“When I Speak of Love”
by Dan Schatz

When I speak of love,
I do not mean romance,
though it, too, deserves praise.
I do not mean a warm feeling,
though goodness knows we need
warmth in bitter times.

When I speak of love,
I do not mean making friends,
though I could use them,
and I recognize
only love
creates friendship
from the ashes of enmity.

When I speak of love,
I do not mean acquiescence,
self-sacrifice,
cheap forgiveness,
or a false promise of perfection.
No.
The world is over-filled already
with such easy sentiments.

When I speak of love,
I mean nothing more
or less
than opening to what is sacred
in all of us,
even when it is broken,
even when it is hidden,
even when it is inconvenient.

    This love
    transforms
    and illumines
    my heart.

    This love
    shapes my living.

    This love
    demands
    better of me,
    always.

    This love
    brings me home
    when I have lost my way.

So
when I speak of love,
please do not shake your head,
or smile in condescension.
Instead,
listen
to your soul’s own longing.

Together,
let us speak of love.

Sermon: “Centered in Love”

Love can be oddly controversial.

It is at once lauded and dismissed, raised to divine heights – literally, because so many define God as love – and simultaneously ridiculed as being sentimental, gushy, and just plain naive. Sometimes I hear both sentiments from the same people.

For what it’s worth, I think both approaches, when we take them to extremes, yield the same useless result. Love just isn’t worth bothering with, either because it requires perfection beyond our reach, or because it is for children and romantics, and we have more important things to be getting on with.

And of course, on Valentine’s Day, love often becomes a mere commodity.

It’s amazing, really, that we bother at all.

This is a not a new problem. When William Ellery Channing, the great Unitarian of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, wrote about love, he felt obliged to clarify that he was not talking about a “constitutional tenderness,” “an instinctive sympathy,”  “the natural and almost necessary attachment to friends and benefactors,” or even “the kindness which is inseparable from our social state and which is never wholly extinguished in the human breast.” It’s not that he didn’t value these things. You can tell he did, but for him love was a virtue at the center of his way of being religious. Love, he said, is “the brightest communication of divinity to the human soul,” “the growth and manifestation of the soul’s moral power.”

Hosea Ballou, the leading Universalist of that era, was even more eloquent, and in true Universalist form, far more enthusiastic.

“There is nothing,” he wrote, “in heaven above, nor in the earth beneath, that can do away sin, but love, and we have reason to be eternally thankful that love is stronger than death, that many waters cannot quench it, nor the floods drown it; that it has the power to remove the moral maladies of mankind, and make us free from the law of sin and death, to reconcile us with god, and to wash us pure in the blood of life, of the everlasting covenant. O love, thou great Physician of souls, what a work hast thou undertaken!”

Now there’s a lot to unpack there. Ballou was interested in atonement, salvation. People were constantly accusing Universalists of ignoring the reality of evil, because we believed nobody would be punished for their sins with hell. That’s what Universalism means. But for Ballou, the threat of punishment did nothing to heal the broken soul. Love – divine and human – was the only remedy.

When you come right down to it, Channing and Ballou were essentially saying the same thing. Love is what allows us, encourages us, implores us to live our values. When Channing spoke of the “soul’s moral power,” that’s what he meant. Love is that within us which urges us to the good. When Ballou wrote about freeing us from sin, he wasn’t just talk about God’s grace and universal salvation. He was talking about the power that allowed us to move toward heaven right here on Earth. Love, he was saying, is what allows us to overcome our worst impulses and embrace the best. It’s the same message.

And that message, though sometimes muted, has remained at the center of Unitarian Universalism ever since. The foundation of love is deep within our UU psyche.

But it is true that for awhile we didn’t use the word so much. For a couple of decades, we shied away from the talking about our faith in terms of love. Maybe it started in the 1960s, when “love” became a counter-cultural touchstone, or the 70s when too many used it as an excuse for poor boundaries and bad behavior. Or maybe “love” just didn’t feel rational enough for that era. So for a long time, love felt like an afterthought.

But it was always with us. It’s by far the most common word in either of our hymnals, and when I looked back recently at some of my sermons over the thirty years I’ve been preaching them – they’re pretty much all about love.

So much of who we are centers on the transforming power of love.

When we talk about human dignity and worthiness, to me, that’s about love. When we talk about respecting the inherent web of existence of which we are a part, that’s love too. Justice and compassion and equity are rooted in love, because it’s love that calls us to recognize there is something sacred in every person, even when it’s broken or hidden, and even when it would be so much easier to dismiss another person as inhuman because of their actions. The nineteenth century satirist Ambrose Bierce wrote that the definition of a Universalist is someone who denies themselves the advantages of a Hell for members of other faiths. I think the modern version would be that we deny ourselves the satisfaction calling someone a monster, even when all the evidence tells us they thoroughly deserve it. Love teaches that no human being is beyond redemption – even if redemption seems highly unlikely. But as Carey McDonald and Terasa Cooley said, “Love is hard. Do it anyway.”

I would even argue that even our UU emphasis on questioning and truth seeking is rooted in love, because we understand that every human being has something to contribute. There is a spark of sacredness in everyone, so honoring our thoughts, our questions, our insights, becomes an act of love. Our Unitarian Universalist pluralism is, itself, centered in love.

I recognize that love can be an awfully difficult ideal. I don’t know many people who manifests it perfectly. Most of us have had at least some moments when we’ve been neglectful, inconsiderate, or downright rude, when we’ve dismissed other people’s humanity, or acted without regard for the common good, or when we’ve hurt other people, whether through a lack of care or through intention. Many of us have done some of those things this week.

And if that thought leads you to be hard on yourself, I hope you can let that go, because placing love at the center of our faith also means loving ourselves, despite our flaws, imperfections, and misdeeds. We need that love to lift us from such moments. That’s part of what Hosea Ballou was talking about when he said that love makes us free, that love can wash us pure, that love reconciles us to the sacred. I realize that sounds like something you might hear at a revival meeting, but you know? Maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world. Under Ballou’s leadership, the Universalist church became one of the largest religions in America, so I think he had something going.

But no, it isn’t easy.

Recently a friend of mine reflected on his struggles with love in a time with so much hatred and upheaval. Doug is not a theologian; he’s a luthier, an instrument builder. He makes dulcimers for a living. He is also a deeply compassionate human being. With his permission I share some of what he wrote with you.

“Long ago, he said, “at least for me, I found that loving everyone isn’t an action but a state of being, and if you taste it, doing differently isn’t an option anymore. But loving is often considered inseparable from liking, and I disagree with this. Loving everyone is acknowledging the commonality of our human existence and losing the ability to dehumanize people, but liking or not liking someone is more on the surface of reality, while love goes much deeper.

“The current state of this country and the degenerate culture that thrills so many break my heart. I have times of being remarkably pissed off, and it can be hard for me to contain it, and sometimes, I fail to contain it…. So I am trying to navigate anger and sadness while choosing to participate in the world rather than withdrawing from it.” “So the adventure,” he said, “continues.”

I believe there is something sacred within each of us. That’s what it means to me that every person is inherently worthy. And it’s not just the human. I believe there is something sacred in every part of this world, every atom and molecule. Love is what opens me to that sacredness, to honor its presence, whether or not I can see or detect it. Love is what leads me to fight with everything I can to preserve this earth, and all its peoples and species, despite what those in power may or may not believe about science. It’s not about God, in my theology, though it could be in yours. In a way it’s what Adam Dyer calls “Love beyond God.” Or, maybe it’s just a point of view that sees something sacred and chooses to honor that.

When we learn to honor the sacredness in all things, of course we’re moved to generosity and justice and compassion. How could we practice hatred while we speak of love? How could we dismiss another religion, or a gender identity, or ethnicity if we recognize the sacredness in all? How could we destroy the ecological balance of our planet if we practice love towards it?

Love is what drives the conscience of Unitarian Universalism. It’s why we strive so much to live our values with integrity, to embrace community, to look for the best within ourselves and others, to celebrate our differences, and to make compassion a spiritual practice.

So when we say that love is at the center of Unitarian Universalism, we mean it. Love, in more ways than one, is our heart. It’s what makes us care for this world, care for each other, care for ourselves. And like our own hearts, it’s a power that pumps life giving vitality into everything we do and everything we are.

This faith is love, and this love is holy.

May love guide us on our way
this day and all days,
and may love guide you home.