"Love Makes Us Family"

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The Rev. Suzelle Lynch
February 12, 2006

Today is Freedom to Marry Day. Freedom to marry – what an amazing concept: that we have both the inner authority to follow our hearts and choose a partner, and the legal authority to make a lifetime covenant of the love we have for him or her.

Uh, there’s only one problem. Somewhere between 17 and 27 million Americans have the inner authority, but not the legal authority. And only because they would, if they could, choose to marry a partner of the same gender.

Making us aware of the injustice of this so that we can change it is what Freedom to Marry Day, and Freedom to Marry week are all about. It’s why they are strategically placed right on top of Valentine’s Day with its hearts-and-flowers celebration of romantic love adored by florists, confectioners and greeting card companies alike.

I’m proud of our congregation for the statement in support of same gender marriage that we issued by congregational vote in the recent past. It both affirms what we believe and calls us to action. It’s posted on our website, and says, in part: “We, the members of the Unitarian Universalist Church West affirm that civil marriage is a civil right. Same-sex couples choose partners with whom to build a life, create a home, and offer their mutual support in good times and bad in the same manner and for the same reasons as heterosexual couples. We believe that civil marriage with its multitude of legal rights, responsibilities, privileges and protections affirms and promotes a more just, equitable, healthy society and should be provided to all couples.” … “(W)e resolve, as the members of the Unitarian Universalist Church West of Brookfield, Wisconsin, to take action to achieve full civil rights for GLBT persons. We do this as a congregation and as individuals. We will actively oppose constitutional, legislative or other efforts to limit the legal rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. We call upon our leadership, both clergy and lay, to take action. We pledge ourselves to support these actions, and we pledge to undertake our own.”

I’d like to think that our congregation might have issued a similar statement a few decades ago in support of couples like my husband Young Kim and me. Because until 1967 -- less than 40 years ago -- interracial couples like Young and me had no absolute right to marry. Our marriage would have been illegal in any number of states. The legal freedom to marry for couples like us was finally granted by the U. S. Supreme Court in 1967 in the case called Loving versus the State of Virginia. Justice Earl Warren wrote the majority opinion, saying, “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.... Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival.”

I met this week with a couple who have asked me to marry them in May. I didn’t use the words, “marriage is fundamental to our very existence and survival” in our conversation, but I did say something to the effect that marrying is one of the most powerful and transforming and life-giving acts we can undertake.

By life-giving, I didn’t mean literally giving life by having children. What I meant is that when two people commit their lives to one another and then nurture and support one another and help each other grow, they give hope and life and strength to everyone who knows them – family, friends, and community. Marriage has a huge potential to make the world a better place, because it takes us out of the realm of “me” and into the realm of “us.”

Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat describe it this way, “Mystery is at the heart of intimate relationships. … Partners are drawn together by desires and dreams, and then they improvise a relationship to navigate the sometimes treacherous waters of communication, career, finances, aging and much more. The intricate and daily working out of two become one is a deeply spiritual endeavor.” And such spiritual endeavors cannot help but inspire others.

The Brussats also say that family relationships also can provide the kind of connection that is spiritually deepening. They quote psychologist Paul Pearsall, who says, “ ‘The family is a soul center and apex of spiritual energy. It is a place where we learn what everything means and how to make everything meaningful.’ There we are tutored in politics, economics, and moral thinking, and we discover the significance of yours, mine, and ours. Parents, brothers, and sisters are companions on our spiritual journeys, giving us crucial points of reference. And as with marriage, there is a primal mystery at the heart of family life extending back in time to our ancestral roots.” (In “Spiritual Literacy.”)

There is a primal mystery at the heart of family life. I say this mystery is that the romantic love of our parents – or perhaps for some of us, the sexual energy of those whose interaction sparked our birth – transforms into a different kind of love. The kind of love that reaches out and holds us and keeps us connected with one another when things get tough. The kind of love that is powerful beyond pleasure or passion. A devotional and committed kind of love, not for self, but directed toward the good of the other. It’s called agape – defined by Webster as “an unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another.” It is the love that loves because the other person – who is inherently worthy -- needs love.

This is the love that makes us family. The love that loves from a deep, centered place, even when we are not feeling deep or centered. We are honoring this love today with our Child Dedication Ceremony, with our words in support of same-gender marriage, and with the marvelous exhibit of photographs of the families of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender folks that opens today in our Community Room. It’s called “Love Makes a Family.”

Love makes us family.

When I think of family, I cannot help but think of my family of origin. Every one of us – whether we currently understand ourselves as being part of a family – did have a family of origin at one time. And in many ways we have them still, even if we have outlived or lost touch with our brothers or sisters or parents. Our family of origin lives forever inside us, as the force that shaped us most pervasively when we were most vulnerable. Remember: “the place where we learned what everything means, and how to make everything meaningful,” for good or ill.

My own family of origin looked relatively traditional from the outside: a father who worked away from home, a mother who stayed home and raised the kids – a boy and three girls. I was born at the end of the decade of the 50s and was a child during the 60s – and that’s the time that many people’s minds turn to for an image when they hear the phrase, “traditional nuclear family.” And, of course, it’s that same image of family: mom, dad, and the kids, that’s often imagined when the corresponding catch-phrase, “traditional family values” comes into the conversation.
George Lakoff (in Moral Politics) reminds us that the values that underly a traditional family have to do with the network of obligations into which one is born, and through which one must navigate and exercise one’s authority throughout life. Family ties are about duty. You do your part based on your gender-based role and I do mine. We rely on each other. And when conservatives use the word "family" they mean that the two-parent, never-divorced mother/father/child family is ideal, and anything that legitimizes other family forms – like providing tax relief for single-parent families or legalizing same gender marriage – pushes us further down the road to societal collapse.

For liberals, the frame labeled family is all about choice and commitment. We, too seem to have internalized that “traditional family” image that Stephanie Coontz tells us is not-so-traditional, but we hold that it is not meant to be fixed. We believe that we choose our partners based on perhaps other-than-traditional criteria and our love leads to commitment. Within that committed framework, we then choose whether or not to have children, to associate with others in our families of origin, to move to a different place based on our career development, and so on. Freedom to choose and commitment once one has chosen go hand in hand.

Looking at it this way, my family of origin actually wasn’t particularly traditional. My parents’ marriage was a second marriage for them both. My brother, the oldest child, was nearly five when he came into that marriage with my mother, and my father adopted him. My mother’s parents also were divorced when she was in high school, truly not something done by many during those days. She was a committed feminist who went back to work and back to school when I was about 12. My sisters and I are close in age, born within four years’ time, and while we look physically like three branches of the same tree, as adults, we certainly have chosen different family paths. My older sister lived with her husband for at least ten years before they married, and they have no children. My marriage is interracial, with one child. My little sister is happily and legally partnered as a lesbian in Vermont, where civil unions are legal, and she and her partner are childless. And my brother is the divorced parent of one child, with four grandchildren. Which one of those is a traditional family? Any of them? All of them?

But as Stephanie Coontz reminds us in the reading, historically there is no traditional family form. At least not one that is timeless and universally effective and magically transplantable from one era to another. And many of us are acquainted with an incredible diversity of families: two parents with children; a divorced parent with primary custody of children; foster parents with foster children; a single person with a close circle of committed friends, a couple with children from other relationships; grandparents who have custody of grandchildren; a lesbian couple; a never-married couple who have a child; a couple with no children; a gay couple who have adopted children; a sister or brother caring for a sibling, or adult siblings living together, a teenager of alcoholic parents who takes responsibility for his or her siblings; an adult child and an aging parent living together; grandparents living with children and grandchildren -- the configurations are multiple, and yet all would name themselves family.

When I think of diverse families, I think of Matthew and Marc, a couple in a church I once served who are raising Matthew’s teenage son James, whom Matthew adopted with his former partner. When I knew them, I also was involved in helping Matthew and Marc adopt baby Joshua. Matthew is white, Marc is Jewish, and both James and Joshua are African American. Baby Josh was a child no one wanted, for he has sickle cell anemia, a chronic and hereditary illness. But Matthew and Marc were not afraid of this challenge; after all, they had been coping with Marc’s AIDS-related illnesses for a decade. As Marc said to me, “Who better than me could help this child learn to live a full, joyful life while dealing with being sick?”

I also think of my friend Maxine, who was like a third sister to me and to Young. I would have adopted her legally if I could have! She was estranged from her parents, and both geographically and emotionally distant from her siblings. But in the thirteen years I knew her, she gathered around herself a most amazing “family of friends.” And this family – including me – was there for her, took care of her, when she was diagnosed with the brain tumor that rapidly took her life. Her birth sister did step in, did help a great deal, and they reclaimed their love for one another. This was very important. But it was Maxine’s family of choice, her family of love, that carried most of the load that helped ease her toward the gentlest, sweetest death possible.

What made Matthew and Marc family? What made Maxine’s friends her family? What makes any configuration of people family? Poet Peter McWilliams says, “We would like to promote the idea that a family is not only a father and a mother with traditional and sometimes too conservative values, but rather a Unit of Love, with one or more consenting adults regardless of gender, creed or color, providing support and unconditional love to their children with human compassion and understanding.”

My colleague Lisa Ward offers this, “The definition of family that I assume is a group of loved ones who have serious intention and commitment toward sharing the challenges and joys of life and growth together. This is a unit not necessarily determined by blood or law. Families thrive in the spirit of connectedness and responsibility; they are defined by our dedication to ... one another.”

A third definition of family is, “Two or more people who are committed to each other over time, sharing love, perhaps a home, values, and who are connected to something beyond the family itself.”

Stephanie Coontz would probably second all of these, but I think she would agree most with the third one. She writes, “(D)espite all the difficulty of making generalizations about past families, the historical evidence does suggest that families have been most successful wherever they have built meaningful, solid networks and commitments beyond their own boundaries.” (p. 288)

Families are intended to provide a secure environment for nurture, growth, and development, and to contribute to the wholeness of their members. As people of liberal faith, our intention for human relationships is that they be responsible, just, loving, health-giving, healing, and not only sustaining of self, and those to whom one is related, but also sustaining of a broader sense of community.

That’s why, I claim, at bottom, that it is love that makes us family. Not Eros, the romantic, sexual love that may have sparked the marvelous accident of our birth, not the kind of warm fellow-friendship-feeling love that goes by the name Philia, but agape love – the love that would call us out of ourselves and toward others who have need of us and our capacity for sharing self, resources and soul.

For as Stephanie Coontz reminds us, “We may discover that the best thing we will ever do for our own families, however we define them, is to get involved in community and political action to help others.”

And indeed, we remember this today: Freedom to Marry day. For though we may know deeply that Love makes us family, the law says something else. We may believe that all families should share equally in the rights, protections and responsibilities currently afforded only to some. We may believe that all families deserve health care, retirement protections, the ability to use scarce needed funds to afford education or a home and the ability to give kids the security to openly and proudly describe their families. But this won’t happen without our help.

And we can help.

Through our congregational statement we have declared our support, and called ourselves to action. Now is the time to, with love, take those actions: political, social and community-based actions, to help all families.

Amen.