhythm of adaptation between two people who are changing.”
Going deeper than love requires adaptation. Evolution. These adaptations and evolutions are about emotional growth, they can involve intellectual growth, and they can also involve inspiring one another to grow spiritually. And this, all of this, takes you deeper than love.
In what Mary Catherine Bateson says I hear ways we can apply our seven Unitarian Universalist principles to deepening spiritually in our relationships. Valuing the difference between you and another involves affirming and promoting the inherent worth and dignity of the other, as in the first principle. Appreciating their worth and dignity is both broader and deeper than love.
Accepting one another and encouraging each other to spiritual growth fits with our third principle. Acceptance and encouragement take you deeper than the first blushes of love and can be part of a truly fulfilling, well-rounded relationship.
If together you search for truth and meaning, as in our fourth principle, your love will evolve even more deeply. In these searches for truth and meaning, each partner must be free to find their own path, while still being responsible to the relationship. Too much freedom can dissolve the relationship. Too much responsibility can bind it.
Finally, I hear a lot about interdependence in what both Bateson and Fisher say. Interdependence is the cornerstone of our seventh principle. I hear in their reflection the evolutionary interdependence of the partners and their shared interdependence within a community of interconnected relationsships, or in an association of friends and/or family such as a congregation.
All of these are ways of have a faith-filled relationship in our tradition - appreciating and affirming your similarities and differences, accepting each other and encouraging each other to grow spiritually, searching for truth and meaning in ways both free and responsible, and becoming interdependent with one another as well as a network of friends.
Going deeper than love is the work of many years - whether it is in a family, friendship, or romantic relationship. In a sense, it means composing a life together. Going deeper than love requires commitment to growing together in ways that involve all of who we are. And that growth is part of the fulfilled and fulfilling life.
In composing a life together, each plays different tunes at different times, sometimes harmonizing and sometimes discordant, but always evolving, evolving, deeper than love. May your relationships grow in this way, bringing you challenge and joy throughout your life.