SERMON

One of the greatest qualities of human nature is generosity. (And I'm not just saying that because we are coming to the end of our pledge drive, although those of you who have not turned one in yet may take special note of what I am saying this morning.) One of the greatest qualities of human nature is selfless giving without the expectation of reward. I invite you to think back now remembering the people you admire and appreciate. The ones whose memory evoke warm, loving feelings. I expect if you explore that memory further, these men, and women, perhaps even girls and boys will be remembered lovingly because they were generous people. People who were willing to share their time, resources and energy not for any personal gain but because they cared about us.

Just about every religion has generosity as one of its core values. In Christianity, Jesus gave his mortal life that we may have eternal life. In Islam, the followers of Mohammed completely give of themselves by surrendering their separate self to Allah. In Buddhism, developing the quality of dana, or generosity is an important step on the Eightfold Path of Enlightenment. Even in the secular world, a willingness to give back to the social whole part of what one receives brings one merit in society. The movie stars who work for charity, the billionaires who become philanthropists, the police officers who put themselves at risk to go the extra inch to save a life, all these people are likely to gain appreciation and respect for their generosity. Generosity is a powerful force of transformation in both building our sense of self-worth and creating positive life affirming changes in our world.

Parents, knowing the benefits of generosity, try to stimulate this virtue in their children. If you see the spectrum of children's television programming I do these days with Andy, the message about being generous to others gets drilled into them daily. All of us at some point or other discover that being generous or receiving other's generosity makes life more meaningful. Unfortunately we sometimes do not learn our childhood lesson about generosity very well. Sometimes giving brings us more pain than joy. This greatest human attribute can be turned into a monstrous disease which destroys rather than creates.

This happens in Beauty and the Beast. Rather than being kind and generous to a merchant seeking shelter from a storm, the Beast threatens to kill him and imprisons his daughter as a price for a night's lodging and a rose cut from his garden. In her effort to save her father, she gives her life to the Beast.

The paradigmatic story of generosity gone astray is the woman who loves too much. Probably because of nature's need to bond an infant to its mother, women are predisposed to discover the joy of giving at a young age and incorporate it into how they live their lives. Men on the other hand, with our natural inclination to seek power and control, unfortunately labeled testosterone poisoning, tend to have a delayed discovery of the value of generosity--often delayed into mid-life (if it ever gets discovered at all). But even if men haven't learned to practice it, they certainly know the value of receiving generosity from their mothers and perhaps even their fathers. So when hormone crazed men and women get into relationships, women are set up to be the givers and men are set up to be the takers, generally extremely accurately replicating their family of origin. Usually, women marry their fathers and men marry their mothers.

For many married couples a rude awakening follows the wedding. Suddenly the passion which drove the couple together disappears and placid domesticity settles in. The fire of romance thrives on insecurity, mystery and challenge. Once the prize is won, it's luster begins to fade.

This is a natural part of the process of most marriages. After all, nature is more interested in our procreation than our marital bliss. We replicate our family of origin marrying our fathers and mothers because this is our deeply intuitive way of creating a safe and stable relationship. How we respond to that loss of erotic love charts the course of our marriage. The response many women make to this rude awakening is to love more and give more to the marriage. And more often than not the giving hurts and gets the opposite response.

It is painful to watch a woman try to mold herself into the image her mate desires, cover for her husband's weakness and immaturity, cook, clean, shop, cater to the man's every whim and then, instead of receiving thanks and praise, get judgment and criticism. It is even sadder to watch the woman blame herself and then try even harder to please her man as he makes more and more distance between them. It is frightening to wake up and find oneself engaged in these unproductive patterns of behavior and feel hopeless of ever getting the desired love and affection. The wonderful elixir of generosity that brings people together and builds the love bond turns ugly and seems to betray the giver.

Understanding the malfunction of generosity is absolutely crucial to saving a marriage and growing in maturity. To do this, let us explore the paradigmatic man and woman in this dysfunctional relationship and explore why they might do what they do. Of course each relationship is unique and the sex roles can easily be reversed with the man giving and giving and the woman never satisfied. Gay and Lesbian relationships too suffer from this dysfunction. I've never heard of a perfect marriage so on some level each of us will find a piece of ourselves in this paradigm. The important dimension to pay attention to is the patterns of relationship.

Let's look at our paradigmatic man first. Why doesn't he satisfy and return this wonderful generosity? Because for most of us, we cannot accept from the outside the love which will fill a displaced need. Just about all of us didn't exactly get the love we wanted and needed from our parents. Most parents do the best they possibly can--but they can't love us perfectly. They, like us, have limits to their ability to give and receive love. Because our mother was not inside our head, she couldn't always give us what we wanted. And in many cases, because of the harm she incurred in her childhood, she was blocked internally from giving us what we needed. Thus when most of us get to breeding age, we have accumulated a lot of unmet needs for love. These unmet needs create both desire and vulnerability. Thus to have the wife satisfy an unmet maternal need feels very good and is often pleasurable but doesn't resolve the old hurt, in fact it can make the husband more aware of his vulnerability. If the wife doesn't satisfy the unmet need or stops satisfying it, the predictable defensive reaction is criticism and judgment. "I married you because completely satisfied me and now your love isn't enough anymore.", complains the husband. "If you would only love me this way again, I could enjoy the happiness I desire." He feels helpless as he contemplates the inner emptiness and the broken promise of satisfaction. And his wife will never be able to perfectly satisfy him because she cannot heal the husband's childhood hurt.

Now let us turn the paradigmatic woman. She too has unmet needs from childhood she seeks to satisfy in the relationship. But she has learned a different way to get what she wants. She has learned about the power of generosity. This giving though is flawed as it is not freely offered. A desire to manipulate the husband into the woman's desired mate shapes and directs the giving. And almost everyone is highly tuned to when they are being manipulated. Thus the husband rejects the gift because he sees through it. And because the woman, at some level, also recognizes her own deficit she is trying to fill, she joins the man and rejects herself driving down her self esteem. By taking false responsibility for the rejection, she defends herself against the terror that she may have trapped herself in a marriage which will not satisfy her childhood needs. So she redoubles her effort to give even more and then she gets rejected again. So the cycle spins and in the worst case devolves into physical abuse.

Our paradigmatic man and woman both suffer from a lack of self esteem originating in unmet childhood needs and childhood wounds. Unfortunately no amount of love and care from a spouse can resolve those hurts from the past. The reason is because the child mal-adapts to unmet needs and wounds from childhood. These childhood injuries are tremendously painful and the way most of us cope with them is to shut down our inner life. We become disconnected from our thoughts and feelings, replacing them with social norms, with what we ought to think and feel which usually conform to our parents expectations. Crying is bad and un-masculine so I'll bury my feelings. Anger is unacceptable and un-feminine so I'll just stop having that feeling and make it go away. My friends don't like to play with me when I'm sad so I'll pretend I'm not and they will still like me. This is the emotional terrorism of early socialization. Few of us get through this period without scars that limit our emotional range of motion.

It is tremendously hard to satisfy emotional needs when they are repressed deeply into the unconscious mind. But like injecting waste in the ground, that which is buried does not go away and will rise again. Often couples find their buried problems unearth themselves by sprouting up as social problems in their children. Social problems get passed from generation to generation with amazing accuracy in disturbing ways. A grandmother who secretly terminates a pregnancy at 15 discovers a grandchild who has done the same thing. An obsession with alcohol develops in the second son of each generation. The oldest daughter never marries. Dysfunction in generosity follows the same patterns.

When the inner life, the awareness of one's own thoughts and feelings, becomes blunted or even shut down, one doesn't know where one's boundaries are. Thus if I experience say the feeling of anger, and I don't realize that I created that feeling out of my perception of a situation and that it may or may not have to do with what another person is doing, then I experience that anger as being caused by that other person. The garbage not taken out or the dirty dish left in the sink is a personal attack not just a mental oversight. Often couples become so confused as to whose feelings are whose they become increasingly dependent on the other person for a sense of emotional well being. They become fused or enmeshed which compromises their independence. And when you can't control your own sense of well being and satisfy your own basic emotional needs without the other person's help or non-interference, one's life can easily become unmanageable.

Restoring the necessary function of generosity in a healthy relationship requires first and foremost the untangling of feelings and the establishment of boundaries. As long as our sense of self worth is dependent on the raising or lowering of our partner's eyebrow, our relationship will be in trouble. Each partner needs to discover whose feelings are whose and to learn how to care for their basic emotional needs themselves. Each partner needs to take responsibility for their own emotional health and make reasonable, agreed upon demands on the relationship. So when generosity is expressed, it isn't out of an obligation or a desire to control but rather a free expression of the heart.

This kind of giving may be quite unfamiliar at first and seem strange. Yet when this kind of giving is experienced, the satisfaction which follows will confirm its tremendous value for ourselves and others unconditioned on how it is received. Real generosity is a precious jewel which transforms and heals both the giver and receiver.

The purpose of a marriage is not to cultivate erotic love. Few husbands and wives can maintain the intensity of courtship over a lifetime. An important purpose of marriage is the cultivation of selfless or unconditional love. This is the kind of love required for raising children. This is the kind of love which allows us to deepen our intimacy as we gradually know our partner better and better. This is the kind of love which develops our concern and commitment that goes beyond our families, communities and national identity evolving into a reverence for all life. The greatest gift we can give is our willing participation in ongoing creation.

This kind of unconditional love is transformative. Beauty's love of the Beast and acceptance of him as he is, expressed in her willingness to marry him, breaks the spell and transforms the Beast into a prince. So too, in our ordinary relationships, the more we can accept and love each other as we are, the more we permit the other to grow and change.

And sometimes giving can hurt--in a good way. Ask a mother who carries a fetus to term enduring the hardships of pregnancy, the raging of the hormones, the distortion of the belly and the pain of delivery--for another woman as a surrogate. Ask a father who leaves behind his family to risk his life fighting injustice and oppression. Ask the volunteer who forgoes trips to the beach and an extra hour of sleep to work for a social cause or political candidate. Ask the devotee who abandons the pleasures of the world to give herself to God through humanitarian service. This kind of giving, sacrificial giving, is one of the greatest expressions of love--mirroring the generosity which supports our existence.

This kind of giving is never entered into as a social contract with the expectation of any kind of gain. In fact it is notable because the obvious gains are passed by. No personal benefits are expected save the satisfaction of doing the right thing. Providing an opportunity and a focus for that kind of giving is one purpose for our congregation.

I know that kind of giving goes on here in this congregation and deepens my sense of commitment and service to you. What we are doing here is much greater than putting on a show on Sunday mornings and entertaining a few kids. I hope all of us accept as we enter this congregation the work of growing an ever bigger heart. The more we really give each other, the more we are transformed, healed and energized as a generous force making more channels for the streams of love to flow out of our doors and into a hurting world.

Copyright (c) 1997 Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.