From the sermon this sUnday "Parenting Through Pain" at UTempleUMC --1415 43rd Street NE--10:30am As a Pastor I have been gifted with the intimacies of other lives. I’ve presided over more than 100 weddings, counseled with couples old and young, straight and gay, heard hopes and dreams, and bitter betrayals. I have walked with couples through divorce, through death, through affairs, through a mutual loss of respect, through numbness and exhaustion. I have been with couples in their expectations of ecstasy and have been with them when the gates of Hell opened with its fiery breath. We don’t get out of this life without pain but pain need not define the limits of our life. Pain need not undo us. As parents most of us will encounter loneliness, trauma, and extreme vulnerability in our life. All will threaten to unravel us. All threaten to make us forget about the power of love, the generosity of compassion and the truth that it is through our commitments, our relationships, and our capacity to offer our life in service to a LIFE bigger than our own, that we find true freedom and deep happiness in life. As parents we will encounter loneliness. Being lonely in marriage tears holes in our soul. We come to the realization that the other cannot fix us nor fill up what it lacking in our life. We discover that the raising of our children is relentless and that we are exhausted and quite often feel as if our life (our essence) is being drained out of us day by day. We try to share this with our chosen love but find that we are not understood … it is as if both partners in marriage live separate lives together. Communication becomes a repetition of frustration and resentment against the other with whom we feel “not heard” and “not cared about”. Indeed, as marriage loses its animating passion even the kids become sources of resentment with its accompanying pal “guilt”. Parents carry enormous pain continuously and this pain is experienced as a solo-burden that frays the marital bond and draws down life and hope. We become haggard rather than vibrant. We become shallow rather than expansive. As parents we need to feed our marriage ---we need to feed it with romance and the animating passion of those things that first attracted us to the other. For the sake of our own evolution of soul, for the sake of our own capacity to give life to our chosen love, for the sake of our children’s development the first priority of family is for the parents to enjoy each other. Love must become “like” because when you like someone you want to hang out with them. I cannot stress enough how important it is to create rituals like a “weekly date night” in your life. On some weeks that date might be a walk or a bike-ride, or a trip to the movies, or an ice cream at Molly Moon’s. Maybe it’s a quiet night at home with a simple meal by candlelight --- or sitting alone on the couch touching hands, rubbing shoulders, doing nothing, making love. It is so important to be with each other without the kids if only for an hour. This is what friends are for, this is what community is for, this is what the Church is for. We carry each other through the pain and loneliness of our lives. We wipe away tears, we dwell with each other even in the valley. Who is your community of care? Who is helping you parent your children and evolve your marriage?
Posted on: Fri, 31 May 2013 19:03:35 +0000