Recovering desire and pleasure in marriage and in prayer

From a sermon on Song of Songs chapter 7.  In it I explore the loss of desire and pleasure in marriage and prayer.  This excerpt deals with marriage; other parts of the sermon deal with the recovery spiritual vibrancy.  See the transcript here.  For the audio, click here.

Why is it that marriage today too often seems to bring an end to desire? Why do lovers look outside the marriage relationship in search for pleasure—sports teams, hobbies, entertainment, drugs and alcohol, pornography, affairs? Why is it that the birth of children, our involvement in responsibilities, and the presence of physical problems in our bones and brains too often spell the end of desire? Can married couples have children and work jobs and live with changing bodies and still look upon each other with passion and desire, and enjoy each other with pleasure from inside marriage?

If not, then the Bible is cruel and misleading.

But I don't think the Bible is selling us a bill of goods. I think we're just lost; captive to sin; imprisoned far away from the love we long for. But if we're lost, then we can be found. If we're bound up, we can be set free.

It's true that some of us have been abused physically. We've been so hurt relationally that we're afraid to make ourselves vulnerable again. It's true that some of us aren't happy with ourselves, our bodies, or our partner's. But it's also true that all of us can find help for healing and growth.

How to write a love letter :: restoring a love that's withered

Here's a link to my recent sermon, "How to Write a Love Letter," on Song of Songs (Solomon), chapter 4 (Oct 17, 2010). In this sermon I look primarily at the relationship between two human lovers, and acknowledge the barriers and pain many relationships experience. It offers a spiritual way toward the renewal of love even in the most entrenched relationships. Here's an excerpt:

Some of you are stuck in a relationship that has years of pain and suffering, where there’s little true love. There may be commitment (and you’re to be commended for that), but that’s all there is. Maybe you’re married—twenty or forty or sixty years.

You go to bed at night alone. Your spouse is more in love with Facebook than with you. Or she putters away in her sewing room to avoid the pain of crawling into bed beside you with that dull ache, wanting only to be held, but the pain of the past has put a wall between you that seems insurmountable.

And all this talk of love is at best frustrating; maybe it’s infuriating. There are some among us who are sitting this series out. It’s just too painful to face this love poem week after week when love is only a dream.

If that’s you, let me say this as gently and compassionately as possible, but as forcefully as necessary. Do not close your heart to love. Even if you’re not likely to get the love you long for anytime soon, you can and must give it. Not for the good of the person you almost hate because of the pain they’ve caused you—but for your own good.

You need to love. You can give love. But you learned that love is conditional. You learned that love is limited.

For more, click on this audio link . . .

The art of prayer and love: on flirting

Each Sunday this fall, our congregation is sitting with the Song of Songs (or Solomon) and listening for the ways this racy, erotic, playful love poem seeks to awaken our love for God and to arouse love within marriage and dating. We're calling the series of sermons, "Romancing God: The Art of Prayer and Love." It's a daring enterprise, trying to hold together the summons to spiritual and relational love, but in the history of spirituality, it's just these two that must go together if we're to experience the health and vibrancy we seek. Here's a link to a recent sermon on the second chapter of the Song of Songs. And below is a little sample of the message that focused on flirting and fantasy (with God and your beloved):

First, here's a little about the flirting commended by the text. Note the playfulness. 2.1: she speaks, minimizing her beauty, fishing for a compliment. 2.2: he’s not too dull to notice and artfully (and wisely) replies. 2.3-4: she reciprocates, returning and magnifying the compliment and is aroused by the interchange. (In this we see that love requires a game, playfulness, flirting takes tact). 2.5: she becomes faint and asks her friends to give her nourishment; passion burns energy. 2.6: she yearns in her heart for him, and then warns her jealous girlfriends against pushing for love prematurely; wait, ladies, it’ll come to you (2.7).

In these days of seriousness, rocky marriages and romances need to recover the playfulness of flirting. Flirting keeps you in the game, and when you’re playing the game, the relationship is interesting. Here flirting is different from being a “tease.” A tease seeks to arouse in order to hold power over the other. Teasers make bad lovers; they are unwilling to give themselves away for love. They only want attention. But flirting is a genuine invitation to dance, a gesture of openness, a willingness to give-in to love. In romantic flirting, there’s a tenderness, a warmth, a humor, a vulnerability. This kind of flirting is a blessing extended to the other.

So, why has honest flirting within marriage virtually disappeared? Why does marriage often seem like the end of courtship rather than the beginning of a lifetime of play? How does this biblical text and the thousands of years of lovers who’ve read and cherished it invite us to renew the game, learn to flirt again, and awaken love?

Continued in the online sermon.

Be gentle with each person you meet

A vacation posting: this post from last spring is even more timely now in the midst of such widespread incivility

Here’s a simple practice that will change the way you interact with others, and how you treat yourself.

“Be gentle with each person you meet, for each of them is actually fighting a great battle.”  Philo of Alexandria, 20 BCE—50 CE

It is a deeply spiritual practice, and contemplative—that is, it rises from the unceasing, interior prayer you are practicing.

Gentleness arises from the compassion God is birthing in you as you pray.  Gentleness arises from your deep awareness of your own interior battle to be human and holy.  Practice this and you will not only change the little part of the world you inhabit, but you will change yourself, for you too are fighting a great battle.

Love in a Time of Hate

A Short Talk given at the Islamic Cultural Center of Fresno, Californiaon the Festival of Eid, September 10, 2010 the Rev. Dr. Chris Erdman

Thursday, in an article published by the Huffington Post, Muslim journalist, Omid Safi, compared the threatened Qur'an-burning on the high holiday of Eid to the Grinch who stole Christmas.  As a servant of Jesus and a representative of the holy catholic or universal church, I apologize that a Grinch has tried to steal your Ramadan peace, your Eid joy. The Rev. Terry Jones isn't the only Grinch who's tried to steal your spiritual joy; there have been others who, with ugly rhetoric, have tried to block the establishment of a prayer center in Manhattan. Sadly, there have been too many Christians among them.

There are people who use the Christian religion for purposes that run counter to the faith of Jesus. They misunderstand Jesus, they misuse his teaching. They are wounded souls who turn the gospel of spiritual liberation into rules and dogma that become weapons and tools for intolerance, hatred, and even violence.

You Muslims are frustrated by the same kind of troublemakers too, aren't you? You know the same kind of wounded souls who turn your religion of humble submission to Allah into weapons and tools for intolerance, hatred, and violence.

So, what are we to do?

We must walk the humble path that weaves its way through the heart of both our religions.

We Christians must surrender ourselves to the way of Jesus---not merely ideas about Jesus---but Jesus' way of life. We must live into the Great Commandment he gave us: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself"---by which he meant, "who is an extension of your very self." To love this way, our hearts must become one with the heart of Jesus.

Love is the path Christians must walk. In the end, love is the only measure by which we shall be judged. Love alone makes us what we were meant to be. Love alone will transform the world. Love alone will heal the world. And so, we must risk everything for love until love is the very air we breathe, the blood that courses through our veins.

Love is not some weak ideal, some squishy, let's-just-hug-everybody emotion. Love is mightier than guns and bombs; love triumphs over governments and grinches.

I've got reason to believe that love is also the path for you as Muslims. I wonder if your spiritual purification this Ramadan is ultimately for the sake of love. Do you seek to love Allah with all your being? Is love the real meaning of Ramadan, the fruit of Eid?

Rabia of Basra is one of the most popular and influential female Islamic saints, a central figure in the Sufi tradition. She was born nearly five hundred years before Rumi, and some say is the poet who most influenced his writings. Rabia describes the path this way:

The sky gave me its heart because it knew mine was not large enough to care for the earth the way did.

. . .

[But] my eye kept telling me, "Something is missing from all I see." So I went in search of the cure. The cure for me was God's beauty, the remedy for me was to love.*

And what do we do with those who don't understand God, who won't dance in Love with us, who can't live and love Love above all?

I'll answer in the words of Teresa of Avila, the most influential female saint in the Christian world. In the sixteenth century, a century full of religious bigotry and intolerance she wrote:

How did those priests ever get so serious and preach all that gloom?

I don't think God tickled them yet.

Beloved---hurry!*

And so let us join our hearts and commit ourselves to love above all. And when we're troubled by the grinches and the grouches (who may sometimes be our own selves), when we're threatened by those who hate, let us together pray: "Beloved, hurry! Tickle them . . . till they can't frown anymore."

*from Love Poems from God edited by Daniel Ladinsky