Living Love
Rev. Claudia Frost
2-14-2010
We are born to love. We need love. This human need never ends. Love is more than words and phrases…..more than emotions and feelings. Every Sunday we speak of love. Love is the doctrine of this church .God is Love.
Since 1793 our Universalist ancestors have preached the radical doctrine that “all would be saved” ….all people are loved by God. John Murray gave us the charge: “ Go out into the highways and byways of America…to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women.” He said, “Give them, not hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.”
Are we living up to this charge? Do we know what is means to be living examples of divine love? Living love is the love embodied by our Unitarian Universalist faith. Often we use the phrase “God is Love” Does that mean human love is Divine? Is there any love that is not divine? Perhaps, for love is not just saintly angelic, serving love, or glorious acts of selflessness and martyrdom. I’m talking about the love given to others …..everyday acts of opening our hearts; stretching our awareness and patience, to see others by the heart for who they truly are, to accept others as they are in all their imperfections. Living love requires us to keep open the door of our hearts. Love makes demands on us. It demands us to rise to our highest potential.
Our Unitarian Universalist faith calls us to love. Our purpose in life is to embody love…..to live love……but our humanness often gets in the way. Our ideals often far outreach the everyday reality of our behavior and we fall short ….as Rev. Tom Owen-Towle said, “We are often anything but holy.” But then as a covenantal people who have held together throughout our long Unitarian and Universalist histories, we may fall short of who or what we want to be, we don’t all think or believe alike, but as our spiritual ancestor Francis David so eloquently said long ago, “We do not have to think alike to love alike”. We can return to our covenant and see one another by the heart……by living love, we can value the uniqueness of others and become able to know and value ourselves. People sometimes really try our patience. We become angry or hurt, but Love can carry us forward. We do not all believe alike but we can bond together in the understanding that our religious community invites us to risk love when we have been hurt in the past, felt dismissed or unseen or unheard. It asks of us to consider love when we feel cynical and to share love when we are happy…to receive as well as give and to become studied observers of love.
Unitarian theologian and ethicist, James Luther Adams said the “church is where we practice to be human.” This is a great place to practice how to love each other more and how to forgive one another too.
Church is where we should be challenged to see our uniqueness as well as our connectedness. This should be a place where we can examine our habits of thought and belief and examine and probe what separates us from others…..what makes up our sense of belonging and connectedness. How do we share that with others? Living love starts with loving ourselves. Then we can love the world for everything is connected……But how do we love ourselves? That’s pretty elusive. As author and poet, Gary Nepo says, it’s as difficult at times as seeing the back of your head.
Loving yourself takes courage. It requires belief in and a loyalty to something no one else can see, our own self worth. It requires paying attention to the original parts of ourselves; appreciating things about you. Loving yourself, understanding your own self worth, is an integral part of your being. Living love means taking time to nurture and appreciate yourself. If you don’t take time to acknowledge your self worth you can loose yourself….loss of self confidence, lack of joy and other negative emotions….loving yourself….self acceptance…self confidence improves and its important training for being able to love others…..Living love means taking care of yourself. Accept yourself, love yourself, forgive yourself, be kind, believe in yourself …knowing that you will make mistakes. Loving yourself requires courage to believe and stay loyal to your own self worth. In loving ourselves we will be more able to understand our connection to everything else.
Love is something all humans need to survive and flourish. Mother Theresa noted that “the hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.” We are born with a need for love…..a need that never ends. Love is embedded in what it means to be human ….to be alive…..The late Rev. Frank Shulman wrote that “Love is an instinct planted in us by God.” From the first to the last breath there is a deep instinct within us to love and a deep need to be loved. Jesus taught that love is the meaning of life. Perhaps you’ve known folks who have withdrawn and given up on life and others who live fully amidst life’s challenges.
When I was in 7th or 8th grade, I was asked by my Girl Scout leader if I would be willing to make regular visits to the local nursing home. She knew of a woman there who was requesting someone to come regularly to help her with letters she would dictate. So about every Saturday, I would go to her room. For about an hour or so she would dictate letters to her many relatives. She was a widow of many years and had no surviving children, and she so wanted to stay in contact with her remaining relatives. She told me that she needed to write them regularly so that they would stay in touch. Now this was before the days of personal computers. Long distance telephone calls were quite expensive and reserved for emergencies or only special occasions. I remember the first time I went to her room….I was a bit scared. I didn’t know what to expect. I saw her sitting by her desk. I had been told that she was blind but no one had prepared me for the fact that she was missing one eye. I hadn’t been around very many elderly people at that time. In fact at the time, she was the first person I had ever met who was over ninety. I must have been about thirteen or fourteen…..so my first impressions of the nursing home, of her arthritic hands, her walker, and the big black lace up shoes …..made me wonder what I had said “yes” to. But those first moments of fear and self-doubt quickly melted when she heard me call her name and looked in my direction. Her smile lit up the room as she motioned for me to come closer. I remember how blue her one eye was …how warm. She called me by my name and smiled at me again, a beautiful smile, and said, ”I’ve been waiting for you.” She instantly made me feel welcome and that my being present in her room that day truly mattered. And so our time together began. She would slowly dictate letters and I would write of her love and concerns to her family…..line by line. She loved being connected with people. She knew the secret of life is living love every day. I could see that she lived unconditional love in the ordinary details of life. Each time I visited and took the dictation of her letters to family and friends, she relayed ordinary life in the nursing home into an adventure of living love….telling who she met……who she came in contact with on the staff or new residents…..listening to their stories, giving them a smile with a bright gleam in that one eye. Though age continued to take its toll on her body, my friend’s life was renewed daily by the love she gave to each she came in contact with and the love that was returned. She had a light and a purpose and lived that love until the end.
Yet as Rev. Forrest Church said Love never ends. In several of his books he reminds us……The one thing that can’t be taken away…. even by death ….is the Love we give away before we go………. Love lasts and is capable of transcending our lifetimes in the people we love, the lives we influence, and the institutions we choose to give our hearts and gifts. I remember the widow with one eye whose smile could light up a room. Love lives on in memories.
Living Love also involves commitment. Love is a choice says Rev. Carter Heyward. It is “a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity- a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is a choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life.”
As Unitarian Universalists, our belief in love is one of inclusiveness for all humanity, not just a partiality for a select few. We know humanity is dependant upon each other for our common good. Some have called this common bond our common human cloak….a cloak of destiny…..It is a cloak of love. We each wear a cloak. For some the garment by seem worn thin, and tattered. Others appear to have thick, warm or luxurious cloaks. We might think it depends on how we have woven our cloak …..what financial resources we have to take care of it…..but if we step back and take a wider view, we can see it depends on how we’ve taken care of each other…..for we weave not only our own cloaks but those of all with whom we interact…..family, friends, community, our earthly environment, our world…..we are all woven together.
A natural solidarity forms when people believe it is possible to be bound by a greater love for one another. Our commitment to one another and to this gathered body, the institution, can hold us in relationship when we have to risk confrontation and speak the truth in love. We can model and teach one another how to engage respectfully and truthfully with those whom we disagree rather than avoiding such conversations altogether. When we have a real relationship with one another, it builds an emotional bank account that can withstand wide differences of opinion and difficult conversations.
As Unitarian Universalists we have a religious commitment to counter hurtful voices in the name of love. Last June the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations launched a Standing on the Side of Love campaign. At first, people might have thought this campaign only had to do with our denomination’s support of marriage equality, but it is more than that. The Standing on the Side of Love campaign is really about living our theology of love. This means living love in a more public way to say that we are a compassionate and activist people of faith who are willing to speak up in everyday situations in support of the worth and dignity of others. The Standing of the Side of Love campaign works with congregations and communities to confront exclusion, oppression, or violence based on identity…whether that identity has to do with sexual orientation, gender identification, immigration status, religion, race, or any other label that society uses to limit a person’s rights.
John Murry gave us the charge,
“to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women. ……to preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.”
I charge each of you to become more aware of the love you give to others…..those everyday acts of opening our hearts, strengthening our patience, sharing our inner light with those we meet. Think about how you are living love…..how are you living your faith? See if you can catch yourself when your humanness gets in the way of your ability to listen, to truly be present with another person. Be on the look out for ways you can stand on the side of love as you live your faith in the real world. In the months ahead, I’d love to hear your stories of living love.
Happy Valentine’s Day. ………….Amen.
Sources:
Forrest Church, Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow, Beacon Press: Boston, Massachusetts, 2008.
Charles A. Howe, Universalism For Such A Time As This, Phamplet #3079, Unitarian Universalist Association, 1993.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have, Conari Press: Port Beach, Maine, 2000.
Ardath Rodale, Reflections, Finding Love, Hope, and Joy in Everyday Life, St. Martin’s Press: USA, 2002
J. Frank Schulman, The Christmas Message of Faith, Hope, Love, Emerson Unitarian Church, Houston, TX, 1987.