‘How to Love’

By Emily Bruce
UUAC First Parish at Sherborn
September 29, 2019

Reading – ‘How to Love’ by Thich Nhat Hahn

If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. 

When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform.

Sermon – ‘How to Love’

Good morning. In this month, with a theme about families and expansiveness, I want to tell you a story about my family. We have talked a lot about families this month, about belonging and supporting, sometimes about struggle and conflict. My story is about my family of origin, but as you listen, I invite you to think about whomever you call family. I think the lesson translates well across all different definitions of family.

As some of you know, I was born and raised in the south – New Orleans to be specific. By and large, my entire family still lives in Louisiana. (One of my two brothers lives in Virginia, but that’s it). 

It’s important to note from the outset that I’m very different than my family, in terms of the lifestyle I live and the choices I’ve made. For example, I’m a Democrat. I was raised to be Republican, but I think I abandoned that platform during my first semester of college. No, probably in the first week of college. 

I’m also a vegetarian – a decision I made only about 10 years ago but negotiating family holidays as an herbivore has been a challenge for me and for them. My family tends to prefer their meat with a side of meat, you know? Maybe you’re like that too – no judgments if you are. But getting them to understand that turkey gravy was not vegetarian even though it doesn’t have actual meat in it, took a while. 

Another major difference for me is religion. I was raised Episcopalian, I left the church entirely in my 20’s and now I’m a Unitarian Universalist. The rest of my family is still Episcopalian. No one in my family had ever heard of Unitarian Universalism before I brought it up. For a while, my brother was convinced I had joined a cult. He now knows that’s not the case, but as you can see, I have quite a history of going in a different direction from the rest of my family. 

Because of that, I’ve often struggled with feeling “seen” by my family – and what I mean by “seen” is feeling accepted and validated for the choices I’ve made. We all struggle with feeling seen, don’t we? We want to be known and embraced for who we are. To be loved and supported, and not to be judged or criticized for making decisions that are right for us. Am I right?

Over time, my family and I have largely made peace with the fact that I’ve often gone in a different direction than them. But it was also lonely at times, to be different. When you have to explain yourself over and over again, it can be exhausting. For a while, I learned to compartmentalize myself with my family. There were parts of me that I just didn’t share with them, because I thought it would be too hard for them to understand, or too trying for me to explain. It was easier to keep parts of myself separate.  Maybe you have found yourself in that pattern with a family member or loved one? 

So, with all of that backstory, I want to tell you a story about how my entire family came up to New Haven last May to attend my graduation from Yale Divinity School. I’ll be honest – I was a little nervous. My parents come up here to visit now and then, but not usually the rest of my family. But now they were all coming here, into my world. 

I was worried that the more conservative Republicans would say something harsh to my liberal classmates and professors. I was worried that they wouldn’t appreciate how important this day was for me, this day that I had worked so so hard for. This was a precious day for me; I didn’t want it tainted. I loved my family, but my anxiety was working overtime imagining all the things that might go wrong. 

There’s one more thing to explain about my family – it has some weird traditions. Many families have weird traditions – whether it’s a certain food you have at Thanksgiving, a movie you watch at the same time every year, songs you sing or jokes that you always tell - often, no one know who started it, why you do it, why you keep doing it, right?  We don’t have time for a group share, but I know there are some weird traditions out there that you could tell me about.  

My family has many baffling traditions, but none so strange as the Woodchuck. There’s an old tongue-twister that goes “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” Who’s heard it? 

Many years ago, no one is sure when, we started chanting that to each other at the end of visits. See when I was 10, we moved to South Florida for my dad’s job but we drove back to Louisiana every Christmas to visit. At the end of one of those visits, we started chanting the Woodchuck to each other as we pulled out of the driveway, always ending it with car honks and a really loud ‘HUH!’ Now it’s a part of every single goodbye in my family. We’ve done it at airports, train stations, in hotel lobbies, outside of my freshman dorm when my parents took me to college. Everywhere. 

So, it’s graduation day at Yale. Our service was held outside on the interior quad of Yale Divinity School. It’s a big beautiful green space with trees and grass. To receive your diploma, you walk up one side of stone steps to the doors of the campus chapel, you get the diploma, have your picture taken with the Dean, and then you walk down the steps on the other side. 

I’m in line, I’m heading up the steps. Thus far the family visit has gone pretty great. Everyone is excited for me. There hasn’t been much in the way of drama. They still don’t understand my wanting to be a Unitarian Universalist minister, but they understand what Yale is, and they’re proud. And climbing those steps I admit to myself that I am proud of them too. And I am glad that they came to witness this moment for me. 

I reach the top of the steps, and hear my name called. I reach out my left hand and take the diploma. There it is – that piece of paper I have given blood, sweat and tears for, is in my hand. I look ahead and reach out my right hand to shake hands with the Dean of the Divinity School. He smiles at me and says “Congratulations.” Time seems to stop as I bask in the glory of this moment, so grateful and proud to be standing there on that spot. 

All of a sudden, somewhere below me in the crowd, I start to hear it. “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck, if a wood chuck could chuck wood. Huh!” I freeze, staring the Dean in the face, my right hand gripping his as I think one awful thought over and over again “Oh NO!”

I’m so mortified I don’t know what to do. You can hear the unrest in the crowd – ‘What did they say? Who was that?’ Somehow I make it through the picture and start down the steps on the other side. I look out into the crowd towards my family, and they all wave and smile at me. My sister in law Amy snapped a picture of me in that moment, and I looked like this [make face].

Afterwards, they all hugged me and congratulated me. I will confess that I was still angry and embarrassed. I was – they took that moment that was mine, that I had worked so hard for, and they made it about them. That stupid tradition had to invade one of the most important days of my life. 

At the same time, I didn’t want to waste my last few precious moments of seminary being angry at my family, and it felt pointless to try to explain to them why I was embarrassed. They all thought it was hilarious. They still do. So, I put it aside and focused on all the reasons I had to celebrate that day.  

The next day my family left and that night, I called a friend to vent. She had graduated too, and witnessed the Woodchuck, so I was fully expecting sympathy and pity for what I had endured. That’s what friends are for, right? To confirm that your family is the problem, that it’s not you, and you have every right to be put out. 

But to my resentful surprise, my friend just laughed at the memory of it. She said “I could tell it was some kind of weird family tradition, and it was hysterical. Your face as you came down the stairs was the best part!” 

I was stunned to hear her characterize it that way. “But it was so embarrassing!” I said. “You would not have thought this was funny if it happened to you. There is no way you wouldn’t be angry right now.”

She paused for a moment. “Well,” she said, “If my family had shown up for me the way your family showed up for you, maybe you’re right. But they didn’t. They were all too busy or too broke to make it there for my graduation. Your family may have embarrassed you, but at least they were there.”

[deep sigh] My heart just dropped into my stomach when I heard her say that. Not only did I feel like the biggest jerk, but in that moment all my resentment and anger fell away. She was right. They had showed up. Not the way I wanted them to, but they showed up. 

I realized that I had a choice – and I could choose to see them differently. They weren’t doing that silly Woodchuck chant to embarrass me. They did it because they loved me. They were claiming me as one of their own. In its own wacky way, that chant was them telling me that they saw me. That moment gave me something that I had wanted for a long time. I was seen by my family, and I was seen with love. 

Sure, it didn’t look like the kind of love I thought I wanted from them. But it was the kind of love that they were able to give. 

We can spend a lot of time and energy defining the ways we want to be loved by others, yes? We like to think we can put conditions on love, or describe it so specifically so it comes packaged exactly the way we think we need it. That’s what I was hoping for with my family – that they would show up and act the way I wanted them to, and only that – only that - would signify their love for me. 

In our reading, Thich Nhat Hanh says “When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer.” By defining love so narrowly, I made my heart small. I couldn’t see them or understand them, and I was the one to suffer for those choices. 

In talking to my friend, I had what I can best describe as a Grinch moment. My heart grew three sizes that day. And I realized I’m so blessed to have a family that loves me. So many of us are seeking love and understanding; so many of us have families who can’t express their love or worse, we have families who have been sources of pain, fear and trauma. Here I have a group of perfectly imperfect people who traveled thousands of miles and spent lots of money to show up for me. To see me. When I looked at it that way, the only embarrassment and shame I felt was for myself. 

The social researcher and writer Brene Brown says “Until we can receive with an open heart, we’re never really giving with an open heart.” How are you able to receive love from others? Have you ever thought about it? It’s kind of a weird question to ask, but think about it. There are countless ways, big and small, that people can express their love. Some are so small we often miss them. When you get a compliment from a friend or loved one, do you wave it away? Or tell yourself “Well, they don’t really mean that, they’re just saying it because of x, y or z.” But that’s love – that compliment. When someone texts you to ask how you’re doing, that’s love. When someone hugs you, that’s love. How much more love could we see if we started paying more attention?

My experience at graduation taught me to start putting down all of the expectations I had about my family. To start accepting them for who they were and embracing their love for me on its own terms. That’s how I learn to love my family.  Maybe love looks not at all like I want it to or thought it would. But it’s the love that is, and it’s a blessing to be received. 

How does love show up for you? Who are the family in your life who show up, maybe not the way you asked or hoped for, but are there nevertheless? Can you find ways to appreciate and embrace what they’re able to give? Because, the Rolling Stones said it best, you can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need. 

Amen.