Sermons of David Leonard
RELIGION AND ROMANCE
Rev. David Leonard
Valentine's Day is usually an occasion for talking about the theology of love
or about sex and marriage or some such-and I'm not planning to abandon these
motifs entirely-but I want to focus primarily this morning on romance.
Even with respect to its ordinary street usage as "romantic love," it is not something about which religion generally has very much to say, and not a great deal of what it does have to say is very useful or positive. The old Christian distinction among the three Greek words for love in the New Testament (eros, philia, and agape) ranks them hierarchically according to their religious meanings, rather than according to common usage and experience. Grossly translated, these refer to erotic love, filial love and self-giving (or "Christian") love respectively. Romantic love, which might be defined as the marriage of eros and filia (or of "eroticism" and "philanthropy!") is pretty far down the list, and is not usually regarded as especially deep or meaningful, even though our actual experience tells us otherwise. For a religion that affirms that the Word became flesh, Christianity tends not to value the flesh very highly.
The weird thing about this is that one of the most ancient literary expressions of romantic love is the Song of Solomon, one of the books of the Bible! Listen to this:
Your lips are like a scarlet thread,
and your mouth is lovely.
Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate
behind your veil.
Your two breasts are like two fawns,
twins of a gazelle,
that feed among the lilies.
You are all fair, my love;
there is no flaw in you.
And so on. Actually, the Song of Solomon is a collection of love poems, some of a man to a woman and some of a woman to a man-unless, of course, we assume they were in fact written by Solomon, in which case he must have gone both ways. It's said that he had a thousand concubines, which in my opinion negates his alleged wisdom, but still, he must have enjoyed quite a life!
Given the general neglect and sometime disdain of religion for matters of the flesh, you have to wonder how this writing ever made it into the Bible. Well, that's an interesting story. It seems that when the men who decided what was to be included in the Bible considered the Song of Solomon, they interpreted it in a highly allegorical fashion. The poems were taken as symbolizing the relationship of God to the people, or of the church to the Christ, and that we supposedly should interpret them "spiritually."
To which I can only respond by wondering how in the world anyone could get such lofty spiritual meanings out of that kind of stuff? I mean, what were they thinking? And this was way before Freud to boot! They must have been totally naive. Of course they were probably a bunch of old guys way past their prime also, but still! (At least, their affirmation of an allegorical method of interpretation legitimizes a symbolic interpretation of the Bible as a whole-something that some Fundamentalists seem to have forgotten.)
At any rate, the work was made a part of the Bible and we still have it to
excite us today. Martin Luther, incidentally, recognizing the Song of Solomon
for what it is, tried to get it tossed out of the Bible. He failed, and I'm
glad he did. On the other hand, he also wanted to get rid of Revelation, which
I think would have been a really good idea. Better love poems than hate poems,
I say!
The upshot of all this is that much of Western religion has come to understand
and to incorporate romantic love as merely symbolic of the ultimate form of
love that supposedly is the ideal. Thus all the talk about the "dear
Lord" (an oxymoron, really) and the experience of Saint Teresa and others
who really get off on religion.
But "romance" has a rather rich constellation of meanings. The
dictionary I consulted listed these, among others: (a) a narrative depicting
heroic or marvelous achievements, (b) the kind of life and world depicted in
such narratives, (c) a baseless, made-up story, usually full of exaggeration or
fanciful invention (I am aware of some religious applications of this meaning!)
and (d) a romantic spirit, sentiment, emotion or desire. A "romantic
experience" or "love affair" is seventh on the list!
What may tie all these meanings together is the element of emotional
extravagance elicited by a fanciful view and perception of the world. The
romantic experience is one in which we perceive and understand the world more
through feeling than through intellect.
What we call the Romantic Movement in European culture is a case in point. The art and music of the early nineteenth century expresses a depth of feeling that by comparison seems missing in the mathematical precision of, say, Baroque music, which is more a product of the Enlightenment than of anything else. The Enlightenment emphasized rationality, whereas Romanticism gloried in feeling. Actually, some musical pieces of the latter era are called "romances."
Our own liberal religion has roots in both movements. The Enlightenment influenced the development of both Unitarianism and Universalism-primarily by way of the philosophy of Deism, the view that the world is a great and complex machine, God being necessary only to start it in motion. Now that the world goes on its way, however, there seems to be no role for God, except perhaps for occasional maintenance.
What we don't always remember, however, is that our religion was also shaped by Romanticism, and this happened in two ways. First, the Transcendentalism of our Unitarian forebears (Emerson, Thoreau, et al.) molded the direction of American Unitarianism in a clearly measurable way. And, more to the point, Transcendentalism is widely understood as the American form of the Romantic Movement, and there is a direct connection between the two.
The second source of our Romantic heritage, however, was via the back door, so to speak, namely, by way of liberal Christianity. The founder of Christian liberalism was one Friedrich Schleiermacher, who made his important contribution during the early years of the nineteenth century in Germany. Both my father (who was as Methodist as they used to come) and I (who became a Unitarian Universalist) shared an appreciation for Schleiermacher's thought. And the essence of his theology is that religion is conditioned and transmitted through a modification of self-awareness, or feeling. To this day, I believe that religious meaning comes to us out of feeling and experience, more than from knowledge or truth, and if I am right, then religion itself might be understood as a kind of romance.
Consider how this might be so. First of all, we have our optimistic understanding of human nature. We affirm the worth of the individual person, and we buy into hopes for a better world, despite an apparent lack of progress. This might well be seen as "fanciful" or "extravagant." We call it idealism, and we believe a sense of idealism is important, but I think we have to acknowledge the Romantic element in it.
Second, our appreciation for music and art as experiences in their own right (and not just in service of the institutions of religion) broadens our sense of religious meaning and the scope of what we may legitimately understand as "spiritual." Feeling and experience are keys to religious meaning, and the fact that so many of us get energy from the experience of intellectual stimulation and exploration, for example, shows it.
Finally, religion ought to be a kind of adventure--not necessarily fighting our ways, as knights in shining armor, through a battleground of devils and angels, but an embracing of the totality of our experience. Religion is, I believe, more healthily a throwing ourselves into the business of life, rather than an escaping from it. There are indeed "dangers, toils and snares" out there-there are dangers, toils and snares within us!-but a sense of adventure (and romance) takes them on and welcomes the challenge. We need only the brains to avoid tilting at windmills and a degree of discipline and resolve to avoid getting caught up in crusades-religious, moral or political. Maybe no one will ever record the tale of our adventures, but a spirit of exploration of, and contribution to, the life of the world will give us deeper meaning.
But what does any of this have to do with Valentine's Day? Well, maybe not much, but I think we need to honor the flesh and blood of the world and put the carne (as in chili con carne, chili with flesh) back in incarnation. Religion at its best is neither escapist nor ethereal. It does not always aspire to a supposedly "higher" plane of existence. Flesh and blood are what we are. The pleasures, pains, temptations and passions of the flesh are realities of our lives. They are the material from which we create new meanings-new music, new art, new spirit, new selves. Religion in this sense is the marriage of idealism with the realities of flesh and blood. Romantic love may be fleeting (although that may only render it all the more precious), but a love of romance (as adventure and feeling) is as deep a flesh-and-blood and spiritual throwing ourselves into our lives as we could hope for. Exaggerated and fanciful? Perhaps. But at least we'll have something to write home about!