To Lead with Love ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
January 7, 2024
We speak often about love. Love is, perhaps, the greatest force we know, perhaps the greatest mystery, ‘the only magic’ it was called in our reading earlier. So we think about it, pursue it our entire lives, and of course, being human, we try to analyze it.
Most of our effort goes into trying to define Love. What is it, exactly? We go so far as to divide it up into different kinds of love, such as agape, or selfless love, eros, or passionate love, or philia, or deep friendship. We humans love our categories. Even God was divided into three parts.
But this morning I wanted to pose a different question for us to consider. Not ‘what is love?’, not ‘where does it come from?’. Today I am asking the question, “What does Love do?” What’s it for?”
Our theme this month is The Gift of Liberating Love. I had to spend time trying to understand what was meant by this idea of ‘liberating love’. And then I remembered a story.
There once was a little girl in St. Louis, Missouri, a little black girl named Marguerite Johnson. Her parents separated when she was tiny, and she and her brother were shuttled back and forth between their grandmother in Alabama and their mother in St. Louis. And when Marguerite was eight, she was brutally attacked by her mother’s new partner. Marguerite spoke up, the man was arrested and found guilty of the assault. However, he was released from jail after only one day, and then was murdered four days later, probably by family members. In response, the child went silent. She said later that she was afraid of the power of speech – that she spoke out and someone died. She thought that she could kill someone, just by speaking.
Marguerite and her brother were sent back to Alabama, and she was enrolled in school. There a teacher who was a friend of her family worked with the little girl and encouraged her to learn to speak again. The teacher, Mrs. Flowers, shared poetry with Marguerite, and told her that to truly love it, she had to be able to recite it out loud.
Perhaps you know this story of Marguerite Johnson, whose brother nicknamed her Maya, who became the reknowned poet and memoirist Maya Angelou. We could say that love saved Maya, the love of a grandmother who always opened her home, and the love of a dedicated teacher, who found a way to unlock Maya’s speech, to open her to life again. And of course, there was the love of poetry.
Later on in her life, Maya Angelou told the story of what she said to her dying mother, giving her mother permission to die from the cancer that had ravaged her. And she had this to say about love:
“…you see love liberates. it doesn’t bind, love says i love you. i love you if you’re in china, i love you if you’re across town, i love you if you’re in harlem, i love you. i would like to be near you, i would like to have your arms around me i would like to have your voice in my ear but thats not possible now, i love you so go. love liberates it doesn’t hold. thats ego. love liberates.” (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/549888-love-she-liberated-me-to-life-she-continued-to-do)
Love liberates. When love is present, genuinely, authentically, love offered to us by another can help us to open, to trust, to have courage to grow and emerge. Love can set us free to become what we are meant to become: to flourish.
I often contrast love and fear, which I consider true opposites. Hatred isn’t the opposite of love, because hatred ultimately is created by fear. Think about what fear does to us: it causes us to shut down, to become silent, to withdraw within ourselves. We don’t share our poetry for fear of being made fun of. We don’t speak out for fear our voice might shake. We remain closeted.
Now think about how you feel when love is present: you can feel powerful, lighter, braver, and more creative. When love is present, we can trust. We can take chances, believing that there will be hands to support us, arms to catch us when we fall, and acceptance when we fail.
The German theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart told this old tale:
“All day long a little burro labors, sometimes with heavy loads on her back
and sometimes just with worries about things that bother only burros.
And worries, as we know, can be more exhausting than physical labor.
Once in a while a kind monk comes to her stable and brings
a pear, but more than that,
he looks into the burro’s eyes and touches her ears
and for a few seconds the burro is free and even seems to laugh,
because love does that.
Love Frees.” (https://ordinarysparrowsacredcreatures.wordpress.com/2015/11/03/meister-eckhart-and-the-burro-donkey/)
Self-love frees as well. Liberation is not only dependent on the love of other people around us. We can free ourselves from what binds us by offering ourselves liberating love. For this reason Buddhists will say that we have to offer compassion to ourselves first of all, so that we can then open our hearts enough to be able to offer it to others. People who were silenced during their childhood, people forced to conform to others’ ideals and expectations, will only free themselves if they have compassion for themselves, if they love and care about themselves enough to rise above hurtful messages, or abusive upbringings.
There are people everywhere who are unable to free themselves from this sort of harm, to release the bonds that might be keeping them from flourishing. It is never too late to hear that message of compassion, of lovingkindness directed toward oneself, so that one can allow love to free them.
What else can love do? Reverend angel Kyodo Williams proposes that love creates space for us. She wrote: “(Love) It is developing our own capacity for spaciousness within ourselves to allow others to be as they are — that is love. And that doesn’t mean that we don’t have hopes or wishes that things are changed or shifted, but that to come from a place of love is to be in acceptance of what is, even in the face of moving it towards something that is more whole, more just, more spacious for all of us. It’s bigness. It’s allowance. It’s flexibility.
This idea is love writ large: truly unconditional love. We come to adulthood knowing that our goal should be to offer unconditional love to others, but no one ever seems to offer a road map for how to reach that point: how we can offer love, be love, embody it, in order to create space in our hears to accept others as they are. This passage by Reverend Williams offers us a way forward. And once again, we have to start with ourselves, to ‘develop our own capacity for spaciousness within ourselves.’ Learning to have compassion for ourselves, once again. And then, when we offer that compassion to others in the form of acceptance, we create space. Our love creates space, once again, for people to accept themselves, to grow, to flourish.
Contrast that with all the messages people hear that are born out of fear: Fear of poverty, perhaps: “you’ll never be able to draw well enough to make a living as an artist.” Fear of social rejection: “What will our relatives say if you come out as gay, or trans?”
Love frees. Love creates space for acceptance. In turn the freedom and space create room for more love to grow. It can be endless.
What else can love do? I think of our politics. Our country, our culture, has a harsh edge to it. Our politics too often doesn’t leave people much room to make mistakes. We don’t approve of handouts – forgiveness of student loans, for example. We’re not loving enough to try to level the playing field for all. We’re suspicious of government poverty programs, even subsidized health insurance. There’s a deep-seated suspicion: a belief that many people don’t deserve to have their way made easier. We are too often governed from a place of fear: fear of the Other, fear of others getting our piece of the pie, and we are not often enough governed from a place of love. A love that creates acceptance of each other, and trust: a love that says, “we trust you to make your best decisions about your pregnancy.” A love that says, “We’ll provide free public transportation. Or childcare. Or healthcare, so that everyone has the opportunity to reach their potential.”
My friends, what would happen if we were to lead with love instead of fear? What might our lives look like, our relationships? How might our country and even the world respond, if one by one, decisions based on love and acceptance became the norm?
Love is the strongest force there is. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, famously, “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Love will prevail. Love will provide freedom, and space for flourishing. But love needs us to spread it, to help it to grow, to stand firm in the face of fear and hatred. Love is like the candlelight we spread from person to person two weeks ago on Christmas Eve. Light – love – spreading from person to person, growing, not diminishing. Let us imagine what the world could look like, what each person could feel like, if we lead with love.
Blessed Be.
Amen.
