Wisdom and Me

I have always wanted to be wise.  So far, I’ve not reached wisdom’s shores but, on occasion, I’ve come close enough to make some reasonable guesses about the terrain.  Since my understanding keeps changing, decade by decade, let me begin by trying to articulate my current view.  Wisdom is the ability to make sense of experience and to make sound judgments based on that understanding.  It is the attainment of a peaceful inner life, far removed from petty concerns and injuries.  And it is the feeling of being connected with all living things and calmed by the loss of a bounded individual self.

As a boy I wanted to be wise because it meant that people might take me seriously, even ask my opinion about important matters.  At age eleven I wandered into a synagogue, not sure what I was after but drawn by the sound and feel of the chanting and the serious ways of the men.  I found moments of peace but none of the deeper meaning and spiritual rewards I had sought.

As a teenager, I began to think of wisdom as a way to rise above the fray.  Those were years of great sensitivity.  I was easily hurt, and finding a refuge from emotional injury had great appeal.  At Harvard, I came upon William Butler Yeats poem, Lapis Lazuli, which described three wise men upon a mountain top “whose ancient, glittering eyes were gay.” This was a metaphor that carried me for some time.  It was secular enough to allay my dislike of religion and romantic enough to soothe my adolescent soul.

I had grown up idealizing the life of left wing intellectuals, preferably those who wore  berets, lived on the New York West Side, published in the Paris Review, and argued passionately with close friends late into the night.  I now recognize the imagery for what it was: the dream of being a learned man, a secular version of the life led by my many rabbinic ancestors.  And, throughout my life, I’ve never strayed very far from this idea.  I earned my badge with a Harvard PhD in intellectual history and continue to read books on history and philosophy.  Maybe this was to be my path.

Before I completed my PhD, though, my mother’s voice began to demand more room in my mind.  Hers was the voice of action.  To continue the Jewish theme, she was suspicious of mere thinkers and believed in justice, tikun olam, for which you must change the world.  So I left graduate school to work at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, helping to write legislation and organize politicians in support of criminal and housing justice.  These were holy grounds, an expression of wisdom, I could believe in.

Then crises struck, one after another. The year was 1971. My father, with whom I had been deeply identified, died suddenly from pancreatic cancer.  My wife and I divorced.  I had a baby to care for, mostly by myself, since my now ex-wife wasn’t so inclined.  I fled the halls of academe, which then seemed self-indulgent and shallow.  My mind entered a state of painful chaos.  I craved any kind of action that would release me from my bleak and obsessive thinking.  I was lost, heart and mind thrown open in search of answers.

If ever I was ready for salvation and a guru to lead me there, this was the time.  But even in the midst of crisis, that was not my way.  Instead, I entered the spiritual pathways as an interested but skeptical onlooker.  I met people who were determinedly marching on the path towards enlightenment.  With them, I read Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki on Zen, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche on Tibetan Buddhism, and the wonderful Carlos Castaneda series about the mysterious Southwestern teacher, Don Juan.  I heard Baba Ram Das hold forth and attended three-day retreats at Sufi camps.

The secular commune that I founded, much to my surprise and chagrin, was rapidly transformed by my then girlfriend, Barbara-turned-Saphira–into a Sufi community.  We filled up with young and wide-eyed devotees.  Saphira thrived and I began to drown in their sincerity.  We were often visited by the international leader of the sect, Pir Vilyat Inayit Khan, who would spend the night.  I liked him and I believed that he had things to teach me but, as was my wont, I held back from devotion.  I could not dance myself into the frenzy of Sufi wisdom.

Over the next decades, I continued to read in the fields of mysticism, Buddhism, general spirituality, and transformational psychology, but I never found a particular teacher to follow.  Each time I’d come close, my independent or, some would say, my counter-dependent spirit would rear up.  But it didn’t stop my pursuit of wisdom.  I have continued to meditate for over forty years now—even though the meditation often becomes routine, neither inspiring nor even particularly calming.  I have continued my search for the perspective that brings calm.

The only vessel that has been carried me consistently towards wisdom’s shores has been my journal, which I have pursued more or less continuously for almost fifty years.     It’s a stream-of-consciousness process that, in itself, makes me very calm.

The thoughts, themselves, have been far less important to me than the calm and the process of discovery that the writing brings to my life. It feels like magic.  All I have to do is keep my writing hand moving until I lose an awareness of time and place.  Self consciousness flees.  I am still.  Then ideas, images, and solutions to problems begin to flow.  There are no auras or revelations that visit me.  But at the moment when I am still, I do feel like more than just myself.

As I age, Buddhism’s emphasis on the present has become more and more compelling.  For much of my life, the future was balm to my pain and anxiety.  If things weren’t good now, I could make them better in the future.  The future is quickly disappearing for me.  At any moment, I could become sick or infirm—or I could die.  Placing a bet on the future seems a bad decision.  Trying to suck the marrow of the present for all it’s worth is clearly the better choice.  My long term interest in Buddhism as a trustworthy guide to wisdom is finally the right idea at the right time.

At this point in my life, there are two seemingly conflicting ideas that are most compelling to me.  The first begins with Buddhism’s down to earth emphasis on what is right in front of you – real things, real issues, real people, real injuries and challenges, and real joy.  There is suffering throughout life, says the Buddha.  We know that there is a great deal of suffering in old age—aches and pains and, eventually, the diminishment of self.  These are real.  Running from them only makes things worse.  Facing them contains them.  The pain is just the pain and not symbolic of more and terrible experience.  By containing suffering to what it is, you leave room for other feelings, like pleasure, calm, curiosity, and joy.

The second idea concerns the impermanence of the self.  Here’s how this idea comes to me.  I might be walking, meditating, writing in my journal.  My mind is wandering.  Ideas, images, and experiences from my past come into view.  They are vivid but I know they are not exactly as they were when I first lived them.  They are just images and feelings now, not concrete experiences.  They have changed over the years with forgetfulness and with new experience.  They enter my mind also shaped by my current thoughts and needs—and by future expectations.   My mind has now stretched out from my beginnings into an indistinct future.  It has become timeless.  As I experience this timelessness, I enter a zone that feels vast, oceanic.  In that ocean, I am suddenly unattached and floating.  The sea of imagery grows quiet.  In that serene space, there is no self.  I feel conscious – so conscious — but not self-conscious.

I have no idea if this expanded sense of awareness is wisdom or just a pleasurable sensation but I’ll take it whenever it arises.

 

 

Feminism and Me: A Rapid 60 Year Review

The Me Too Movement, the latest wave of the feminist revolution, finds me, once again, a supporter and a slightly wary bystander.  It’s easy to cheer on the fight for equality and safety, but this is not a revolution that men like me experience at a distance.  We live and work with women.  We raise girls.  As with any fight, there are some bruising times with the most intimate people in our lives, even as we struggle to be on the right side of justice.

The dawn of the struggle for me came early.  I was a teenager when my mother decided she would go to work.  My father opposed her.  To me, his opposition seemed wrong, foolish, even stupid, and hard to even fathom until I looked more closely at how fragile his ego was.  I strongly supported my mother but, in some darker side of my psyche, I could identify with his fear of losing her love—who might she meet out there?—and his control of her once she was free.  Still, I vowed, even then, that I would never follow in his footsteps.

The struggle emerged again in force during the late 1960’s, when I was in graduate school, in the form of consciousness raising groups.  Women gathered to surface and discuss the many forms of their oppression in male-dominated societies.  Again I cheered, but I hated being singled out as a generic man, man the oppressor.  I hated anger directed at me, knowing some was legitimate, even as I wanted to explain how I was better than most.  During the next ten years or so, conversations among friends, colleagues, and public intellectuals kept the pot stirred.  Even while being on the side of justice, it was hard to relax around gender-based issues.

It was during that time, 1970 to be precise, that my daughter was born.  Unlike my current wife of forty plus years, my former wife was not drawn to the traditional mothering role. There was little in my early life to prepare me to be the parent most involved in her early years, to feed her and change her diapers, to walk with her late into the night to soothe her crying.  Nor, as time passed, to arrange my schedule and finances to pay for her child care.  I never thought to give up this role but it forced me to work less and, as I watched other men and their single-minded devotion to work, I did wonder if it would slow or stunt the development of my career.  Eventually, though, I came to love my role. I loved taking care of daughter, and I believed that it had taught me incalculable lessons about nurturing, dedication, discipline, and intimacy.

I thought that I had bought myself a pass, insulated myself from feminist criticism—even though I knew there was some truth to it, too.  I was a different kind of man, more like a woman.  But most women couldn’t see into my heart.  Most knew nothing of my parenting role.  For them, I was a man, maybe a nice man—a family therapist, after all—but a man, who liked to be the center of attention, who expected that society would treat him and his ambitions well.  I knew this.  I understood.  But it wasn’t fun.  And there was work to be done in active support of the revolution.

I could be what in modern parlance is called an “ally,” an outsider who sympathizes with the cause of diversity and equal justice.  Instead of just reacting to women, I decided to add my voice. So I wrote a long paper called “The Psycho-politics of Coupling,” though never published, which enjoyed a good informal run in the Boston-Cambridge area.

I argued that, right along with social and political changes, the structure of intimate relationships was shifting dramatically, that women’s quest for equality would diminish men’s place—or, at least, that’s how men would feel about it.  They would be threatened by their loss of control and their loss of centrality.  In response they would lash out or, more commonly, pull away.  Instead of confronting the changing dynamic of power, men would grow interior and resentful. They would secretly nurse the impotence they felt in the face of the assault.  No matter their outward or stated values, there was no way to fully avoid this experience.  Women, even those who had been encouraged by men’s explicit statements of support, would feel betrayed, resentful, adding fuel to their original anger.  And it would be arduous negotiation for those couples who wanted to both heal the rift and rekindle the flame.

As with my efforts to father my daughter, I naively hoped that the paper would insulate me from feminist criticism, and it did, but not enough to avoid the bruising.  When one group of people seize the initiative, the other becomes reactive or at best, responsive.  Some men formed an early men’s movement that bifurcated in two opposing directions; the first affirmed a primitive, loin cloth-wearing masculinity, with drums and chants around the fire, and the second adopted an excessively passive, apologetic posture that belied the complexities of gender differences and the possible avenues for redefining them.  I could join neither, sought a middle way, and kept searching for ways to join hands as a partner in the feminist revolution.  I wasn’t always welcome.

Over the years, as is true of successful revolutions, there has been wave after wave of criticism and aspiration in the feminist revolution.  With each wave, men – including those like me — have had to find a way to take in and learn from the criticism, learn to be better partners, and at the same time, both nurse our wounds and define a just and sensible masculinity.  It has been easy to deal with the broad aspirations of the women’s movement.  Its values are wholly compatible for all of us who have supported equal rights for Blacks, Latinos, immigrants, and oppressed people of all kinds.  It has been harder to deal with the revolutions in our own homes, to manage our own defensive reactions, and to find ways to affirm the transformations.

 

 

 

 

Stand Up for Real Men, Tom Brady

Dear Tom Brady,

I’ve been wanting to speak to you candidly about a man some think of as your friend, Donald Trump.  In my mind, he’s no man at all.  In fact, he’s giving men a bad name.  Let me try to explain myself and, with luck, bring you onto my team.

To begin, I know in my heart that Trump doesn’t represent what even men raised in old fashioned “macho” traditions stand for.  He lacks the backbone to admit when he’s wrong.  That’s a primal sin where you and I come from.  Coward that he is, he blames others for all of his failings. Your lineman are very clear about this: Tom never throws us under the bus to cover his own mistakes.  Trump always does that.  Your lineman talk about your loyalty.  The minute you might be a liability to him, Trump throws you over.

We  also know that he takes advantage of women.  For that matter, he will exploit and overpower anyone who permits it.  Power comes first in his world.  Values, compassion, kindness fall to the rear.  Is that manliness?  We weren’t raised to get every last ounce of what we can take.  We want to reap the harvest of our efforts but not to take and take, especially from women.  Donald Trump embarrasses me when he does.  I bet you are with me on this one, Tom.

We don’t have to be that perceptive to understand that Trump is afraid of women.  Afraid in the primal, pre-verbal way that some species are afraid of others.  Unless women are entirely pliant and worshipful, he protects himself by putting them down.  God help a woman who might be honest and, at times, critical.  If he weren’t so afraid, he’d be kinder, more respectful, actually interested in what they think.  He wouldn’t need all those surrogates mouthing words for him in public

Donald Trump seems to believe that he can ride over his own fears and activate ours with his bullying ways.  And too often he succeeds.  But—and here I really hope you are with me, Tom—when we were growing up, didn’t we learn that bullies were insecure guys who had to prove, over and over, that they were stronger or, at least, that they weren’t weak.  Because they are weak.  You can beat a bully by standing up to him, which is what real men like you need to do, Tom.

Like a baby, Donald Trump needs constant attention.  “Look at me, look at me,” he tells us.  So do my grandchildren but by the age of four or five they already like to share the limelight with their siblings, friends, and parents.  In small children, we know that this kind of narcissism is necessary to build up their egos.  But once built, the ego no longer needs the constant, fawning attention of others and turns, instead, to learning, doing, accomplishing, joining.  Weren’t we guys taught to say “aw shucks” after praise and then head to the sidelines so others could share the goodies.

It looks like Donald Trump never made that transition into adulthood.  The biographies about him tell us that his is a severely injured ego that can never have enough reinforcement.  All you have to do is read a little bit to find out how much his father tore him down and destroyed his confidence.  It seems as though Donald learned to fake it in order to survive.  I’d feel sorry for him if he didn’t hurt so many others.  Real men—the men we are or aspire to be—don’t need constant reinforcement.  We can be by ourselves, take pride in our work, take pleasure in solitude, enjoy our families.

Donald, may seem nice.  But, after watching his performance over the last year, you’d have to admit, it’s a show.  He’s really as selfish as they come.  “Me, me, me” is only followed by “mine, mine, mine” in his vocabulary.  Can real men endorse this?  Don’t we have enough inner strength to put off such gluttony?  Can’t we be sufficient unto ourselves? At least in our dreams?

Then let’s compare his actions with the ethical truths we hold dear.  Trump is neither Christian, Jew, nor Muslim.  He has no honesty, no charity, no generosity, no natural kindness.  His values go directly against the teachings of all our religions about what a good man should be and do.

Tom, by now you know this is true.  Help me to push him out of our club.

Let’s push him out into the desert, Tom.  Expose him to the hot, glaring sun, where all can see.  Trump is a long way from the lean, mean “fighting machine” that we men are supposed to be.  Nor is he the spare, soft spoken guy who keeps his own counsel and lots of strength in reserve.  He talks excessively.  He preens.  He’s a show off.  That’s not us.

I could go on but I hope my point is clear.  We men—if we are men—need to repudiate virtually everything Donald Trump does, and reject virtually everything that he stands for.  I’m holding us to task.  We need to maintain—or recover—what we like about our own manhood, and insist that Trump does, too.  Short of that, we need to withdraw his membership from our club.

As you know, Tom, celebrity has its responsibilities too.  You who stands up to charging lineman, who chose a wife with strength and character, who loves and admires the women and men in his family…it’s time for you, for us all, to stand up.

 

Values: Finding Your Way Between Constancy and Change

I’ve held a set of core values constant throughout my life – for example, the importance of social justice and the need to do more than talk about it.  There is nothing ephemeral about these values.  They are at the central to my being. They are how I know myself and how others know me.  They connect me to my parents and probably to their parents; to my wife and my children; and to my friends and colleagues; they are evident in my past, and present, and hopefully my future as well.

At the same time, the world and I keep changing, and often these changes challenge the viability and applicability of my core values. There are times when the idea that “all are created equal”—and will be given equal opportunity to thrive—seems alive, reflecting positive, forward-moving cultural and political transformations that we have made. There are other times when these ideals seem like distant, almost childlike, dreams.  These different perspectives don’t rest only on the “evidence” of  social change at any given moment.  They are also responsive to my own moods and my perception of how well I am able stay the course of my cherished values, what adaptations I need and can make.

Ultimately, there is a tension between constancy and change.  How much can we change without losing integrity, an enduring sense of who we are in the world, and how much can we stay who we have been without becoming rigid.

Oddly, constancy and change are essential allies to one another.  All species, the human one, too, must adapt to environmental change in order to maintain their stable identity.  Trees adapt to soil and wind changes.  Frogs, wolves, and insects change in response to their contexts.  In biological parlance, morphostasis (change) serves homeoststasis (stability). We change in order to attempt to remain essentially the same. So it is with people and their social context.

During the last month, I have begun a series of interviews with elders (at least 70 years +) who have sustained their efforts over many years on behalf of what we can roughly call social justice.  They still serve as leaders in their communities.  I’d like to begin sharing some observations about how they have managed to keep the faith.

There are many strategies that people build in order to navigate between their values and their lived experience – in the language above, between the demands to stay constant and to change.  Let’s consider these three:  Some resist change and build a stable world that supports the constancy of their values.  Others deepen their inner convictions in order to neutralize changes in the world that might contradict those convictions.  A third group acknowledges and credits the changes “out there,” and develops new strategies to meet a changing world.  All three approaches serve the stability of the values.

Stability in time and space. Some of the elders have created what looks like a timeless universe.  I met a Boston couple, for instance, who began their muscular community activism half a century ago, and continue to this day at the center of a strong  civic association.  They have retained many of the same friends, associates—and maybe even the same adversaries.  For example, those who would “gentrify” their neighborhoods by bringing ungainly buildings and outside businesses into residential areas and forcing out the more vulnerable older members.  The couple live in the same house and others know where to find them.  When I ask if they have had to change over the years, they say, simply, “No.” They like who they are and they still fit in their milieu.  From my perspective, I see admirable a wonderful power and efficacy in their stable ways.

Deepening inner conviction to fight outer change.  When the world is more than usually challenging to our values, when it seems that social justice will be subverted at every turn, as it is under the current Republican reign, it is easy to doubt, to wonder if we can hold onto those values.  One strategy for doing so is to insulate our convictions.  We do that in two ways: first, by not measuring their successful application day by day; second, by deepening them so that they can remain almost untouched by current affairs.

In the past, the goals of social justice seemed good, important, but now they take on an emotional urgency and depth that is closer to religious experience.  With this kind of transformation, our relationship to the values changes from ‘doing good’ to a ‘calling,’ a way to live and work that defines us at the well of our being.  A extreme illustration of that kind of change might be John Brown, an abolitionist, who became so convinced that social and political change would not happen through normal processes that he became what, today, we would call a terrorist.

Generally, though, faced with great odds to realizing social justice, we adopt a more faith-based feeling and attitude.  We will continue to act for social justice even if we fail for the moment.  We will act because we “must.”  We are internally comforted by what feels like a certainty that may once have depended on practical accomplishments but now looks and feels more like hope, and faith.

For the religious-minded, God has chosen their path and they are servants of God’s plan.  Prayer and the company of other congregants help them see the plan clearly and return to it when they have strayed.  Secular believers often see social necessities and practical plans with greater force and clarity.  “This is where we must go.  These are the programs we must build.”  Some see that pathway with a passion that might look to outsiders very much like religious belief.

Recently, I spoke with a highly successful and practical business woman.  In retirement, her commitment to human — and especially women’s — rights has only grown stronger.  She calls herself an optimist.  As nonprofit leader and mentor, her job is to pass along her optimism, her belief in social justice, as though from her DNA to the next generation’s DNA.  The image is visceral, almost literal with her.  If you look closely, her internalized feel for the march of history is not so different than a divine plan.  I had long identified with this kind of vision.

Adapting strategies to remain internally stable.  As I have aged, my own commitment to social justice has required more effort; it no longer is carried along without tending, as though by a deep terrestrial stream.  During my early years, that sense of easily hewing to my values was accompanied by a belief that their realization was mostly a matter of destiny, with a little help from committed citizens.  This narrative has been shared by millions of others, beginning with the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20^th century:  The human condition would improve by regulating the otherwise unruly conditions of a laissez-faire economy and greedy capitalists, and by implementing safeguards to protect the health and well-being of common people.  We needed only to devise ways to promote the “greatest good for the greatest number.”

Those beliefs presumed that human beings are essentially good.  Free from social and psychological duress, we would almost invariably act generously towards our fellow human beings.  But that undergirding assumption of mine has been eroded. I have become more skeptical about human nature.  During the last decade or two, I have come to believe, with the Founding Fathers, that human beings are not so benign.  They have good and generous impulses, but they are also greedy and tribal, often pitting their own group against others.  “America First” is only one expression of this inclination.

I see now that people are anxious and defensive about their safety and property; and, when they even imagine others will attack, they attack first.  Where once I lived in the world of Rousseau I have become a disciple of Thomas Hobbes.  Where I believed that the freer the populace, the more generous and peaceful it would become, I now believe in the need for restraints on this rougher human animal that I’ve come to know.  I believe in structure, checks and balances, careful organization—a Constitutional form of government—to guard against our baser impulses and provide room for our better angels to emerge.

In other words, the prime value of justice, learned at my parents’ dinner table, has persisted.  I recognize myself in it.  But, with my darkening world view, I no longer believe in the manifest destiny of social justice.  There is no plan that I see.  There is only our own, unending efforts on behalf of our ideals that will make a difference.  I see that new strategies and structures are essential to putting my values into effect.                          ———————————————————

These are some early forays into making meaning from my interviews and personal musings.  My hope is that they provide a framework that helps you see a little more clearly how you have adapted to current events, and that you will share those efforts with me.  

 

Relationships as Covenants

Professor Jameson said very clearly that his church, evangelical and puritanical, was at the center of his family.  You could only understand them by understanding their faith in Jesus and their deep commitment to Christian doctrine.  His wife nodded.  His teenage daughters nodded.  Even his 15 year old son seemed to agree.

The occasion was an interview that I was conducting for a television pilot.  We wanted to explore—and celebrate, I thought—the great variety of American families.  As I began to explore Professor Jameson’s opening, there was a knock on the one way window that separated us from the camera man and the producer.  The producer was already bored.  The pilot needed something juicy in order to win over his audience.  He wanted to know how the parents dealt with the girls so-far-unexpressed dating desires.  I did too, I said.  Let’s see how a deeply Christian family deals with it.  He wanted to watch them negotiate or argue, which I already knew wouldn’t happen in public, if ever.

Over the next hour, the producer interrupted several times and I never got as deeply as I wanted into the specific covenant that bonded the family together.  That was about twenty-five years ago but I remember it perfectly because it spoke to an idea that has become thematic to me: marriages, families, organizations, and communities who are united by a belief in something beyond themselves, are more securely bonded than those who come together simply on the basis of mutual or negotiated agreement.

The origin of the covenantal idea is biblical.  For example, when Abimelech and Isaac decided to settle their land dispute, they made a binding agreement, a covenant, to live in peace.  When Moses brought the Ten Commandments to the Jewish people, their relationship to the Commandments was said to be covenantal, which I think means that the relationship with God sealed and strengthened the relationship between Moses, the secular leader, and his community.  Thus the Jews were said to be people of the covenant.

The best way to describe covenantal relationships may be by comparing them to what might be called transactional relationships.  In the law, these are written agreements or promises between two or more parties, generally “under seal” and concerning some performance or action.  Transactional contracts are quid pro quo arrangements.  I agree to do this if you do that.  If one of us fails, the other is no longer obligated to fulfill his part of the contract.  There is no assumed relationship, no necessary loyalty, and it can end when either chooses.

Free agency in sports is a good example of how this works.  The dramatic change in employer-employee relations, once a lifetime affair, ensured by loyalty to an almost family-style relationship, and now a matter of financial calculation, also illustrates the transactional style.

There can, of course, be common ground between the two types of agreements.  If, for example, both parties believe that the law, itself, is sacred, if the agreement is thought to be not only formal but also solemn and binding, then the agreement might be considered covenantal.  But in most cases this is not so.

The covenantal relationship is more like a three legged stool.  Two people or groups come to an agreement but another force is present.  It could be God.  It could be a shared sense of mission, a shared set of values—something larger, more important than the two people and the particular agreement.  If this is so, any breach in the agreement is a transgression, not just against the other party but also against God or sacred values.  In that case, you don’t violate the terms of the agreement very readily; nor do you leave the relationship with ease.

There is, however, a complicating factor in covenantal relationships: the assumption of free will.  As in a transactional agreement, a covenantal relationship must be elected.  You have to make a decision and, once made, you have to be all in.

The combination of a binding yet freely elected relationship has a paradoxical quality.  If you opt in why can’t you opt out?  How do you sustain the experience of permanence when you have free will?  I believe that solving this paradox is at the heart of virtually all spiritual and religious experience.  At the risk of extending myself way beyond my own understanding, let me propose a few keys to such a solution.

The first is a willing suspension of disbelief.  You simply insist, internally and externally, that the compact is forever—or, as they say, until death do us part.  During the marriage ceremony, for example, we are aware, cognitively, that divorce is a possibility, but we will ourselves to deny it.  The marriage is forever—and we believe it.

This brings me to the second key to sealing a covenantal relationship: ritual.  Over and again, rituals like anniversary celebrations and yearly religious celebrations of Easter,  Passover, and Ramadan consolidate our connection to past, present, and future.  They remind us emotionally, more than cognitively, that the covenant is eternal and sacred.

The third key is to hold both sides of the apparent contradiction—freedom of choice and permanence—together, in one hand, one breath, hold them so close that they touch and inform one another and no longer seem in conflict.

There is one last quality of covenantal relationships that I want to name.  In Hebrew, it is called hessed, which means loving kindness.  This speaks to the day by day quality of relationships, when discipline and spontaneity combine to bring generosity to one another.  By contrast, the binding power of relationships that lack hessed feels obligatory, tolerable, necessary, reasonable.  But not enhancing.  The very nature of obligatory relationships is that they are often bothersome and, in fact, unreasonable.  When that is so, the parties resist.  The thought of leaving can seem practical and relieving.  Leaving becomes easier.  Short of leaving, checking out, living within the relationship but without strong feelings becomes the norm.

When you combine the sacred quality of a covenantal relationship with free will and loving kindness, relationships become strong and life giving.  This is an idea—an image and a feeling—that has come to me late in life.  I could not be more grateful.