Opening to Love
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
November 17, 2019

 

There was a great turnout on Wednesday evening at Jalapenos Restaurant down the street. It was World Kindness Day, and our local Kindness Project, conceived and spearheaded by our very own Kelly Knox, held a celebration and fundraiser. Our choir sang “Filled with Loving Kindness”, the hymn we sang a few minutes ago. It’s a little unusual for a church choir to get up and begin singing in the middle of a busy and noisy Mexican restaurant; our own Gloucester UU version of a flash mob. I’m sure that some folks, deep in conversation, were a little surprised. But the din subsided, and gradually you could hear the attention being paid as people stopped talking and eating for a moment, and listened. At the end, everyone applauded, and then restaurant life began to return to normal. It was a moment of kindness – on the part of the choir members who showed up on a cold night, and on the part of the listeners. And the moment set the event apart: it sent a message that this was no ordinary dinner, but an opportunity to go a little bit deeper, to see and hear things a bit differently, and to pay closer attention to who was there, and why we were there.

Almost a year ago, Kelly noticed that World Kindness Day was going to be held on November 13, and she conceived a plan to hold Kindness Cafés throughout 2019 to invite people into a months-long conversation about Kindness, to nurture and cultivate kindness here on Cape Ann. In this era of meanness, of incivility, of people feeling empowered to be rude and dismissive of each other, it felt like a radical act of disruption.

In Kelly’s initial email, back on New Year’s Day, she invited us to think about a number of questions. The first one on her list was this: How are kindness and love related?

What a great question: how are kindness and love related?

I have been thinking about this question for several weeks now. Our theme for November is Attention, and we’ve been exploring this topic through a variety of lenses. We talked about the spiritual practice of deep listening, and how to find the sacred in moments of silence. Last week, Reverend Sue preached about the impact of distraction in our busy and noisy lives. And this exploration has led me to pondering these questions: can we love what we do not pay attention to? Can we be kind if we’re not paying attention, if we’re not aware?

There are so many things of importance to give our attention to. We all have our own lists, beginning with the most mundane, the most prosaic. We have to pay our bills, make sure we have shelter and food and clothing. But we humans are called to go far beyond this basic functioning in order to reach a place of reverence, and of kindness.

For starters, how well do we pay attention to our surroundings? Perhaps it’s easier for us here on Cape Ann, in this area of great natural beauty. But have we stopped to notice how gnarled and twisted are some of the tree branches as they appear now without leaves, or the shadows of tree trunks on boulders? Or the fallen leaves swirling in the wind? Did you see the full moon first shining and then rapidly obscured by the wind-blown clouds on Thursday night?

We may say we love our Earth, our home. We might be aware of grim statistics warning of a great upheaval in our climate and our way of life. But knowledge of the statistics won’t teach us to love our home. It’s our attention, our taking time to observe, that will draw us into loving relationship, into striving to treat the earth kindly, to care for other creatures who face extinction, to become reverent toward this planet. It is noticing the beauty, the untold variety of species of plants and animals, and the ongoing cycle of life that draws us toward love, toward reverence. We can teach children all about biology and botany, so that they might have a full understanding of how the earth works: all its systems and cycles. But if they never take a walk on the beach, looking for fish and shells and stones, if we never introduce them to the woods to hear birdsong and look for toadstools, and watch the leaves rustle in the breeze, they will not learn to love the earth, to feel reverence for it. Knowledge is part of what is needed to survive. But attention is needed more: for without attention we will not learn to love what is around us. How can we love what we do not notice?

I’ve been using the word ‘reverence’. This is a word that can have strong religious connotations, and some might find it challenging to hear or to consider. What is meant by ‘reverence’? It turns out that reverence is a virtue; the virtue, according to philosopher and historian Paul Woodruff, “that keeps people from trying to act like gods.” (Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, HarperOne, 2009, p. 21). Woodruff defines reverence as “…a deep understanding of human limitations; from this grows the capacity to be in awe of whatever we believe lies outside of our control – God, truth, justice, nature, even death.” (Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 3.) He continued, “…reverence kindles warmth in friendship and family life…without reverence, things fall apart… Without reverence, we cannot explain why we should treat the natural world with respect. Without reverence, a house is not a home, a boss is not a leader, an instructor is not a teacher.”

Paying attention, then, fosters reverence, that sense of our place within the larger whole, that sense of what is greater than ourselves, beyond ourselves. Paying attention fosters reverence, and humility.

And a sense of reverence fosters kindness. When we can see ourselves as part of something larger, our focus shifts. We can see more clearly, and notice all those around us in need of our kindness, our attention, our compassion.

I described the Kindness Project earlier as a radical act of disruption. And right now we are going to engage in yet another act of disruption: we are going to quietly pay attention to each other, all of us right here in this sanctuary. Take a moment now to look at your closest neighbor. You don’t have to say anything, or offer a hug or a handshake. Just turn to each other, and look at one another carefully, and kindly. Smile, if this feels awkward.

(pause)

The author of this morning’s reading, Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor, wrote this: “Reverence for creation comes fairly easily for most people. Reverence for other people presents more of a challenge, especially if those people’s lives happen to impinge on your own.” (op. cit., p. 27). Certainly we see that in our crowded existence here in Gloucester, with our narrow streets, the congestion, the lack of parking, the trash that we humans carelessly cast aside. Recently on social media, on one of the local Gloucester Facebook pages, a woman shared a photo of a note that someone else had left on her car. The writer of the note decided to comment about the woman’s appearance and facial features. It was possibly one of the meanest things I have ever seen, just a wholesale attack on a complete stranger – anonymous, of course.

It can be so easy to forget that we are judging another human being. Wrapped up in ourselves as we so often are, we can forget that another person might be suffering from depression, or maybe just received some terrible news. And also, we are so complex: so alike and so different all at once, and it can be hard to connect across the differences. We have different abilities, different skin colors, speak different languages. We are vulnerable to a long list of physical and mental health challenges. We are gay and straight, cis- and transgender, liberal and conservative. It can be hard to view each other with reverence. We’ve been taught to see everything in black and white, but we live in a rainbow world. All the more need for some radical disruptions: for the Kindness Project, and for moments such as we just experienced here in worship, where we paused just long enough to really see each other, to notice and pay attention to each other. Who looked sad, or tired? Who looks particularly happy this morning? Did we have a chance in that moment to see beneath the masks we carefully put on to hide our imperfections?

Barbara Brown Taylor went on to comment that when we notice people in this way, truly pay attention to them, that suddenly, we can see that we are not at the center of everything. We might think of others as peripheral, but when we pay attention we can see that they might only see us on the margins as well. And that leads us back again to reverence, leads us back to that understanding that there is something larger than us, something more important than us.

Paul Woodruff had another surprise for me. He wrote, “It is a natural mistake to think that reverence belongs to religion. It belongs, rather, to community.” (op. cit., p. 5.). Reverence, our understanding of our place within the whole, gives us an appreciation of the importance of community, of the need for one another, for the lives that we share here on this beautiful and bountiful and fragile Earth.

When we practice paying attention, we are allowing ourselves to open. Our eyes and ears, our hearts, and our minds can open in response to all that we see around us: the great beauty that surrounds us, the humanity in each other’s faces. And of course, like all spiritual practices, we need to emphasize the word ‘practice’: it takes time and attention to learn to see other’s expressions, to see who might be shouting angrily but who might be in deep pain, and to feel compassion.

Paying attention draws us open: to kindness, to reverence, and ultimately, to love. This is deeply spiritual work, to notice, and as a result of our noticing, to care and to love widely, extravagantly, to experience the universal love that the Greeks named agape. If we believe, as the Universalists always proclaimed, that God is Love, then by learning to love the whole of life, the whole of creation, we are drawn into that great Love. We become part and parcel of it, and it becomes part of us in turn. Night turns to day, as we heard in our story.

My friends, at the beginning I shared Kelly’s question: how are kindness and love related? And I shared the question that has been with me in recent weeks: can we love what we do not notice? Both of these questions hinge on the practices of paying attention, of teaching ourselves to notice, of returning to the ancient virtue of Reverence. These practices guide us toward kindness, and from there, we can open ourselves, our hearts and minds, to that universal Love that is in us and around us, always. May night turn to day for you, in the light reflected in another’s eyes. May you find yourselves opening to Love, and may you sense that Love all around you.

May it be so,
Amen.