Happy Valentine’s Day weekend, First Church Community!
This seems like a good time to remember that “love” is not a feeling reserved only for romantic partners or a saccharine sentiment used to sell Hallmark cards and candy hearts. Love can be a radical and active force in the world—holding us in our most despairing moments, calling us back to our sacred centers when we feel lost, and driving the work of justice and liberation.
Love, in fact, is the central tenant of our faith. It is at the heart of our theology and the origin of our historical heresies. The new articulation of our Unitarian Universalist shared values, place “love” at the center of six interconnected values that encircle it (justice, equity, pluralism, interdependence, generosity, and transformation). The language reads, “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.” In a reflection on love as our central tenant, Rev. Dr. Sheri Prud’homme reminds us that is not just our present commitment but our theological inheritance, writing, “The great Universalist heresy—the one that so threatened evangelical and Calvinist groups in New England in the late 18th and early 19th century that they vehemently opposed it, denying Universalist preachers access to their pulpits and to positions of public power—was that the nature of God is Love.” Our ancestors believed in a love so powerful it was deemed heretical. That’s not exactly the stuff of hallmark cards!
We can know this intellectually. We can memorize the language of our values and parrot them back in conversation. But it is a different matter altogether to know the radical power of love in our hearts and in our bodies—to practice it and live it and organize our life around it. Love as a theological concept always feels squishy and undefined until we witness it in practice.
Nevertheless, there are a number of thinkers who have helped me understand more deeply what love looks like. I share a few of them with you this Valentine’s Day and invite you to choose one or two of these quotes to spend some time with. Perhaps journal about one that moves or perplexes you. Repeat one yourself on a walk as a form of moving meditation. Or choose one to discuss this weekend with a person you hold dear. And if you have favorites that aren’t included here, please share them with me!
“At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love. When we rise to love on the agape level, we love men not because we like them, not because their attitudes and ways appeal to us, but we love them because God loves them. Here we rise to the position of loving the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that the person does” - Martin Luther King Jr.
If love is really the active practice — Buddhist, Christian, or Islamic mysticism — it requires the notion of being a lover, of being in love with the universe… To commit to love is fundamentally to commit to a life beyond dualism. That’s why love is so sacred in a culture of domination, because it simply begins to erode your dualisms: dualisms of black and white, male and female, right and wrong.”- belle hooks
"Justice is what love looks like in public" - Dr. Cornel West
“What else do we all want, each one of us, except to love and be loved, in our families, in our work, in all our relationships. God is Love. Love casts out fear. Even the most ardent revolutionist, seeking to change the world, to overturn the tables of the money changers, is trying to make a world where it is easier for people to love, to stand in that relationship to each other.” - Dorothy Day
“The beginning of this love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” - Thomas Merton
“Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument.”-Reinhold Niebuhr
“We’ve made it private, contained it in family, when its audacity is in its potential to cross tribal lines. We’ve fetishized it as romance, when its true measure is a quality of sustained, practical care. We’ve lived it as a feeling, when it is a way of being.” - Krista Tippett
“Is it strange to say love is a language / Few practice, but all, or near all speak?” - Tracy K. Smith
“When we were sitting in, it was love in action. When we went on the freedom ride, it was love in action. The march from Selma to Montgomery was love in action. We do it not simply because it’s the right thing to do, but it’s love in action. That we love our country, we love a democratic society, and so we have to move our feet.” - John Lewis
In faith and love,
Rev. Danielle