My date has wavy brown hair and works at a butterfly farm. My date has dreadlocks and dark, punk eyes that excite and soothe in the same blink. My date is a warm ocean eddy that surrounds me as I dream away my day; a 3 yr-old princess smiling in a blue taffeta dress; a white clapboard church building in the Deep South with fried chicken in the sanctuary and two women getting married in the front yard. My date is finding mail that rewards me with a job offer or a postcard from my friend Darcy in Japan. My date is a really huge metaphor for a life full of surprises and hopes that I have. My next best date is simply my next big adventure. Some would say fantasy, but I have a friend who would say yes to all of it—these life experiences, these dreams of mine. He would say put them all on a beach blanket, bring a cooler and just relax into your deepest desires. I have another friend who, upon hearing all the possible dates I could come up with, remarks: ‘yea, but none of those things would happen to me.’ And when I’m with her, I begin to worry about my fantasy life.
I mean, let’s face it: Dating is horrible. This was the theory proposed one night by a special think-tank here in Washington, which meets usually in someone’s basement and at irregular times which highlight the spontaneity of the group’s intention: the intention to throw out theories that can never be debunked. I mean, who hasn’t heard a worst-case story about a date gone bad? So, fed up with the sheer negativity of the meeting that night, I threw down the gauntlet and proposed an alternate theory: You Really Do Want To Date!
Somewhere between our dreams and our real life is the next date—the unknown. I look forward to it… with great anxiety. We have whole mythologies, biblical stories from our deep cultural past that attempt to articulate our dreams, and that’s just in my field of religion. We have the sciences, political, numerical, medical, people looking and finding great beauty in the space that lies before them: their vision of the next best political construct, the gene for cancer, the theories that define our cosmos. And I can’t even plan my next date. First I have to check the calendar. Do I even have time to plan a date? Do I need a strategy?—what will they think of me if I’m late or am not smart enough or witty—is that really the best shirt I have?
Clearly, my beautiful metaphor for “dating as the dreaming we do” gets a little bogged down with details. After all, living ourselves into our next best experience involves defining goals, planning our life—making our dream fit into our life, or making room for something that just happens to us, good or bad. And when I say dating, I really want to talk about the things we love, both people and professions—I know people who don’t have any personal life, as they give all that energy to their work. They invest in things that can just as well love or reject them—and if they have a setback, it can hurt. I remember the amazing trials of when I began teaching and how it holds for me emotional memories like a first love. Of course, while we may have a date-like experience in different aspects of our lives, to which we devote time and energy, I find sharing the icky tales of romantic dating torture more to the point. So let’s get that out of the way.
I knew Claudia from the school bus—it was that surreal time between adolescence and actually getting your first car, so she and I both rode the bus to high school. I still have a picture at home, I think, from our date to the Homecoming dance. You see, the picture is important to note because she is all vision, you know from my dream segment earlier, the soft brownness of her, that warm eddy in the ocean, but the picture is all I’ve got of us. Not long after it was taken, she left the dance with a friend (made some excuse for that) and I found myself at a restaurant with my friends later that night—which was fine—until I look over and… there was Claudia, sitting at a booth with her friend and their two new dates. And I am left with that picture of me and her... of what soft brown smoothness actually feels like when it has torn and jagged edges on it. Eh, she was not for me.
That’s what we tell ourselves. That was not for me or that was not to be, like we want to be blinded from the acts and mishaps of love, which involve a rush of pictures and feelings, often revolving around a painful experience, and wants to show us something: My smile in the Homecoming picture, the song playing when I saw her later. As CS Lewis says affection is indiscriminate and connects us all to others, and we are messed up and we still find something to fall for: people, work—especially our vocation, because if you’ve been in one sector, in one field long enough, you’ve learned to deal with what comes with that relationship. You may have a job you love and you must love all parts of it, or mentally rope some of it off from what you say is really important to you. You may love DC but section it off and move to Maryland, you know, so you can enjoy DC better. You love your partner and you accept all of him, or maybe you’ve moved on. It wasn’t for you. We highlight differences and painful memories by… shutting them down a bit, closing them off from us.
I told myself Claudia wasn’t for me. And now, after telling myself that 8 more times, I’m realizing it’s not feeling so good. Nine relationships. It’s like eating a ninth doughnut--too much. It’s like I am nine times more removed from people, because they weren’t for me. Each time I apportion my self away from the me that was there enjoying the time I had with that person, in that life. I close off new experiences by allocating painful feelings to a special place with the label of, “that won’t happen to me again.” But it might, because although I grow, I’m the same person who wants to be loved. I can hide but I really don’t want to. Nine times later, I want to feel not nine times sorry, not nine times wiser, but nine times more full of life. And life can be hard; dating, hard. Long ago, the great American writer Washington Irving said, “There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief...and unspeakable love.” There is no other species that would choose such pain and general awkwardness, but we are all about discovery and offering our life up for the noble cause of discovering new things about our lives, and because as CS Lewis says, we have a Need-Love. We offer each other a Gift-Love. I call this interchange devotion. Like people who daily read the Bible call it their devotional, the thing into which they put their life and energy and out of which they hope to gain more perspective and passion for life. And maybe if we’re not trying to control what happens in our lives, we too will give ourselves over to a perspective larger than ourselves. We may practice the Buddhist art of detachment, or the Christian art of sacrifice, when we talk about giving our life to God—either way, you act from who you are—your past—but you don’t let it control you. You always venture forth with your best intentions, guided by love.
Because love is indiscriminate—it touches us all—and we make room for the possibility that our next date will be both dark and light, both introspective and high-flying—our date will mean everything to us, getting to all the parts of us that we want to express, and all the parts that we want to forget. The god of dating stands at the fire exit in your life, and tells you what you already know: your next best experience might be just like this one, but don't take the exit. Don't deny that particularly bad year, the one you came this close to wishing away because of a critical mass of crap. Many in my think-tank came close to wishing their year, some to wishing their life, away. Devotion to love means you are devoted to the vulnerable act of loving. The novelist Eli Gottlieb gave us a wonderful picture of himself in our second reading this morning, running around with his heart in a lockbox, wishing someone would find the key. But the main character in his novel, after losing the relationship that has defined him for so long, finds himself in a hotel, wishing for a new--another--life.
"Lying in my rented room, I wanted to fast-forward five years and compress all the stumbling, the late-night bone-chewing, the confusion and the pain into the future synthesis of a brisk, purposeful man who cared about new things, and new people. I could feel the soft moment arriving in which sleep would open up like a mouth and swallow me. I would flow through that sleep and wake up a tiny bit better. And each day from here on in would have that much less anguish that the day before, and would be a small stop against the forward current of regret. Because what's past is past, right? Right?"
All we have, it seems, is our past and the promise of a next date, both confusing. Please carry them with hope. They are, truly, yours.
The think-tank will hopefully accept all this, the proposition that dating is a force beyond our control, that to reckon with it we must, simply, reckon with it. Because it can be a beautiful thing. And we will say that it doesn’t merely suck, it blows badly. And we will sit around that cruddy basement apartment and sing of its glory as I look to the next best date I have, which is now, because here I am part of a community that practices love; and because I know the answer. Ready for it?
“There's nothing you can know that isn't known. Nothing you can see that isn't shown. Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be. It’s easy. All you need is love, all you need is love, All you need is love, love, love is all you need.” --The Beatles.
Posted by UNMC Office at March 31, 2009 04:21 PM