To Call Yourself Beloved
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
February 14, 2023
“And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.” ~~ Raymond Carver, “Late Fragment”
Last month we spent some time talking about core values, as you may remember. And I shared a list with you all as an exercise, to help you frame your thoughts about what your own core values might be. As I recall, we were invited to choose five values from the list. Then we met after church to talk over our values. Some of you mentioned important values that weren’t on the list. And then someone emailed me afterward who noticed, in reviewing the list I had provided, that love wasn’t listed.
And neither I, nor anyone who participated, mentioned that love was missing from a list of core values. And I’ve been pondering this ever since, and asking myself why.
I don’t have a good answer. I wonder if some of the folks present that day might have some thoughts that we can share after church in our discussion. (There, some of you have an assignment and about an hour to think about it.)
But I wonder if perhaps love is so large in our lives, so important, that it can become almost invisible. It reminds me of the little wisdom tale of the baby fish that was swimming around one day, and an older fish approached and asked, “How do you like the water?” And the little fish asked, “What water?”
Is love so important that we don’t have to mention it, to include it on our list? Is it the water we swim in?
On the other hand, paradoxically, we mention it all the time, and always have. The poets, of course, have written about love throughout human history, and we have treated ourselves to the beauty of their thoughts this morning. Love poems have come down to us from antiquity. Here is the ancient Greek poet Sappho, writing before the Common Era:
“He is more than a hero
He is a god in my eyes –
The man who is allowed to sit beside you –
He who listens intimately to the sweet murmur of your voice,
The enticing laughter that makes my own heart beat fast.” (in Bartlett’s Poems for Occasions, p. 283.)
Thinking about love as a core value led me to think about how to define it. What, exactly is love?
We often try to define love by describing it. We’re fairly familiar with the kinds of love: Eros, or romantic love, Philos, or friendship, Storge, or love of parents for children, Philautia, or self-love, and Agape, unconditional, compassionate love. There are others, but those are the common types.
These terms help us to differentiate one sort of love from another, but by themselves are not definitions. So what is love?
An emotion perhaps. Certainly we feel love as emotion, but that doesn’t really help us to understand it. So I dug deeper, looking for good definitions of love.
I always remember what M. Scott Peck had to say about love in his classic book The Road Less Traveled. He described love as: “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
Ah. So love is a demand, a call to us to grow, and to nurture the growth of others?
Then I came upon this segment of a poem by Shane Koyczan:
“Know that love is a vulnerability but not a weakness.
Love is the volunteer in you that raises its hand and steps forward
without needing to be rewarded.
Love is a currency that functions in reverse,
because the only way to be wealthy with it is to give more of it away.” (“How to be a Person,” by Shane Koyczan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PI5uYOSEhs)
And what I’m hearing, through all of this, is that love, true love, is the force for goodness and life in the world. Love is that force that generates, the energy of life itself. Love is all that is benevolent, all that is compassionate, the force that wants us to prosper, to become who we are meant to be. It is an energy that flows between us, in all directions.
Our Universalist ancestors defined God as Love. And so, yes, in a sense, love is the water that we swim in, that invisible energy that surrounds us, nourishes us, and calls us forward. And of course, sometimes, we cannot see it, or feel it. There are times in every human life when we don’t feel loved.
And yet perhaps this is what we most want and need out of life, to be able to love and to know that we are loved. “I am my Beloved’s and my Beloved is mine.” (Song of Solomon 6:3.)
Eros, romantic love, can fail us. Romantic feelings can pass away, and beloved partners can die. We can be heartbroken and grief-stricken. And there are times too when the love between family members and friends can also seem distant, or dissatisfying. We can feel neglected, unheard or unseen. We can feel unloved, and maybe unlovable.
“And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.”
When Universalism was emerging, in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, it was considered a radical, heretical doctrine. Imagine – a God that would love you, regardless of your behavior or your beliefs.
The old story goes that when Hosea Ballou, who we think of today as the father of Universalism, whose portrait is hanging in the back corner of our sanctuary now, was 19, he converted to belief in universal salvation. His father was a Baptist preacher, and was to say the least dismayed by this. And Hosea reminded his father that when he was a little boy, he used to play in the mud a lot and get very dirty. And his dad would ask him over and over again to stay out of the mud. One time, Hosea got worried and asked his dad if he still loved him, even when he disobeyed. His father reassured him that he would always love him. And so, years later, Hosea reminded his father of that time, and of his reassurance that the love would always be present, regardless of the mud. Hosea told his father that a loving God would be far more likely, far more able, to keep loving God’s children, even when they failed, than a human parent. If the human parent could love unconditionally, and always, why would people believe that a deity would be less loving?
And from there, our beliefs have expanded to hold the idea of the holy being the force, the energy, of love in the world, always present, whether we sense it or not. That we are held by this love, this benevolence and compassion, throughout our lives. That despite grief and loss, ill health or even natural disaster, we can find our way back to this loving energy. It is there for us.
- Scott Peck also had this to say about love: that we choose it. As he put it, “Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” (Peck, The Road Less Traveled) In other words, we choose, we will ourselves, to find our way back to love, that we allow ourselves to see and feel, to notice the grace we receive.
Rabbi Rami Shapiro wrote this prayer, that we often use in our services:
We are loved by an unending love.
We are embraced by arms that find us
even when we are hidden from ourselves.
We are touched by fingers that soothe us
even when we are too proud for soothing.
We are counseled by voices that guide us
even when we are too embittered to hear.
We are loved by an unending love.
We are supported by hands that uplift us
even in the midst of a fall.
We are urged on by eyes that meet us
even when we are too weak for meeting.
We are loved by an unending love.
Embraced, touched, soothed, and counseled…
Ours are the arms, the fingers, the voices;
Ours are the hands, the eyes, the smiles;
We are loved by an unending love.”
Beloved, may you sense this great energy of love and life around you; this water in which we swim. May you choose to seek it out, to notice it, and to accept it. May you have faith that even when love seems invisible or absent, that it will hold you, and will not let you go.
Love never ends.
Amen.
