Our first reading this morning is the Grateful Dead song, Althea, from their 1980 album, Go To Heaven.

I told Althea I was feeling lost

Lacking in some direction

Althea told me upon scrutiny

my back might need some protection

I told Althea that treachery

was tearin me limb from limb

Althea told me: now cool down boy -

settle back easy Jim

You may be Saturday's child all grown

moving with a pinch of grace

You may be a clown in the burying ground

or just another pretty face

You may be the fate of Ophelia

sleeping and perchance to dream -

honest to the point of recklessness

self centered to the extreme

Ain't nobody messin with you but you

your friends are getting most concerned -

loose with the truth

maybe it's your fire

but baby...don't get burned

When the smoke has cleared, she said,

that's what she said to me:

You're gonna want a bed to lay your head

and a little sympathy

There are things you can replace

and others you cannot

The time has come to weigh those things

this space is getting hot -

you know this space is getting hot

I told Althea

I'm a roving sign -

that I was born to be a bachelor -

Althea told me: Ok that's fine -

So now I'm trying to catch her

Can't talk to me without talking to you

We're guilty of the same old thing

Talking a lot about less and less

And forgetting the love we bring

The Reverend Debra W. Haffner is the director of the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing. She is a Unitarian Universalist community minister, associated with the Unitarian Church in Westport, Connecticut. Haffner was the chief executive officer of SIECUS, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, from 1988 through May 2000. While at SIECUS, she created the declaration from which this reading is taken.

Sexuality is God's life-giving and life-fulfilling gift.  We come from diverse religious communities to recognize sexuality as central to our humanity and as integral to our spirituality.  We are speaking out against the pain, brokenness, oppression, and loss of meaning that many experience about their sexuality.

Our faith traditions celebrate the goodness of creation, including our bodies and our sexuality.  We sin when this sacred gift is abused or exploited.  However, the great promise of our traditions is love, healing, and restored relationships.

Our culture needs a sexual ethic focused on personal relationships and social justice rather than particular sexual acts.  All persons have the right and responsibility to lead sexual lives that express love, justice, mutuality, commitment, consent, and pleasure.  Grounded in respect for the body and for the vulnerability that intimacy brings, this ethic fosters physical, emotional, and spiritual health.  It accepts no double standards and applies to all persons, without regard to sex, gender, color, age, bodily condition, marital status, or sexual orientation…

 

How many of you have seen the movie, Spanglish? How many of you have read or seen The Bridges of Madison County? Those of you who said yes: how many of you were affected by the relationship between the main characters?

I just saw Spanglish last weekend. I’m not much of an Adam Sandler fan, but I thought he did a good job playing this dramatic role. Sandler plays John Clasky, who is a chef in southern California. He lives with his wife, Deborah, their two children, and his mother-in-law. They hire a Mexican woman named Flor to be their housekeeper. Flor has a daughter, Cristina, about the same age as John and Deborah’s daughter. Flor emigrated to the U.S. several years prior, to make a better life for her daughter. She had been working two jobs, day and evening, but now that Cristina is old enough to attract boys, Flor has to find a better-paying day job so she can be home in the evenings.

Flor turns out to be exactly what the Clasky family needs. John loves his children dearly, and Deborah does, too, but she doesn’t really know how to show it. She is especially troubled by her daughter, and generally ends up making things worse instead of better. Flor sees all this right away, and sets about restoring the young girl’s self-esteem.

The family spends the summer at a beach house in Malibu, and they convince Flor to come along, and to bring Cristina. Deborah sees everything in Cristina that she thinks her own daughter lacks, and begins to bond with her. This bothers Flor and John both.

John’s restaurant gets more and more popular, which worries him because he fears that success will change his relationships with his coworkers. Deborah has her own insecurities, and begins an affair with a real estate agent. She continues to lavish attention on Cristina, and even gets her a place in the private school where her kids go.

Flor finally has enough, and decides to quit her job, and to pull Cristina out of the private school. She arrives at the house shortly after Deborah has told John about the affair.

John and Flor…well, what do you think will happen? What would constitute a happy ending to this story?

John and Flor go to the restaurant, where he cooks a sumptuous meal for her, and they sit on a bench together… where they basically confess their love for each other, and they confess that it cannot go any further. John goes home to Deborah, and Flor breaks the news to Cristina—who is distraught at leaving the school, but ends up later writing on a college application essay that she is glad it worked out that way, because family is most important.

Is that the happy ending you thought of? I was surprised by it. It seemed like the filmmakers were setting us up to want John and Flor to end up together.

Mostly, I am surprised that a film produced in the United States would promote commitment to a long-term process over instant gratification.

I found myself comparing the movie Spanglish to The Bridges of Madison County, where Meryl Streep’s character falls in love with a handsome stranger played by Clint Eastwood, while her husband and children are off at the state fair. The two lovers spend a few days together, and they definitely have sex, but then he leaves and she stays behind. Her secret isn’t discovered until after her death, when her children read her journal.

Both of these films raise questions about love and sex and commitment and passion and where they all intersect.

Of course, sex is not required to have a fulfilling and wonderful life. John and Flor have a passionate love affair and they do not even kiss. Some people choose celibacy, for various reasons, and there are many human beings who are asexual—who do not experience sexual attraction to other people, or who feel no desire to act on such attraction. Asexuality is not a choice, it is more of an orientation, and our Unitarian Universalist Association just became the first major religious body to recognize asexuality as a normal human expression.

That said, and with apologies to anybody in the room who may be an asexual, most of us are powerfully affected, and at least occasionally confused, by love and sex and how they play out in our lives.

The Grateful Dead sang a lot about the complexity of love and sex. In our first reading, we heard:

I told Althea I'm a roving sign -

They also sang:

You told me goodbye

Jerry Garcia sang this story:

Bob Weir laments:

I tried to pretend it came to an end
Cause you weren't the woman I thought I once met.

But I can't deny that times have gone by
When I never had doubts or thoughts of regret
And I was a man when all this began
Who wouldn't think twice about being there yet.

The Grateful Dead sing about love the same way my friends talk about it. We all want it—we all need it—and we are all-too-often confounded by it.

We also recognize its power. Whether talking on the back porch, or singing for tens of thousands, we speak with words of awe and wonder.

Jerry Garcia sang these lyrics based on the true story of a man who robbed a jewelry store to get a diamond ring for his girlfriend, and shot several people in the process:

Well you know son you just can't figure,
first thing you know you're gonna pull that trigger
and it's no wonder your reason goes bad -
jelly roll will drive you stone mad

Of course, “jelly roll” is slang for sex. It is not only sex that is powerful, but love in general, as this verse demonstrates:

I am really moved by that concept: “gave the best we had to give--how much we’ll never know.” That’s what love is like. It makes us want to do things for those people we love. We don’t count the cost, we just do what is necessary because we love.

I think sex has power because it drives procreation. It has to be that powerful, so our various species continue to reproduce. It literally is the Spirit of Life, pulsing in our veins and pounding in our organs.

And it’s the same power in love. It’s the same primal instinct, the same feeling of the universe evolving from energy to matter to life to intelligence to loving, caring intelligence. Sex drives physical evolution and love inspires spiritual evolution. How often have you heard—or said—that somebody “makes me want to be a better person.” That feeling, that desire to be a better person, is the spirit of life, evolving in and through you.

Because love and sex are so powerful, we must be particularly concerned with how they are expressed. Power can be used for good or ill; it can be used or abused. So how do we use them for good? How do we express the loving, sexual parts of our selves without ending up holding a gun in a jewelry store?

There are a lot of different answers to that question. Many of them—perhaps most of them—have tried to categorize acts and behaviors. To over-simplify a little, one answer has been that “sex between one man and one woman, for the purpose of procreation, is good and all other sexual acts are bad.”

This is the kind of thinking that Debra Haffner is seeking to replace. She prefers that ethics and morals be based upon relationships, and not acts. A particular act cannot be judged good or bad by itself, but only within the context of a relationship.

If the people having sex are doing so in a “safe, sane and consensual” manner, then it is a good thing, and we should celebrate the joy it brings them. One obvious implication of this is that homosexuality is no longer considered a sin, or wrong. Because acts are morally neutral, it is only the circumstance around the act that can be judged. If two people of the same gender have safe, sane and consensual sex, it is a morally good thing. Whereas, if someone—of any sexual orientation—attempts a sexual act without the consent of the other person, or with someone who cannot give informed consent, such as a child or someone whose reasoning is impaired, then that is an immoral act.

Haffner’s relational morality seems to work for the obvious test cases. It is a little like the relational theology that many UUs espouse. Rather than a top-down, rules-based approach to life, they prefer a situational ethic, with each challenge met on its own terms. They attempt to find the sacred in each day and in each choice; they seek to find the win-win solution in every opportunity.

In fact, Unitarian Universalism has, in general, embraced relational morality. Along with the United Church of Christ, we are among the very few churches that affirm same-sex relationships. Over 400 of our congregations have completed the “Welcoming Congregation” program, which helps us understand and welcome bisexuals, gays, lesbians and transgendered persons. There are many UU ministers who are openly gay, lesbian or bisexual. Our congregations, ministers and associational leaders have been active in the movement to legalize same-sex marriage, both in state and federal governments.

However, there are some who oppose same-sex marriage, and not for the reasons you may suppose. They are not opposed to queer couples sharing their lives together, on the contrary, they are concerned that such couples are needlessly restricting themselves to an impoverished view of “straight” sexuality. To these people, queer life is more rich than mainstream heterosexuality. They object to the idea that, once a person is married, she or he may have sexual relations only with their spouse, and all other relationships must be non-sexual. Such critics point out that there are many other models that have worked in human experience. An occasional fling outside the two-person partnership, or an ongoing, “same time next year”-type of relationship, might be healthy models of human sexuality. Some suggest that three or more people can form committed, loving, sexual partnerships. Rather than seeking to legalize same-sex marriages, they want to raise the “queerness” quotient available to all relationships.

I have not asked her, but it seems that Haffner might agree that such relationships are moral. As long as they were consensual—meaning discussed and mutually agreed upon well before the actual act—such partnerships may well be healthy.

They may also be more typical than we assume. In Dr. Helen Fisher’s classic book, Anatomy of Love, she demonstrates that humans throughout history and across many cultures are less monogamous than “serial pair bonders with relationships on the side.”

I am not trying to normalize adultery here, and I know a number of couples who have been together for fifty years or longer. It’s just that human sexuality is more complex and varied than we are sometimes taught.

Haffner’s morality reflects and accommodates that variety. According to such a relational moral framework, Streep’s character in The Bridges of Madison County is not automatically “bad” for having sex with another person, nor is Sandler’s character more pure because he did not. Rather, they are judged by their relationships—by how they express love, justice, mutuality, commitment, consent, and pleasure with their partners and their children.

The other thing about relationships is that they are often painful. Love makes us vulnerable—every relationship is a mixture of joy and sadness, exhilaration and disappointment, anger and tenderness. Virtually every close relationship in which we ever participate will involve all of those emotions.

In the movie Spanglish, as Flor is leaving the Caskey house for the last time, John’s mother-in-law comments on the painful decision Flor has just made, saying:

I lived my life for myself; you live yours for your daughter. None of it works.

At first, I found that line to be sort of bitterly funny, and perhaps sadly true. Now, I understand it a little differently. I think “none of it works” means “none of us gets exactly what we want, wahen we want it.” None of us get all the benefits of a love relationship without the struggles and the sacrifices. That is the evolution taking place; the personal growth that makes us better people.

The Second Noble Truth in Buddhism is that suffering is caused by desire, specifically a desire that our circumstances be different. Having been raised on stories ending “happily ever after,” we may be disappointed when our own lives continue to include struggle. We suffer because we want our lives to be different than they are.

When Marshall Tucker sings, “heard it in a love song…can’t be wrong,” he means it to be ironic. In the song, he is leaving the woman he loves for “something greener on the other side of that hill”—which he knows does not exist, but he’s repeating to himself a love song’s promise of eternal exhilaration, of the first flush of new love lasting forever. Just like him, we sometimes buy into the love songs and the fairy tales and we want our lives to be different—and we may suffer because of it.

In both movies, the characters knew that they were living good lives. They knew that wanting something radically different would only lead to suffering. So they chose to taste

a bit of a different life, and chose to continue with the relationships that made them who they were.

They knew, like Althea in our first reading, there are things you can replace and others you cannot. So, it comes down to knowing what you can replace, and what you can’t. It’s the serenity prayer: grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Among the things that we cannot change are the facts that love and sex are complicated and very powerful, and that the best relationships are those that sustain us and challenge us to become better, more loving people. The best relationships are those in which the people involved give the best they have to give, how much they’ll never know.

The last Grateful Dead song for today contains the lyrics

I need a woman ‘bout twice my height

Maybe the spirits will know what to do. Maybe, even though we are confused about love and sex, the spirits can guide us. I do believe that the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Life pulsing in us all, can guide us, if we sit down and pray and listen to the still small voice within.

I can’t get around it, and I can’t run away:

I need a miracle every day.

Well, love is a miracle. And on those days where I witness the miracle of love in my life, things do go a lot better. When Becky or a family member or a friend or even a stranger does something loving, maybe not even to me, but to someone else which I witness in passing, my day feels better. I do need a miracle, every day.

Althea said,

Can’t talk to me,

without talking to you

We’re guilty of the same old thing

Talking a lot about less and less

And forgetting the love we bring.

We do bring love, each and every one of us. Though we often forget it, we do possess the miracle of love within ourselves.

We can give life to that miracle every day, every moment. We can bring love into the lives of those around us, and into our own lives, because we are all good people.

In sexual and nonsexual ways, we have the right and responsibility to lead lives that express love, justice, mutuality, commitment, consent, and pleasure. 

So may we be.