Let Us Love
Let Us Love
1 John 4:7-9
For the past 75 years, The Study of Adult Development, run out of Harvard, has been tracking the physical and emotional well-being of over 700 men who grew up in Boston. This study closely followed men from their twenties into their eighties and nineties—one of the longest and most comprehensive studies ever done. Of course, many of the findings are not a huge surprise: don’t drink too much; don’t smoke; exercise often; eat a nutritious diet; maintain a healthy body weight; keep on learning. These are all individual concerns— lifestyle choices.
If you think about it, those choices that now seem so obvious weren’t for a long time. Consider smoking. There was a time when if you went to your doctor with stomach complaints the doctor would encourage you to smoke. It was thought to calm the nerves and improve digestion. Over time, despite the best efforts of big tobacco, we learned otherwise but a smoker’s well being depended at that point on becoming a non-smoker as soon as possible. We had to change ourselves in the light of new evidence.
I remember Bill Ditzler, a favorite member of this church for me in a previous era. Bill was a scientist, a tall “drink of water” of a guy who had the driest sense of humor possible. I was talking with Bill one day and he told me about how he fell in love with jogging. He claimed, and I don’t have any reason to doubt him, that he was one of the first people to jog in Lake Bluff. He would laugh and talk about all the crazy looks that he would get from people who he was sure thought that he must be running from some crime. Now, we point to exercise as a key to well-being and accept that notion widely. Bill was just an “early adopter” of that wisdom.
All of this leads me to the last thing mentioned in the overview of individual attributes: the willingness to keep on learning. I have said in a variety of settings that the most happy and fulfilled older folks that I know do a handfull of similar things. They exercise but not in some narcissistic way to have this kind of body rather than that but to maintain strength and balance. Over the years, I’ve seen so many people’s lives change in an instant when they fall. Second, they are intellectually engaged. They don’t act as if the last good idea or the last great movie or the last song worth singing was written thirty years ago. Finally, and maybe most importantly, they enjoy the company of younger people and build time with these others into the structure of their lives.
To put a finer point on this last notion, according to George Vaillant, a psychiatrist and clinical therapist who directed the Harvard study for over three decades, the most important component to a long, happy, and healthy life is love. “The 75 years and 20 million dollars spent on the Grant Study points to a straight forward five-word conclusion,” Vaillant writes. “Happiness is love. Full stop.” The Study of Adult Development shows that the quality of one’s relationships has an enormous impact on the quality of one’s life. The more relationhips you have, the deeper those relationships are, the greater chance you have to love and be loved, the better off you will be.
In order to lead a fulfilling life, we have to take care of ourselves. We have to adjust our habits and be flexible enough to change. We have to do things that matter to us and spend time with people we care about. However, beyond all of that and below all of that is this question: “Who and what will you love?” Your well being rests on your willingness not just to be open to that possibility but to sieze the opportunity, every chance you get.
What does that mean? Here’s the challenge. What almost all of us will think about first is romantic love. If you have a partner with whom you share your life deeply, your well-being will increase. That seems obvious but it is also so American. We are the land of rugged individuals. Maybe we extend the notion of love to include our nuclear family: “Okay…you find a partner you love and you create children whom you love and you have an island of love in your home. And, if you’re lucky, those grown children take care of you in your old age.” If you’re a woman then you’re a lot more likely to expand things a bit wider for who you love. You do something that seems so radical to us men—you have friends. Of course, we have friends, too and we will spend time with them, every five years at our college reunions.
Here’s the thing, the island notion, even if it includes friends, is not really what is being talked about in the results of the study. Whether you have a happy marriage or a fulfilling life as a parent or you’re blessed with friends, human beings are social animals. Yes, some of us are introverts and some of us are extroverts. However, human beings need to be connected to something beyond ourselves just as much as we need air or food or water. We can ignore this need or totally deny this need. We get to choose what will or won’t be a part of our life. However, just like if we choose to smoke or choose to lead a sedentary life or choose to eat terribly, if we choose to live as if we don’t need meaningful time with people we love, we will suffer. We won’t live as well. We won’t live as long.
Not everyone has a single romantic partner. Not everyone gets to be a parent. The point of the study is not that there is a single path to well-being that you will walk or you won’t thrive. No…the point of the study is that happy human beings, fulfilled human beings, ask on a daily basis “Who should I love today? What should I do that I love to do today?”
I really want to emphazise the openness of the “who” and the “what.” I love my dog. When beloved pets die, our hearts break on the spot. Why? Because that beloved pet may love us as purely as anyone in our lives and we may do the same with them. They aren’t people but they are loved and are loving. Most days they are a lot less complicated to love than any person in our lives. One of the really impoverishing thoughts about old age to me is that I probably won’t be able to handle a dog physically at some point. That would be a huge hole in my life. (Oh…and yes, you can be a cat person or a bunny person or an aquarium person if you’d like, too!)
I think we love places, too. Some of the places are sacred spots that we go visit. We make “pilgrimages” to those treasured places, spend a while there, and then come home, refreshed. We love being there! Or, we do things that make our house our sacred home, filling it with photos and art and that one chair that is my chair—all the things that help me to feel whole. I can love my home or some other sacred place just as much as I love my pet.
We love doing certain things, too, and when we do those things we meet others who share an interest with us. It may seem like pickleball is a sport invented by orthopedic surgeons to drum up business. However, it is, in fact, an activity created by people who longed for another way to connect, especially a way to connect for people who might have aged out of competetive tennis or who just need something to keep them moving. Pickleball generates new relationships—not intense, romantic relationships (though certainly it has generated a few of those, too.) A social network is built on that court but not a digital social network. These relationships are face-to-face, in person, and real. (What a radical notion!)
If we are isolated, we don’t thrive. Fear starts to get the best of us. We feel extra vulnearable. We get lost in the worst of what we feel. Our stress levels rise and all sorts of physical fallout starts to happen. This is why the scariest horror movies always feature a main character who is on their own. This is why the worst punishment in a prison is solitary confinement. This is why, historically, the most drastic measure that a community could take against a person was to shun them and act as if they no longer existed or to force them into exile and literally never see them again. This is why dementia is such a cruel disease because eventually a person loses their ability to connect even when they are surrounded by loving people.
All of this seems obvious, right? And yet…what also seems obvious is that a lot of us live as if our social connections are an after thought. We would never back burner our need to eat well or breathe or get some sleep, at least not for long. If we do those things, the consequences are pretty immediate and obvious. However, a lot of us, particularly men like me, live all the time as if our relationships and our connections—the network of people and things and places that we love—are just icing on the cake when we’ve accounted for everything else. As a matter of simple fact, rather than being ‘icing” the absence of love in our lives will shorten our lives and eventually kill us. Every now and then, we may ask, “How long can you hold your breath?” We almost never ask, “How long can you live without love,” and just as importantly, “How much love in your life is enough?”
Now, so far, we’ve been talking in broad strokes about human beings. All of these needs may get expressed in billions of ways. However, connecting and loving is our life blood. Here’s the next thing to acknowledge: we account for our needs by creating structure in our lives and generating habits. So, we have times when we eat. We have a bedtime and a time we get up. We have the things we do for exercise because we enjoy them and we have a time and a place when we do them. Life is simpler and we do better at accounting for our needs when our lives have structures which account for those needs. When it comes to love, the stuctures that we rely on are communities.
Bell Hooks, a writer whom I enjoy, says that there is a lot of spirtuality in our culture that is simply narcissism. Just as your time at the gym can have nothing to do with your well being and everything to do with your ego, so, too, spirtuality can just be another perfectionist practice—more focus on me and my needs. Hooks says that the alternative is to understand our spiritual growth as happening when we learn to “practice love in community with others.” That’s the meaning and purpose of the church in a single phrase to me. Here is an ongoing group of people who are figuring out, day in and day out, what it means to love one another. They make decisions together. They share their struggles. They delight in the birth of a baby. They cry together when a beloved person dies. We live better and we live longer when we practice love in community with others.
If God loves us, (God does!) we ought to love one another (or at least give it our best shot!) If God loves us (God does) then we ought to make doing things we love and doing them with love our way of being in the world. If living a loving life is challenging and full of joy and something we need to practice, then we should call out to one another, “Beloved, let us love one another!”