MonFeb152010
Scripture: MATTHEW 17:1-8
Valentine's Day
When I was in high school—a boys’ school—there was a guy named Tom Robertson whom I’ll never forget. Actually, that’s not true. Tom I could forget. But he had a cousin named Nan who came to visit him once. And her I will never forget! She was, to this day, I think, the most beautiful girl or woman I have ever seen. When she walked into the dining room there, all heads turned to watch her. The first time I saw her, I actually thought I was going to faint! I could feel the blood leaving my head and I started to think I was going to keel over in a swoon. That’s the only time that’s happened to me in my entire life. I was in love!
Or so I thought. Actually I never exchanged a single word with her. I didn’t know the slightest thing about her—she could have had lots of disgusting habits, for all I knew. I was just smitten by this incredibly powerful attraction. Without any real sense of who she was, I would have followed her anywhere.
Maybe you’ve experienced something like this yourself. Maybe you’re experiencing it now with someone you know, or see on the street. It’s one of life’s most wonderful, most giddy feelings. That breathless sensation is a kind of bliss, one of the great highs of life.
You may remember, a number of years ago, the novel and movie version of The Bridges of Madison County. It’s a fascinating, turgid depiction of two people who meet in middle age and fall passionately for each other. They meet one day when her husband and children are away, and it’s just as though the universe made them for each other. They’re seemingly transported to some other dimension by the power of their—what?
Their what? What is it that happens to them on that hot, dusty August day in Iowa? Do we say that they fall in love? Do we say they’re infatuated with each other? Is this a romance, a fantasy?
It’s hard to say. Maybe it is love. But I must say, I wonder. Like me with that high school knockout, I wonder if that’s what love is. I wonder if love is that unbelievable intoxication that most of us have had, or whether love is something else again.
Some years ago, The New England Journal of Medicine carried a little piece by a psychologist named Jules Older suggesting that we don’t really have a good word for describing the ecstasy of that kind of experience. “I’ve believed for some years,” he writes, “that the lack of a descriptive term for this state constitutes a serious gap in our language. Until recently, there has been no word that accurately describes the extraordinarily intense excitement of being smitten with the presence or thought of another person. The feeling is usually called ‘falling in love,’ but this term creates some problems.”
He goes on to say that not everyone who falls in love has this feeling at the beginning. Not only that but that sort of sensation may initiate a relationship which then doesn’t last very long and can’t really be called love. I know a woman who was married in her mid-twenties to a man who created that excitement for her. After a while they divorced and she married again—this time, a man who didn’t set her on fire the same way. But the second marriage is a much better marriage, even though, for a long time, she wondered if something was missing because that intensity was absent.
So the psychologist Older coined his own phrase for this sensation. He calls it “falling in boinng” (The New England Journal of Medicine 1981; 305:1583-1584). It’s different from falling in love. “Boinng” is a great word for it—you feel like you’ve been bounced, on a great trampoline, higher than you ever thought you could go. You feel sky high, out of control, weightless. You feel as though you’re operating in a very different orbit than you normally do, or than most other people do, either.
There are even gradations of boinng, he says, depending on how many n’s there are in the word. “When you’re in boinng, you see stars. When you’re in boinnng, you see stars and hear heavenly choirs. Boinnnng is so overwhelming that it may require hospitalization. On the other hand, boing could be something you ate.”
“Falling in boinng.” It’s a perfect expression—partly because it also conveys something of how fleeting it is. Like a superball that’s bounced very high, the bouncing may go on for some time. But each bounce is lower than the last, until finally it peters out. “Boinng” can’t last. It’s always temporary.
There’s nothing in the entire world like the giddy rapture of falling in boinng, of getting “twitterpated,” as the movie Bambi puts it. But I’m afraid that our culture has mistaken that feeling for love. We’ve too often assumed that if we don’t have that sort of ecstasy, something crucial is missing. And I suppose it’s worth reminding ourselves, on this Valentine’s Day, that that’s not true.
“Boinng” is nice, but it’s not love. You may never have that feeling with your spouse or partner, and still have the most wonderful, giving relationship imaginable. You certainly won’t have that enchantment every day for years, and yet a rich love may persist over that time.
Marriages get into trouble all the time because one or the other of its partners has this boinng feeling about someone else, and no one quite knows what to do with it. Most people never dare talk about it, especially with their partner. But maybe if we acknowledged that falling in boinng was different from falling in love, that experience would be much less threatening. When Mary and I say to each other, “Wow! Isn’t he or she stunning,” “How ’bout that Salma Hayek or Penelope Cruz, or, for her, Hugh Jackman or George Clooney, or the server in the restaurant,” isn’t that a way of saying, “Yes, there’s some very powerful feeling at work here, but it’s not a threat to the love we have, because it’s something different from that love. It’s something that happens to you, like a sneeze or a laugh, and it’s very compelling, but it’s not love.”
So what’s love? Like boinng, love is in many ways something that happens to you. It’s a gift. I can’t imagine that I could will into being the love that exists between Mary and me. I have been blessed by it, and I receive it gratefully.
At the same time, though, love asks something of its partners, doesn’t it? Love has to do with covenants. It has to do with commitment, with giving. It has to do with doing things for each other’s sake. The entire story of Israel’s relationship with God is a story of mutual self-giving. God has initiated the relationship and made it possible. Yet God also expects a devotion in return.
In today’s story of the transfiguration of Jesus, in the midst of this amazing event, Peter suddenly blurts out, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” (Matthew 17:4). Peter has seen something spectacular here, and he wants to hang onto it. He doesn’t want to let it go. I don’t think this is unlike our desire to hang onto the boinng, to cling to it as though it is what will finally make everything all right.
But this boinng is an impostor, isn’t it? Just as Peter wanting to hang onto that spectacular moment on top of the mountain is misdirected and unwise, so our worship of the boinng is significantly off the mark. The entire testimony of the scriptures is that it’s not the boinng that will save us. Those scriptures call us, rather, to revere commitment over giddiness, to live by the long view rather than by the quick high, to be guided by compassion rather than by fleeting euphoria.
Which is not to say that all falling in boinng is a bad thing. The object of life need not be to flatten it out and eliminate all powerful feelings. They can be incredibly enlivening, and shouldn’t be thrown out for the sake of some monotonous, unchanging sameness.
It’s just that life’s major decisions probably shouldn’t be made on the basis of these passing fancies, no matter how powerful. When marriage and divorce are decided by boinng feelings, something essential is missing—the sense especially, perhaps, that real love is born not so much of ecstasy, but of care, that it’s rooted not so much in rapture, but in compassion. This is what the voice of God conveys to Jesus on the mountaintop: “this is my Beloved” (17:5), whom I will never desert. It’s not the mountain-top experience which is central, but rather God’s unwavering presence with Jesus throughout his long, painful journey through suffering and betrayal and desertion, and even and especially to the cross. God’s love is marked, not first by feelings, but instead by unending presence.
Some years ago, in another church I served, a man told me that he was going to leave his wife and children and move to Tennessee, to be with a woman who had just bowled him over. He had agonized about it, and told me of his struggles, then asked what I thought. I didn’t want to cast any shadows over his exciting new life, but I did say that I thought the real test of their relationship would come when they were together all the time, that in the midst of their routine they would discover just how much love was really there. “If you can go to the Laundromat together, and do all the hum-drum stuff of life, and still want to be with each other, that will be a good sign.” Some months later, I got a letter from him. Enclosed was a picture of him and his sweetheart in the local Laundromat. But his letter told me that they were no longer together. It hadn’t worked out, after all, despite its auspicious beginnings.
The letter saddened me. But it hardly surprised me. The tradition in which we stand recognizes that relationships need to be based on something deeper and truer than ecstatic feelings, no matter how compelling those feelings may seem. As M. Scott Peck reminds us, in The Road Less Traveled, love is not a feeling, it’s an action. And it’s a devotion that transcends the impulse of the moment.
We’re probably all going to have boinngs. But I wonder if, on this Valentine’s Day, we might renew our covenants with those we love. I wonder if we might remind ourselves that right in the midst of our daily routines, right in the midst of our own various Laundromats, there can be riches beyond measure. The witness of all of scripture, to me, is that life’s greatest rewards emerge from the midst of covenant, commitment, lasting concern. That’s not to say that no one should ever divorce. There are many marriages that are harmful and should be ended. It’s only to say that, even though many divorces are necessary, our covenants still deserve to be taken very seriously, for it’s from the midst of such covenants that life’s greatest fullness emerges. It seems to me we just have to live with that tension: yes, some divorces are necessary; but yes, also, commitment that transcends all life’s many setbacks and frustrations is a glorious and precious thing.
Robert Fulghum tells a story about Charles Boyer, with which I want to finish. “Remember Charles Boyer? Suave, dapper, handsome, graceful. Lover of the most famous and beautiful ladies of the silver screen. That was on camera and in the fan magazines. In real life it was different.
“There was only one woman. For forty-four years. His wife, Patricia. Friends said it was a lifelong love affair. They were no less lovers and friends and companions after forty-four years than after the first year.
“Then Patricia developed cancer of the liver. And though the doctors told Charles, he could not bear to tell her. And so he sat by her bedside to provide hope and cheer. Day and night for six months. He could not change the inevitable. Nobody could. And Patricia died in his arms. Two days later Charles Boyer was also dead. By his own hand. He said he did not want to live without her. He said, ‘Her love was life to me’. . .
“It’s not for me to pass judgment on how he handled his grief. But it is for me to say that I am touched and comforted in a strange way. Touched by the depth of love behind the apparent sham of Hollywood love life. Comforted to know that [two people] can love each other that much that long.
“I don’t know how I would handle my grief in similar circumstances. I pray I shall never have to stand in his shoes . . . But there are moments when I look across the room—amid the daily ordinariness of life—and see the person I call my wife and friend and companion. And I understand why Charles Boyer did what he did. It really is possible to love someone that much. I know. I’m certain of it” (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, pp. 32-33).
My prayer today is that we be blessed by rich loves that outlast the boinngs. May we stick to our promises and love even when it’s difficult. And may we always remember that this is the sort of love with which God loves us. ‘In thick and thin, in life and in death, you are my Beloved,’ says God. ‘I will not let you go.’ Thanks be to God.