February 4, 2024
By Rev. Kirk Ballin
READINGS FOR LOVE AND ONLY LOVE
1.” Soberingly, despite all our advances in technology and material resources, we are not much more advanced in the art of delivering emotionally healthy childhoods than generations before us. The number of breakdowns, inauthentic lives, and broken souls shows no marked signs of decline… We are failing to offer one another tolerable childhoods not because we are sinful or indifferent, but because we still have so far to go before we know how to master that improbably complicated subject: Love… Love is a skill not an emotion…” – 18 different authors, “The School of Life: An Emotional Education”
2. “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” – James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time”
3. “Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love “. Thich Nhat Hanh – “True Love”
4. Although some two hundred kinds of viruses are known to infect, sicken, or kill us, as the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 has most recently hammered home, that’s only one part of the picture. Viruses also keep us alive.
“Despite the devastating effects of viral diseases, the viruses that count most in our lives are crucial not in disease but in health and in all aspects of life,” says Eugene Koonin, an expert on the genetics of evolution and viruses at the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Biotechnology Information. – The Magazine, Harvard Medicine
Love is the power that holds us together and is at the center of our shared values. We are accountable to one another for doing the work of living our shared values through the spiritual discipline of Love.
Inseparable from one another, these shared values are:
Shared Unitarian Universalist Values
Good morning! To some extent, I am going to be plagiarizing from my own Sermon, “Shaving in the Shower”, which I delivered back in September of 2023. That’s because this is an extension of that sermon as the discussion moves forward on educating this congregation on the UUA Article 2 Revision being considered for adoption by the member congregations of the UUA, including this Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Harrisonburg. This Revision is the taking the previous/current Article 2, which is the 7 Principles, and, like various bold flavors, folding those Principles into what you see on your handout. It is NOT doing away with the 7 Principles. They are imbedded in the dynamic interactions of what you have in your hand.
At the heart of this is Love. A more in-depth conversation is needed to further explore the dynamics of the relationships of the 6 Values to this centrality of Love. But this morning I will primarily be speaking briefly about, Love.
What the World Needs Now Is Love Sweet Love (sing together). And, yes, this song from the 1960s is a beautiful example of how culturally we manufacture Love as a mask to fit our faces for our particular agendas. None of us here are necessarily against Love! But we do have our own convenient definitions and preferences for what Love is, including that it is “the answer” or even that Love is “just sentimental tripe”!
So much of what is presented as Love are masks we wear for our self-serving happiness – an infantile sense as Baldwin called it. But Baldwin’s other comment is what we need to pay attention to; that he means Love in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
In my sermon, I also quoted from Erich Fromm’s book, the Art of Loving, that Love is absolutely critical to addressing the basic needs of human nature, and how Baldwin’s understanding of Love underscores Fromm’s assertion. And I further underscored that this is the Love that is categorically necessary to take on the great unravelling of humanity and the biosphere. This understanding of Love is What the World Needs Now! No masks of sentimental songs or wishes or dogma will empower the Love of as the tough, universal sense of daring and growth that is critically required to address our existential crisis for survival. And no technological advances or scientific understandings that are not guided by this critical Love will address this great unraveling; all our solutions require being motivated, directed, and grounded in this tough, universal Love for the sustaining of the Biosphere, for energizing MLKing’s Network of Mutuality, this Interdependent Web of Existence of Which We Are A Part, to truly give birth to, shape to, life to the Beloved Community that embraces all of us, with us being all human beings and all the other manifestations of life on this planet.
At the June General Assembly of the UUA, the first phase of the 2-phase discussion and possible ratification of the Revised Article 2 of the UUA Bylaws was democratically approved by the UUA Congregations’ delegates in attendance. Inspired by exploration of an 8th Principle focused on fostering wholeness by building a Beloved Community by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves, in our institutions, and in the world community, this concept was the impetus for the Article 2 Revision.
To me, this 8th Principle inspired Revised Version of Article 2 UUA is a laser focused and challenging effort to foster this “tough and universal sense of quest and daring growth” in the understanding and empowerment of Love; understanding and empowerment of Love that are served by these 6 values. These Values foster Love as the skill humanity needs to survive. This dynamic relationship of the 6 Values in service to Love removes Love from being various masks of some cultural agendas and self-serving ideologies and puts Love center stage as THE force for survival. It says that we UUs are called to look at Love through the eyes and experiences of our values, values that are committed to fostering a Beloved Community and to be empowered to put these values in service to this Love at the Heart of the Beloved Community. This is the tough, essential, and skillful work we are being called to do as UUs, as human beings in service to addressing the severely unhealthy state of the world human community and the great unravelling of the Biosphere of which humanity is an integral part. Addressing this unhealthy unravelling is essential and critical to fostering the Beloved Community. And without Love, it is all for naught!
Nobody is born unlovable (repeat); when we’re born, everybody is loveable. Yet all of us struggle to say and believe that about ourselves or other people. Think about the people you consider loveable. Now think about the kind of people you find unlovable. Why, if each of us is born lovable, do we find ourselves not being loved and or not loving others? There are of course a myriad of reasons why we are not being loved and/or why we are not loving others. And therein lies the crux of our challenge as human beings – and the call to action of us UUs. Because it is our inability as individual human beings and as a world community of human beings to love ourselves and others in a healthy way that is putting our survival in jeopardy. Love is the only force that will transform the environment that will sustain human life and the biosphere as a whole. That’s why Love is at the center of the graphic on the screen.
So, then, what is this “improbably complicated subject” of Love, if it is so essential to the future of life, including the human world community? Well, that’s the point, isn’t it, of making Love so central to our survival, by making it so critical and essential to our survival? Each of us is being called to intentionally, constantly, daily, consciously, individually, and collectively ask ourselves “What is Love and how do I put Love into action?”. For Love is but a word if not put into action; Love is but a word if isn’t transforming the world into a healthier place. Love is not simply an emotion. It is the critical skill for healthy human relations and for our relationship with the greater Biosphere.
That’s what the whole of this graphic is doing. The 6 values help us to focus on how to define Love and how to practice Love in a way that is transformative in cultivating a healthier World Community and Biosphere, a truly Beloved Community.
For it isn’t simply about including those people whom we already say we love, because that ain’t really Love as it stands central to this dynamic; if it’s not constantly striving to include the wider circle of humanity, it is not part of this dynamic relationship, this “universal sense of quest and daring and growth”.
Of course, it certainly is Loving whom we already Love; but it must also be, and this is critical, discovering how to Love people with whom we have trouble finding reason to love; Loving the people we disagree with; loving the people who cause us and others harm; loving the oppressed and loving the oppressors; loving those who conduct wars; loving those who are victims of war; loving the homeless; loving the so called criminals, etc. It is, as Thich Nhat, Hanh puts it, understanding someone else’s suffering. And someone else is any other human being. If you don’t understand, you can’t love 2.
Each of us has our own walls that keep us from learning and understanding how to love all; walls that prevent the extension of the “Network of Mutuality” as MLKjr called it. As the Science Fiction writer, Ursula K. Le Guin phrased it: “Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go unbuild walls.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Love and only love will break down the walls we have built out of fear that have given opportunities for hate, prejudices, war, and exploitations to grow and flourish. And love and only love will build the bridges and pathways and communities to genuinely give birth and sustenance to build up the Beloved Community.
Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear, only love can do that.
We must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
Pie in the sky, you say? Idealistic thinking? Impossible? A Dream world? You bet it is! And it’s also our only possible reality for survival.
Whatever your understanding of love is hug it, embrace it; and now dare to let it grow and expand. The challenge is to grow your understanding of Love every day.
The beauty of Unitarian Universalism is that as a denomination we neither proscribe nor prescribe what it means to be religious or not. UUism does not forbid you to believe anything or dictate to you what you have to believe. It is a matter of individual conscience. An awesome personal responsibility, and the locus of accountability is upon you as an individual. And as a congregation that is in membership with other congregations in the UUA, that exercise of responsibility and accountability is through the democratic process of our member congregations.
What this process does is not forbid or dictate. Rather it seeks to help guide us in our efforts to be responsible and accountable as human beings as we seek transformation to heal the world community and the biosphere. So, there will never be a dictated UU definition of Love that you must abide by. Instead, there is a call to each of us to explore, to be challenged by, to put into action as individuals and as congregations what Love is. By whatever means and values you as an individual wish to pursue this is your choice, your responsibility, and your accountability. By whatever means this community wishes to explore this challenge of being responsible to and accountable for fostering the Beloved Community grounded in Love and nourished by and guided by the 6 values in service to Love is the call the Board and Membership of this congregation must heed, hear, embrace, empower, and repeatedly put into action within this community, the community at large, the world community, and the community of the Biosphere. (Facebook quote: “Take action from Love – not for Love”
So, it is my hope that as individuals and as congregations we UUs will intentionally, mindfully, respectfully, and passionately commit ourselves to asking ourselves what Love is, to asking ourselves how we can put that Love into transformative action and do it. Let this UU community be a healthy virus. And let each of you be a living, determined body of this healthy virus and spread it!!!