The Eternal Dance Of The Universe:
The Work Of Relationships

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Blacksburg, Virginia), February 11, 2007, by the Rev. Don Robert Johnson, a former Methodist minister, a former college chaplain, and Leader Emeritus of the Ethical Society of St. Louis. Rev Johnson will be in the pulpit twice a month during Rev. Brownlie’s sabbatical.

Readings

Hospitality to strangers is greater than reverence for the name of God.

Hebrew proverb

Love is the strength of the world and the weakness of too few.

Norma Bragg

To be is to be with.

Gabriel Marcel

In the beginning was relationship.

Martin Buber

Is there any topic discussed more widely and urgently than ‘relationships?’ And the relationships we have in mind are mostly interpersonal and often intimate. It is safe to say that we are preoccupied with the chemistry and the politics of personal interaction; meanwhile, we hope for little beyond the preservation of our own unique, autonomous integrity. Such is the poverty of our imaginations as we consider our possibilities. Only in relation to the human other is human being realized, and that relationship is properly one of care and of good will.

Robert Meagher

Relationships are matters of skill and art. We treat them as matters of convention, or worse.

Jean Toomer

“Maybe the journey is not so much a journey ahead, or a journey into space, but a journey into presence. The farthest place on earth to journey is into the presence of the person nearest to you.”

Nelle Morton

Preliminary evidence suggests trees communicate with one another by airborne chemicals. Experiments with Sitka willows over the past four years indicated that trees attacked by western tent caterpillars changed the quality of their leaves to make them less nutritious to insects, and prompted nearby willows not infected to do the same. This may show that plants emit signals that are received by other plants.

Kim McDonald

It seems a very strange thing that of all the forms of life on this planet, the human being–the most intelligent, the most powerful, the most capable of controlling its environment and of relative independence–is also the form of life which has the longest period of physical dependence and immaturity. No other creature has so evident and so prolonged a need for its parents; on no other creature is the lesson of family and of relationships so deeply impressed by its own necessities. However much we may at times resent our human interconnectedness, we must also admit that most if not all of the joy, color, and warmth of our lives comes through contact with other people. Is this interweaving of relationships a cruel doom, or the possibility of treasure multiplied?

D.M. Drooling

Sermon

The motif of the Eternal Dance of the Universe comes out of readings on Shiva and Sati in Brahma stories. These Hindu deity stories portray very human emotions with creation and relationship as integral–the relationships between people are the eternal dance of the universe. They keep the universe going!

The gods praised Shiva, hoping he would return to himself. “Light of all Lights, Shiva, you understand the impermanence of all things, in your form you are the Highest Being.

We tremble before your grief over the loss of Sati. Shiva! Let your anguish pass.

Shiva remembered his Highest Self that had always been the object of his meditations, but he could not bring his powers to focus. His grief was overwhelming.

At last Shiva opened his eyes. When he saw Brahma, he said, “Brahma, what am I to do?”

And Brahma said, “You must let your pain go. You must let your anguish go. Return to your True Being. In the whirling dance of the Universe you will find Sati again.

And Shiva said, “Brahma, I can do nothing. Brahma, stay with me until the pain passes, until I come up from the ocean of my loss. Do not leave me, Brahma, stay by me and give me comfort. And Brahma said, So shall it be.

Blind with suffering, Shiva took Brahma’s hand, and the two gods departed into the solitude of the mountains.

They walked until they came to a lake. It was surrounded by holy hermits who were meditating. The lake was quiet, clear, and peaceful. Shiva sat by the lake and looked into the waters. He saw fish swimming, darting in and out among the lotus stems.

It was beside the waters of this lake of peace that Shiva found his rest. He released himself from suffering and centered himself in the eternity of his True Being. So he remained in deep peace and meditation until Sati was reborn as Parvati, the daughter of Manaka, Queen of the Mountain.

And by her long sustained medications, Parvati was able to stir Shiva from his deep place of peace and bring Shiva to her, so that once again, they were united in love. And once again, the rebirth of the world was assured.

Retold by Diane Wolkstein,Parabola, Vol. V. No. 4

I remember discussing painting with an artist friend(Amy Panek). This resulted in my seeing the canvas and painting as a metaphor for relationships. In painting, overlapping is essential, relationship is essential. Lines pull one in, flowing inward, blending in the background, keeping the eye involved. Intentional errors are often necessary to build the relationships. Liberties, imagination, distortions create parts of the relationship, the painter chooses what relates by the painting process–color, line, etc. Every stroke relates to each other stroke, leading to this building of relationships – so it seems to me is life.

In painting, as in life, one has to be brave enough to begin, then you may start seeing for what you are looking. It has its ending. It too is terminal, one could have done more, but some closure is necessary.

Our relationships with others often become suspect, confusing, inauthentic. Why?

One young girl named Nan was also frustrated with this problem, so she wrote: Dear God,

I bet it is very hard for you to love all of everybody in the whole world. There are only 4 people in our family and I can never do it.

Or, maybe it is as Larry suggests:

Dear God, maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each so much if they had their own rooms. It works with my brother.

To begin with we have lost a language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other. We have an excellent vocabulary for technical subjects–but when it comes to meaningful interpersonal relations, our language is lost; we stumble and become isolated.

Husbands and wives with children between them     Sit in the subway: so I have seen them

One word only From station to station So much talk for. So close a relation.

Husbands and Wives, Miriam Hershenson

Russell Banks wrote in Firewood (from The Angel on the Roof):

One of the most difficult things to say to another person is, ‘I hope you love me for no good reason.’ It is what we all want, but rarely say to one another.
Much more genius is needed to make love than to command armies.

Ninon de Leaclas

But deep in us the resources exist for rich relationships:
When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it’s bottomless, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless

(Pema Chodron).

Following the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber’s lead, a whole new direction for human thought is the relationship I-It and the relationship I-Thou. The difference is between detachment and engagement.

In an I-It relationship we can acquire a certain kind of knowledge of other persons by treating them as detached objects, by watching and observing them, but without being personally concerned or moved by their affairs. To reach an I-Thou relationship, we must come out from the self, we must abandon the independence of the observer. We must be willing to reveal the self and to receive the revelation that only the other can give of the self. A true relationship between humans is always a moving relationship between moving beings. Human nature is always a reaction to its environment and experiences; it is always changing and therefore the I-Thou relationship is also always changing. We can enter this world only by willingness to surrender some of our own power and by taking from the other some part of her or his power.

In the I-thou relationship people are present to each other in an attitude of openness and selfgiving. To be with another person means that the I and the thou cease to be two isolated entities communicating by means of signs across an uninhabited no-person’s land. I-thou relationships pass over from dialectic to dialogue, from conversation and chatter to communion. When the other person becomes a thou for me, the relationship established is an end in itself. There is nothing beyond love and communion to which it is merely a means. Communion is creative in that it changes and enriches both partners. I become I, in the fullest sense, only when I encounter a thou. Apart from the mutual giving and intermingling of such relationships I remain an isolated ego, always a prey to loneliness and despair. -

Sam Keen, Gabriel Marcel, p. 29

This is the real meaning of authenticity as a person, that my exterior truly reflects my interior. It means I can be honest in the communication of my person to others. If I am willing to step out of the darkness of my prison, to expose the deepest part of me to another person, the result is almost always automatic and immediate; the other person feels empowered to reveal the self to me. Having heard of my secret and deep feelings, he or she is often given the courage to communicate their own.

The real problem for people in our day is preparatory to love itself, it is to become able to be loving – that is a goal gained only in proportion to how much one has become a person in one’s own right.

The capacity for loving presupposes self-awareness, self-feeling, and self-acceptance, as well as freedom. Loving is generally confused with dependence, but in fact you can only love in proportion to your capacity for independence. Love which is not freely given, but which comes out of need is not love.

We receive love not in proportion to our demands or sacrifices, or needs, but basically in proportion to our own capacity to love. Sam Keen suggests we should start by loving a tree, a cloud, a rock, and work up to loving persons.

Harry Stack Sullivan made the startling statement that a child cannot learn “to love anybody before preadolescence. You can get them to sound like it, to act so you can believe it.” But until the age of adolescence the capacity for awareness and affirmation of other persons has generally not matured enough for love. As an infant and child one is quite normally dependent on parents, and may in fact be very fond of them and like to be with them. But it is very healthy and relieving for parents, in reducing their tendency to assume for themselves complete importance in nature’s scheme for the child’s life, to note how much more spontaneous warmth and “care” the child shows in dealing with a teddy bear or doll or, later on, a real dog.

The bear or doll make no demands; the child can project into them all she likes, and she does not have to force the self beyond the degree of maturity to empathize with their needs.

The live dog is an intermediate step between the inanimate objects and human beings. Each step–from dependence, through dependability to interdependence–is a stage of the child’s maturing capacity for love, Rollo May says.

Many adults have never finished this process. It is no wonder. We move so quickly through life that there is no place where the steps from dependency to dependability to interdependence can happen for us.

The more feeling of a need to be satisfied that we have, the less we can perceive the other as a unique person. The more hungry we are to have another fill some deficit in us, the more we use them as a tool.

The tremendously spiritual and creative writer and poet, Rainer Maria Rilke describes this relationship beautifully:

“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 against the sky.”

And yet, we do benefit from intimacy with others. Joseph Donders states:

“They say one who is knocking at the door of another is not only looking for that one, and the one who opens so eagerly the door is not only longing for the one knocking. It is part of our quest for ourselves.” (p. 126)

And in speaking of friends he says:

“This is what friends do to each other, it is in this way we discover ourselves”. (p. 65)

Jerry Gillies in the book Friends: The Power and Potential of the Company You Keep includes a friendship credo which states:

“You are my friend. I choose you as a friend because you bring out in me things I like about myself. I feel comfortable and warm in your presence. My life is more interesting because you are there.

I don’t have to have you in my life to be happy, but I am very happy you are in my life. I know you care and you know I do, even if we are separated by time and space. You touch me in a way that no other human being does, and what flows between us is quite unique. You matter to me, and I take great pride and pleasure in knowing that I matter to you. The essence of we two together has to remain a feeling, never totally captured in words or thoughts. In some indescribable way we communicate that feeling to each other. And that is, most of all, why you are my friend.” (Friends, p. 22)

Antidotes to Toxic Relating (Adapted from unknown source)

Nourishment in human relationships is an ongoing process. The following questions compare attitudes and behavior patterns that are toxic to a relationship with those reflecting a more nourishing approach.

I end with these words from Wendell Berry in “Poetry and Marriage:The Use of Old Forms”:

Because the condition (of any relationship) is worldly and its meaning communal, no one party to it can be solely in charge. What you alone think it ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. It is going where the two of you–and time, life, history, and the world will take it. You do not know the road; you have committed your life to a way.

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