First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Color My World

Jean Toll and Gary Blegstad, winners of the 2006 service auction sermon topic, have asked me to address what they termed "the Mark and Kendyl Gibbons story." They are correct in their supposition that this is probably not a topic that I would be likely to choose myself for preaching. I suppose that all of ministry, including what I say in the pulpit, is informed by the minister’s life experience in all its dimensions, including the most personal. Yet in general those inner connections tend to be implicit, rather than specific, and I’m quite confident that my illustrious predecessors in the this pulpit, figures like Carl Storm, Ray Bragg, and John Dietrich, devoted little of their homiletic energy to personal anecdotes and self-disclosure. At the same time, I take seriously Emerson’s much-quoted observation that "What you are speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say." Any humanist minister, having no divine warrant of revelation for his or her preaching, must rest its credibility to some extent upon the example of his or her life; my wisdom is only as reliable as my own choices may demonstrate. Thus it is not unreasonable for those who might sometimes entertain my guidance to inquire of its practical results in my own case.

I could argue that our story, Mark’s and mine, is in some sense unremarkable; as Tolstoy dismissed happy families for being uninterestingly similar, so happy couples offer fewer dramatic possibilities for story telling. Our marriage has known only one shaping tragedy as we have moved through our lives from privilege to privilege. Yet here we are, after 33 years, and the world is not so plentifully supplied with either knowledge or models in this arena that any of us should scorn to make whatever contribution we may to the body of common knowledge. Certainly the two of us set out quite intentionally to make our lives and our family different from what either of us had observed growing up; a project endorsed by our generation, but one which has to some extent required that we invent the rules as we went along. I expect that any number of people in this room will recognize that quality in their own past and present relationships.

It began for us in Jane Baskin’s high school history class, in the town of Friendly, Maryland outside of Washington DC. Mark had landed there after the Catholic school authorities concluded, as they informed his parents, that "Mark does not appreciate the value of a Jesuit education." His willingness to give energy and attention only in classrooms where he felt that he was actually learning something seemed dangerous and glamorous to me; I was a long-time teacher’s pet who thrived on the moral order and structure of school, but often found myself not especially challenged by the intellectual content I was offered. Mrs. Baskin engaged both of us with her enthusiasm for American history; in the company of our academic peers, we thrived and excelled. Dating relationships within that small group of gifted students solidified fast; by the time I met him, Mark was already dating another free spirit – also a Unitarian; what are the odds? – so I settled into a convenient connection with the one other guy in our class who was both tall enough and smart enough to suit me. The four of us were much together, in clubs and on teams, and by the start of our senior year, Richard had transferred to a different high school, and I was taking an honors physics class solely for the sake of spending two hours of the school day in a lab together with Mark. As a startlingly precocious and reflective adolescent, I took our growing attachment to each other be a particularly intense case of what was referred to in the child development texts as puppy love. I enjoyed the high school romance of it, firm in the conviction that it could not be other than a kind of preface to the more serious and enduring relationships I would experience in the future. Yet I was deeply glad that this first love had a kind of authenticity and natural integrity; it seemed somehow larger to me than a lot of the petty, manipulative, self-seeking relational dramas that were being enacted among our classmates.

We graduated from high school together in the spring of 1972; you may or may not recall that that was one of the draft lottery summers. My own future was settled; I had been accepted early to the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and my parents, swallowing hard, were writing checks for tuition and dorms. Mark, at 18, the fourth of ten children, had no such expectations. When his birthday came up with the lottery number three, it was clear that he was going into the military, one way or another, and perhaps to Vietnam. In a bid for some degree of control over his destiny, he enlisted for a three year stint with a promise of army medical training. I had finished my UU religious education before the development of our formal About Your Sexuality program, but those same values had shaped my own emergent self-understanding; responsibility, first and foremost; within responsibility, honesty; within honesty, care; within care, freedom. After long and searching thought, I concluded it was unlikely that any future relationship would soon rise to the level of trusting comfort Mark and I had established; the chances were good I would have less to regret experimenting with him than with some arbitrary player to be named later. Despite this landmark in the deepening of our connection, I still accepted the assumption that time and distance and the difference in our circumstances would inevitably wither our young love, naturally making way for more complex, mature relationships in each of our lives. I was determined, at 17, not to be silly about this; to make it hurt as little as possible, no matter which of us it happened to first.

There were six golden autumn weeks after I was deposited in my Williamsburg dorm room before Mark reported for duty at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in mid-October. As often as he could commandeer a vehicle, he drove the three hours to see me, sometimes only for a few hours’ visit, and then back again. I was touched; it was comforting, in the newness of college life, to see his dear, familiar face. And then, as the winds of the tidewater grew colder, he was gone. Mail to the recruits at Fort Dix required the soldier’s social security number – I learned Mark’s better than I knew my own; I can recite it to this day. In the little basement kitchen of our dorm, I prepared care packages; from the campus mail drop I received some of the very few letters he has ever penned in his life. There are ten weeks of basic training before troops get their first leave; this remains the longest solid stretch of time we have ever been parted. Then, at Christmas break, came what I have always thought of as our "Clairol moment" – you have to be old enough to remember the hair color commercials with the strains of violin music and the couple running toward each other in slow motion through fields of waving wheat. Though in our case, it was actually a sea of faces at Union Station in Washington DC, where I, home for the holiday break, went with his brother to pick Mark up from the train from Fort Dix. While Geoff waited in the car, to avoid parking, I made my way through the crowds, and spotted my own true love at the far other end of that vast marble edifice. He saw me at the same moment, and in that long, breathless, unheeding rush through the mass of travelers, a new possibility opened up in my heart. Perhaps, unlikely as it was, unusual as it might be, just perhaps, this was in fact the real thing, all the marbles, right here, the gold ring already in our hands.

It was a daring thought, which we would explore gingerly at first over the next several months, turning it around and around, examining the possibilities. The sensible thing, of course, would have been to plan to get married when I graduated from college, and Mark was discharged from the army. At that point, I knew, I was headed to seminary in Chicago; he could start his delayed education there, and everything would work out nicely. No one would be surprised, there would be a silent, collective sigh of relief if I had managed not to get pregnant in the meantime; all very orderly and predictable. The only problem was my own irrational prejudice as a budding liturgist that the celebration of a commitment ought to take place when the commitment was actually being made; that, and our mutual impatience with parental protocols that seemed increasingly irrelevant to the life we were envisioning together. By March I was wearing an engagement ring; by May my parents had warily consented to continue paying my college tuition if I would complete my undergraduate education after the wedding – something that I was fully determined to do, with or without their aid.

And so, on a warm August evening following my freshman year in college, as dusk settled in the cinderblock sanctuary of the Unitarian Universalist church my parents helped to build, by the authority of my childhood minister and with the blessing of a radical young priest we both approved, we lighted our unity candle, and made those ancient, unflinching promises of love and honor. Mark had just turned twenty; I was eighteen. Of course we had no way of knowing at that moment exactly what the future held for us, but I believed then, and I believe now, that we knew what we were doing; indeed, I think now that we were wiser even than we knew.

We had a ten-day honeymoon, after which I returned to Williamsburg, and Mark was stationed at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, where he was able to work a ten-day sequence and then have a four day leave. This schedule enabled me to focus on my classes for ten days, and then have those leave days mostly free to rejoice in his presence. Two years flew by; Mark received his honorable discharge in October, I completed my undergraduate requirements in early December, we celebrated Christmas with our families, and arrived in Chicago with our U-Haul van in the midst of January’s below-zero wind chill. I started seminary immediately – the last entering student in the last class to receive total tuition reimbursement – and Mark went to work for the University of Chicago food service and registered for his first undergraduate classes. At last we were not only married, but sharing a small married student apartment. Within six months my sister, having dropped out of college and unsure how to proceed, arrived to stay with us, and the following year my brother began his own undergraduate work at the University. We moved into a larger staff apartment, where not only my siblings but assorted of Mark’s brothers and other friends encamped from time to time. For my parish internship year, we left them in charge of the Chicago apartment, and lived with his parents and the younger siblings still at home in Virginia, while I served at the Fairfax church in Oakton. Less certain than I was of what he wanted for his future, Mark worked a variety of jobs, primarily in food service management, freeing me to concentrate on completing my training for ministry. Throughout these years, we were scrupulously careful with birth control; the challenges of education, financial self-sufficiency, and our families of origin was a rich enough brew; we did not need to add a baby into the mix.

In 1980 I graduated from Meadville/Lombard Theological School, and in the same cinderblock sanctuary where we had been married, was ordained to the Unitarian Universalist ministry. The UUA having judged me a bit too unseasoned to send forth upon a congregation at that point – I was all of 25 years old – we settled back in the DC area to wait while I acquired a bit of non-academic life experience. But the UUA’s judgment not withstanding, opportunities for ministry presented themselves. I was invited to preach for a newly forming congregation not far from where we were living, and Mark, who had not connected to the gothic university Unitarian church in Chicago, found this group appealing. Together, we would be part of nurturing the Accotink Unitarian Universalist congregation through the first three years of its existence, with Mark on the board, and me leading assorted programs and services, conscientiously trying NOT to fall into becoming the community’s minister by default. It was a special moment, with a very special group of people, and that experience cemented our ability to function together in congregational life in our distinct roles. It has been clear to me from the very beginning that I can neither take responsibility for his spiritual life and be Mark’s minister, nor make his choices a function of my professional responsibilities. My usual response when people have asked – often in the assumption that this must be how I came to a clergy role – "Oh, and is your husband a minister too?" has been that one in the family is enough, thanks. I do know clergy couples who make this shared vocation work well, and that’s a wonderful thing, but my own early ingrained feminist independence still wants a career the success or failure of which lies in my own hands. As well as a marriage that is a refuge from the stresses and challenges of that career, not a factor in them. Three years later, when I was called to the DuPage Unitarian Universalist Church in Naperville, Illinois, we parted from our Virginia friends with real sadness. They gave us a friendship quilt, and we remember them fondly and with gratitude.

In Naperville, my ministerial vocation began to unfold in earnest. Mark found himself moving from a skilled and eager user of computers in his food service work, to becoming a technology specialist in his own right. I had promised my new congregation two full years before they would be called upon to implement the maternity leave provisions in my letter of agreement, and I was aware that there were many pairs of knitting needles poised at the ready, eagerly waiting for an announcement. At the end of that two years, with a contract on our first home purchase in place, after twelve years of marriage, Mark and I joyfully threw away all our carefully implemented mechanisms of birth control, and prepared to begin our own family. I will not bore you with the details of thirteen years of increasingly intrusive and distressing medical interventions in our quest for fertility, as most of you are aware, it’s a deeply difficult process, and in our case none of it ever worked. More than one person has said to me over the years that "No one who touches as many lives as you do can be called barren," and I acknowledge with great thankfulness the extent to which that is true, but there is another dimension in which it helps not at all. It was somewhat difficult as our age mates had their children, but at that point we were still hopeful. I thought the loss would lessen as the years went by, but now that our peers are looking forward to grandchildren, I find that there are always new poignancies to be faced.

For nine of our fifteen years in Naperville, we shared a home with my best friend and her husband and two children, one of whom is my god-daughter. Being a part of their growing up was some solace to our heart-hunger, and leaving that unconventional family was one of the difficult aspects of accepting the call to this congregation nine years ago. Yet the children we had moved in with were teenagers by then, and young adults now; active parenthood, however longed-for, can be only a limited era in a fully realized life. And though we did not suspect it, with our move to Minneapolis, a new chapter of family was about to unfold for us. The afternoon before my November installation celebration here at the First Unitarian Society, we received a phone call that Mark’s mother had died quite suddenly. Over the course of the following year, it became clear that his father could not safely be left to manage alone in their Birmingham home; the next spring, he came to stay with us. For two years we made Tom part of our home and family, until his medical needs required constant attention, and he moved to the care facility across the street from us. It was a time of sweet reconnection, and after he died peacefully in Mark’s presence in the September of 2002, we were grateful to have had the opportunity to share his final years. It is clear to me that our childlessness has made us available for our families, our friends, our communities, and our work, in ways that would not have been the case had we had responsibilities to our own kids. Moreover, however unwillingly, we have had the ultimate environmental impact; not replacing ourselves in the population curve beats driving a Prius by orders of magnitude.

It also brings us back to the place we began, facing the journey of life together. Marriage, I believe, is a vocation; happiness is its by-product, the purpose of the institution is to offer a path of spiritual deepening and growth, which is by no means always happy. We chose one another, I think, because of the way each of us reflected back what we knew the other had the potential to become; because of the way we saw ourselves through each other’s eyes. You make that choice, I take it, on something close akin to faith, trusting that what is demanded of you as the years unfold will call you to your better self; that your own faults will summon something wiser and kinder than would else grow in your beloved. We become who we might be by trying to be as good as those who love us believe us to be. I know that all my weaknesses and vanities, all my pride and judgment, all that is false and foolish in me floresces as if under black light in the intensity of my hope to be the kind of person I want Mark to be married to. I also know that it takes two whole persons to build authentic intimacy; that I must be about the business of my own self worth and my own work in the world before I turn to him for validation. We learn to see each other, as Rilke advises, "whole against a wide sky," and rejoice in our distinct identities as much as in our bedrock connections.

Love, John Denver suggest, might be a lot of things; an open door, a shelter from the storm, comfort, conflict, holding on, letting go. It has been for us all of these, and more – everything, and a power we scarcely know how to name. We have had our portion of the one-and-only moments, Mark and I, yet our home and our hearts have always had space for others, and our lives have been immeasurably enriched by those with whom we have shared them. It is stunning to think that we have been about this business of marriage for 34 years come August; I so often feel that I am just beginning to understand what it means, and how to go about it. You might say it came easily, all those years ago, and so it did, but we earn it again every day in risk and forbearance, in respect and discovery and the practice of tenderness. You might say too that we have been denied one of life’s great gifts, and I would not argue, only affirm that we have also been generously blessed in so many ways. In the end there is only gratitude, for what we have been to each other, for what we have shared; for the road we have traveled together, and how it has shaped us; for the work and love we have been able to give forth into the world, because of our trust and sustenance in one another; for the continuing hope of love that even now, still colors our world.

The Landscape of Love

Do not believe them. Do not believe what strangers

And casual tourists, moored a night and a day

In some snug, sunny, April-sheltering bay

(Along the coast and guarded from great dangers)

Tattle to friends when ignorant they return.

Love is no lotus island, endlessly

Washed with a summer ocean; no Capri,

But a huge landscape, perilous and stern.

More poplared than the nations to the north,

More bird-beguiled, stream-haunted, but the ground

Shakes underfoot. Incessant thunders sound,

Winds shake the trees, and tides run back and forth

And tempests winter there, and flood and frost

In which too many a traveler is lost.

None knows this country save the colonist,

His homestead planted. He alone has seen

The hidden groves unconquerably green,

The secret mountains steepling through the mist.

Each his own discovery. No chart

Has pointed him past chasm, bog, quicksand,

Earthquake, mirage, into his chosen land;

Only the steadfast compass of the heart.

Turn a deaf ear then on the traveler who,

Speaking a foreign tongue has never stood

Upon love’s hills, or in a holy wood

Sung incantations, but having bought a few

Postcards and trinkets at some cheap bazaar,

Cries, "Thus and thus the god’s dominions are!"

What Any Lover Learns Archibald MacLeish

Water is heavy silver over stone.

Water is heavy silver over stone's

Refusal. It does not fall. It fills. It flows

Every crevice, every fault of the stone,

Every hollow. River does not run.

River presses its heavy silver self

Down into stone and stone refuses.

What runs,

Swirling and leaping into sun, is stone's

Refusal of the river, not the river.

from Gift from the Sea Anne Morrow Lindberg

We all wish to be loved alone. "Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me," runs the old popular song. Perhaps, as Auden says in his poem, this is a fundamental error in humankind:

For the error bred in the bone

Of each woman and each man

Craves what it cannot have,

Not universal love

But to be loved alone.

Is it such a sin? In discussing this verse with an Indian philosopher, I had an illuminating answer. "It is alright to wish to be loved alone," he said, "mutuality is the essence of love. There cannot be others in mutuality. It is only in the time-sense that it is wrong. It is when we desire continuity of being loved alone that we go wrong. For not only do we insist on believing romantically in the "one-and-only" – the one-and-only love, the one-and-only mate, the one-and-only mother, the one-and-only security – we wish the "one-and-only" to be permanent, ever-present and continuous. The desire for continuity of being-loved-alone seems to me "the error bred in the bone" of human nature. For "there is no one-and-only," as a friend of min once said in a similar discussion, "there are just one-and-only moments."

The one-and-only moments are justified. But one comes in the end to realize that there is no permanent pure-relationship and there should not be. It is not even something to be desired. The pure relationships is limited, in space and in time. Its essence implies exclusion. It excludes the rest of life, other relationships, other sides of personality, other responsibilities, other possibilities in the future. It excludes growth.

A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart’s. To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing. Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back – it does not matter which. Because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it.

Perfect poise on the beat is what gives good dancing its sense of ease, of timelessness, of the eternal. It is what Blake was speaking of when he wrote:

He who bends to himself a joy

Doth the winged life destroy.

But he who kisses a joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

The dancers who are perfectly in time never destroy "the winged life" in each other or themselves.

But how does one learn this technique of the dance? Why is it so difficult? What makes us hesitate and stumble? It is fear, I think, that makes one cling nostalgically to the last moment or clutch greedily toward the next. Fear destroys "the winged life." But how to exorcise it? It can only be exorcised by its opposite, love. When the heart is flooded with love there is no room in it for fear, for doubt, for hesitation. And it is this lack of fear that makes for the dance. When each partner loves so completely that he has forgotten to ask himself whether or not he is loved in return; when he only knows that he loves and is moving to its music – then, and then only, are two people able to dance perfectly in tune to the same rhythm.

But is this all to the relationship? This private pattern of two dancers perfectly in time? Should they not also be in tune with a larger rhythm, a natural swinging of the pendulum between sharing and solitude; between the intimate and the abstract; between the particular and the universal, the near and the far? And is it not the swinging of the pendulum between these opposite poles that makes a relationship nourishing? Yeats once said that the supreme experience of life was "to share profound thought, and then to touch." But it takes both.

Rainer Maria Rilke:

A togetherness between two people is an impossibility, and where it seems, nevertheless to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement which robs either one party or both of his fullest freedom and development. It is a question in marriage not of creating a quick community of spirit by tearing down and destroying all boundaries, but rather a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude. Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky. Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.