Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church-Unitarian Universalist

Revs. David and Leslie Takahashi Morris

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

November 19, 2006

Marriage (Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

by John Justice and Leslie Takahashi

Sermon: Rev. David Takahashi Morris

In the early days, we are constantly, electrically aware of one another. Everything about this new person fascinates us, and we’re constantly thinking of things we might do to help the relationship develop. This is true whether we’re in a new romantic relationship, or welcoming a new baby, or meeting new friends, or new colleagues at work. But that level of stimulation isn’t really sustainable in the long haul, and sometimes we fall into habits that put our relationships in jeopardy.

Our drama today highlights four of these habits. The Biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse appear in the Book of Revelation as a sign that the end of times is under way. They have traditionally been named Conquest, War, Famine, and Death.

Psychologist John M. Gottman, whose work today’s drama was adapted from, chose the Four Horsemen as a key metaphor for a book on marriage. His Horsemen are Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling. Like the Biblical riders, they gallop in and leave havoc in their wake, and they are heralds that the end is coming.

All of us have complaints in our relationships: You forgot our anniversary, you left my interview suit at the cleaners, you got ginger root instead of ginger powder at the store. It’s when we add negative words about our partner’s character, motives, or personality that the first horseman, Criticism, comes pounding in the door: You don’t really care about me; I can’t trust you with anything. Why do I bother making lists?

Criticism prepares the way for Contempt, when our criticisms convey not just a judgment of our partner, but a sense of our own superiority, a tone of condescension or even disgust. We don’t just say: Your approach to writing a business letter isn’t good enough (which is already critical); we say: I can’t believe you would write that.

Criticism and Contempt are often quickly followed by Defensiveness. We try to deflect the blame to the other person. The partner who found she’d missed a MasterCard payment COULD say: Oh, how did that happen? Well, I’m glad you noticed. Instead she says: You come in and paw over the mail like a spy to see if I’ve made a mistake so you can have the pleasure of jumping all over me.

Stonewalling also usually arrives on the scene as a defense. A partner who feels subject to attack withdraws, tuning out of the conversation—and eventually the relationship. We walk away in mid sentence. Or we don’t leave, but simply cease to participate.

Imagine the devastation to your spirit if you live in the constant company of these four toxic companions day after day after day. You don’t have to imagine it really: we could feel it in the room as the drama unfolded. It’s not only between spouses or partners, either. We have all heard someone speak this way before. Sometimes it was us speaking. Either way, we know these four communicative weapons deliver bruising blows and leave anguish in their wake. And there’s an escalation beyond the Four Horsemen as well, where hostility and aggressiveness move beyond verbal abuse. John Gottman doesn’t call his chapter on the Four Horsemen “Some Unfortunate Habits that Hinder Good Communication.” He calls it: “How I Predict Divorce.”

If this were a lecture on good behavior in committed relationships, the next thing out of my mouth might be “Don’t DO these things. Don’t talk to your partner this way.” Of course that wouldn’t be very effective. If you’ve ever heard these terrible wounding words coming out of your mouth, or if you’ve ever felt the slashing pain of them, you know it isn’t as simple as the Four Don’ts of Loving Communication.

And this isn’t a lecture. We’re engaged in another task here, what Ken Patton calls seeking “shyness behind arrogance, the fear behind pride, the anguish behind cruelty.”

What is behind these painful negative strategies? We don’t, most of us, consciously decide that we’re going to speak in ways that are hurtful for our loved ones and toxic for our relationships. Yet most of us will ride one of these horses sometime, to our own cost and someone else’s. What puts these feelings in our hearts; what puts these words in our mouths?

John Gottman says the Four Horsemen are a response to being “flooded” with a sense of danger. Something our partner says or does triggers panic within us and we respond to that panic with the most primitive reflex: Fight or flight. We use criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling to protect ourselves from our own, too-strong feelings. In the heat of an apocalyptic exchange with someone, we KNOW the whole thing is their fault, not the result of something in US. But most of the time, it’s actually the overwhelming hurt or fear or doubt they trigger in us that we’re attacking; they’re just suffering collateral damage.

If we’re going to resist letting these heralds of disaster become a dominant, destructive force in our lives, we have to learn what is opening the door for them in our hearts. What is it we’re afraid to fully acknowledge, to feel? We’re probably not really that upset about ginger powder, but we may be panicked at the thought of our parents ONCE AGAIN passing judgment on our cooking, our home, our life. We may speak with contempt because we’re afraid a partner—or child—who has different values or ideas or tastes from ours will be hurt by the world, or will leave us. We may live with the constant presence of someone’s critical voice in our mind, so that the first hint of criticism sends us into spasms of defensiveness. We may stonewall because we don’t think we have a right to our own opinion, or because the power of our emotions frightens us.

But we can make other choices. Intimate relationships are the most fertile ground for spiritual growth in our lives. To name those deep fears and hurts, to begin to work with them instead of letting them determine our actions is the beginning of growth, and it also acknowledges the fundamental truth of all relationships: The only person I can change is myself. In naming my fears and hurts, in working to heal the fissures of my being, to let them go and to make amends for the ways I’ve responded to them in the past, I open the way for love to grow stronger and brighter between us.

Sermon Leslie Takahashi Morris

This week I attended the meeting of the Southeastern Unitarian Universalist Association of Unitarian Universalist Ministers at The Mountain, a Unitarian Universalist Camp and Conference Center located in Highlands, NC. This was not my first trip to The Mountain. In 1991 I went for leadership school as a twenty-something who was about to be president of my congregation and who needed to learn a few things about relationships with my fellow religious seekers. I went looking for skills on how to run a meeting, how to set a vision for a larger organization, how to not feel so presumptuous about leading such a complex place about which I knew only a fraction. What I found was a path to deepening my spiritual life. In 1997, I was back at The Mountain seeking to support a friend who was a candidate for ministry, to find some time for the novel I was writing, and to see what this ministry path was about. And what I found was this person named David.

Going back to the Mountain last week gave me the chance to put breath back into my spiritual life. I rose in the mornings to stand on Meditation Rock and look out at the Blue Ridge Mountains. During our scarce free hours, I hiked down and plunged my hand into icy cold creek water. And it was a chance to reconnect with that excitement of meeting the one who would become my partner in love, life, child-rearing and ministry. Remembering the honesty with which he spoke. Remembering the first time I heard him sing. Remembering how we both got up in the middle of the night to see a comet and to keep company with a colleague. Sitting for a week in the room where we met let me rediscover this. If the word “spirit” the Hebrew word for “breath,” then we need these chances to how do put the spirit, the breath, back into our most important relationships. To break the cycles of bad habits such as criticism and stonewalling and those other habits lethal to commitment, we need to be open to new paths, which lead us back to the life-giving nature of our connections. And if no life-giving can be found, to break the ties that only restrict our breath.

At the Mountain, I walked with care and deliberation, trying to notice the natural world. In our relationships, we too can walk the path of intention. Creating a time to reconnect with a deeper sense of purpose, the old hurts that need healing, the vision you wish to create is religious work. Religion—that which binds—is about binding yourself to that which holds meaning and the relationships which shape our lives are among our deepest vessels for this. We are about to form a covenant group for parents and one for couples, a place to delve into the deeper conversation about what it means to live committed in a disposable world because we need more places to transcend daily tensions and reach for the far horizon of joy and knowing. Treating the lives you love as if they were sacred can help you take the time to touch, to feel, to release the mind and to still the thoughts that summon those horsemen. Michael Dowd, a Unitarian Universalist minister who presented at the Mountain last week talked about the way that touch and sensation can literally free us from spirals of anxiety and fear because of the way our brains are structured.

Another way to walk a time-worn path is with a new perspective and depth. I brought a flashlight on my trip and yet chose to navigate at night in the dark for it gave me a new appreciation of the place. Understanding your viewpoint, the eyes with which you see what you see, is part of the individual human journey that we travel here. This part of the journey takes place whether we are in partnership or not—it is about knowing yourself. When David and I met, we were both in a place where we needed to be doing that work on our own so while we acknowledged and greeted one another, we did not consider ourselves with the eyes of commitment until months later. The frame with which you behold the one you love, the ones you love, is shaped and reshaped by life and love itself. What do we take out of its growth and change and evolution? What are the visions we still living with that grow out of another time and space? At the Mountain, on my favorite path, a pine tree grows out of a large boulder. When I passed that a decade ago, it seemed interesting. Today the tree is taller and I have a better understanding of rock—and it seems amazing. We can try to see ourselves through our loved one’s eyes—and we can remember that the only person we can change is ourselves.

A path walked in gratitude can avoid contempt and defensiveness. To rise every day and be aware of the many gifts a partner or a lover or a spouse—or a child, a parent or a friend—offers is transforming work that can make the ordinary extraordinary. The appreciation is for one’s self, for the other, and for the relationship you form. The poet Ranier Marie Rilke’s is still my favorite definition of love: Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. My trip last week was my first stay at the Mountain in a number of years. Returning to that place after being away gave me that odd feeling of knowing a place and yet finding it remarkably changed. Isn’t that often the way when we take the time to consciously revisit our most important relationships? Aren’t they often familiar ground yet changed in some way by the ceaseless flow of time? My spiritual roots are in that place and yet my spirituality is more seasoned and nuanced than it was in those days. I still love David-- and it isn’t all about songs and starlight now.

We can return to our breath, to the place of our spirits, to where our loves were incubated with a greater understanding of what we find there. We can know how much harder love on this earth is to realize than we ever imagined and we can affirm, as our membership ceremony said, that faith in community and relationship will hold us fast in the inevitable times of storm and challenge. We can return with a much deeper sense of intention, perspective and gratitude that says my part, and mine is only part, is to treat the gifts of the spirit and love as sacred. We can know the size of our heart to be expanding. We can offer our loves in service to the larger life of the world. So may it be.