Love the Hell Out of This World ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
January 21, 2024
I read a story recently by the Reverend Susan Frederick-Gray, who just last June finished her term as the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association. She was remembering the time she discovered her son, who was then two, bringing his stuffed animals into the shower. She thought it might be a good idea to ask him what he was up to. And he told her that it was ‘shower church!’ So Susan asked her son what was going to be happening at shower church, and he told her that he would be preaching. “What about?” Susan wondered. “About love, Mommy,” he said. “It’s always about love.” (https://www.uuworld.org/articles/essential-spiritual-moral-value)
Our theme this month is Liberating Love, and as I mentioned earlier in the month, I had to do a little work to understand exactly what is meant by that term – liberating love. And I realized pretty quickly that it’s a love that frees us. It can be a personal, romantic love offered to someone else. If it’s unconditional and genuinely wants the very best for the beloved, then it will be liberating. If we feel secure and trusting in the love of another, we can really grow in confidence, and flourish. Loving ourselves can be equally liberating, be freeing. We can offer ourselves the compassion and gentleness we need to feel worthy. Practice saying something compassionate to yourself; something you might say to a dear friend. When we do that, we can feel our backs straighten just a bit, or feel that we can perhaps spread our wings and soar.
Liberating love can also be extended beyond intimate relationships, and beyond the self. This is a very different form of love; it’s not felt as an emotion, but rather, as purpose or mission. It’s often described as a desire for justice for everyone, or for peace. African-American author and speaker Cornel West is well known for saying that ‘justice is what love looks like in public.’
But what if we took this belief in liberating love for all even deeper? What if we thought of love as a religious practice?
We Unitarian Universalists aren’t well-known for our religious practices. We are allowed to do all sorts of things that are often forbidden by stricter religions: we are allowed to drink alcohol, to smoke, to explore our own sexual expressions. We don’t have a creed or a set of beliefs that we have to profess publicly. We’re not likely to give up things for Lent. Since people don’t see us performing a lot of rituals, or engaging in religious practices, a lot of people struggle to think of us as religious. Then again, a lot of us struggle to see ourselves as religious! Spiritual, maybe. Or maybe not. But it doesn’t matter. You’re all my people regardless.
But here’s the hard part: As Unitarian Universalists, we are called to practice love as our religion, and to name this as our practice.
We haven’t always been very good at this. Well, some of us haven’t. We haven’t always known how to talk about love. When the Unitarians and the Universalists merged in 1961, it wasn’t always a match made in heaven, especially when it came to understanding the nature of the divine. Historically, Unitarians were much more focused on the intellectual aspects of religion, and especially on what God is. Is God really divided into three parts? Can that be proven? Is that written in scripture?
Now, the Universalists emphasized not the nature of the holy, but how it showed up; how it acted in the world. And from their very beginning, the Universalists, from John Murray to Hosea Ballou, and on down the long line to today, Universalists were convinced that God is a loving force in the world. Since they usually framed it in 19th century language, they experienced God as a loving ‘Father’, who would never eternally punish the beings here on earth. God, they said, is love.
With that, the Universalists replaced that ancient fear of Hell; replaced it with a message of love – a message so radical at the time that it created anger and consternation. You can almost imagine it on a T-shirt: ‘God loves you and wants you to be happy.’ In fact, Hosea Ballou coined the word ‘happify’ to describe the effect of releasing people from their terror of a miserable eternity. Has there ever been a more liberating love than this doctrine that freed people from their fear? A love that results in ‘happification’.
In the early years of our newly formed religious tradition, Unitarian Universalism, the worry was that Universalism would disappear, be swallowed up. After all, we have this long name that few people understand, and it’s so easy for many people to just refer to us as ‘the Unitarians’. And historically the Unitarian churches were mostly wealthier, and that denomination was better organized, with a greater emphasis on learned clergy and scholarship.
And so it was that in 1985 when the current version of our Principles were adopted, they did sound very Unitarian. And there was an important word that was left out altogether. Our principles are lofty and inspiring. We talk about justice, and compassion. We talk about the worth and dignity of all people. We mention spiritual growth, and the search for truth and meaning. Over the years, I found that by choosing to live in accordance with our Principles, by using them as a guide for living a moral and ethical life, that it wasn’t hard for me most days to know the path I am on, to know usually what is the right thing to do. Following the principles truly has been my religious practice. I grew a great deal, informed by our Principles. And I grew to a point where I began to notice that something was missing. We left out one very important word. That word is Love. The Universalist word.
Our religious tradition has been on much the same sort of journey that I am on, personally. As we have matured, we have been called upon over and over again to speak up and protect the vulnerable, to work to expand human rights, to protect our planet. We have done this work out of our growing sense of justice. As we’ve matured as a religion, our hearts have grown larger as well. We have been able to hear the voices of those who have felt excluded or left behind by our religion, and are working to make space for them. In short, we have turned to embrace our Universalist heritage.
With that heritage as our foundation, love becomes our religious and spiritual practice. Love, in the form of compassion for all, and an understanding that all are equally deserving of justice. We draw the circle wide here; if no one is to be left out of heaven, then no one should be left behind here on earth, either. We are called to love the hell out of the world.
Love is at the center of our religion, and at the center of our religious practice. Liberating love – the kind of love that offers itself as compassion and empathy; the kind of love that works to remove artificial barriers so that other people may flourish and become all that they are meant to be. To free people from the discrimination and fear that have been holding them back.
So let’s take a look at our orders of service. There, you will see a graphic depiction of a religion that practices love, that puts love at the center of everything. I want to note that this is the work of artist Tanya Webster. For folks watching on YouTube who might not have an order of service handy, you can find this at uua.org. Here we see a flower graphic with Love at the center. All around Love we see six core values, all equal, all connected to each other and to the center. The proposed language for this section of Article 2 reads: “Love is the power than 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: Interdependence, Equity, Transformation, Pluralism, Generosity, and Justice.”
This way of depicting the proposed values has the benefit of being easy to visualize, easy to remember. But each value has a lengthier description that explains what each means to us as UU’s. I won’t read them all now, but I can help you find your way to them so you can read them for yourselves. And there are handouts downstairs. But I will share one example, one that’s especially important to me: Pluralism. It reads: We celebrate that we are all sacred beings, diverse in culture, experience, and theology. We covenant to learn from one another in our free and responsible search for truth and meaning. We embrace our differences and commonalities with Love, curiosity, and respect.
I like it. It contains words that we have grown into over the years, words such as sacred, theology, and Love. Religious words. And it also includes our older language encouraging our never ending search for truth and meaning in our world.
My friends, love takes many forms. It can be elusive, and quickly changing. It can make demands on us, it can call us forward to meet challenges, to do hard things. In the words of Patrick Murfin, “Love is the only magic –
It enriches the giver
As it nourishes the object…”
Think of the power that is love – power to enrich, to nourish, to liberate. And remember that that power, that force of life itself, is within you and surrounds you and all of us. May that love free us. And may we in turn use it to free others.
Blessed be
Amen.
