“Let your light shine.”
Last week, Reverend Bill called us to be aware–sometimes even wary–of the lenses we wear that add another filter between us and that light, impacting how we meet it. That light, that sacred spark, that Spirit of Love that shines on all of us and can shine through us. Our song today reminds us of this light.
In fact, we Unitarian Universalists talk a lot about love in this sense: that it is something we can channel through us, like a light, as a blessing to the world. We are the people who “side with Love.” We breathe in peace, and we breathe out love. I’m sure you could help me keep the list going.
What a thrill to be a people so boldly loving! But, sometimes I find myself using these words as a way to keep love in the abstract. Like, of course, it is something inherent to my faith, and should be for everyone. Who doesn’t love love?
It’s easy when it’s abstract like that. It’s when we get more specific and concrete, that challenges arise. Take our responsive reading today, for example, that challenges us to love people who are different than us. I think many of us can name abstract groups of people in our country who are different than us, and who we make it a spiritual practice to “send love out to.”
But what about actively loving people who are different than us who we share space and community with? What about loving people who are different than us when we are exhausted and weary, and want to save our love for people who it’s easier with?
This is what I want to talk about with you today. I believe that, for us to respond to Love’s call in concrete ways, we must cultivate it as a daily practice, understanding that it is one we must commit to, knowing we will falter, and need to recommit.
“Love is hard. Do it anyway.” And practice is how we’ll get there.
So, if we’re going to take seriously our commitment to say “yes” to Love’s call, we should probably get clear on what we mean by love. For this work, I frequently turn to bell hooks, a feminist scholar and educator whose book, titled All About Love, has guided me in this for years. Expanding on the work of psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, hooks sets out to define love and the way we can encounter it and develop it in our lives.
The book’s working definition of “love” is: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
I’ll repeat that. Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.
So, love is that impulse, that life energy that says: we can do better than this. We can grow; we can deepen; we can live more fully into our inherent wholeness. Love is that working toward spiritual growth. To me, spiritual growth is about being our whole and messy human selves, working to better honor our interconnectedness and inherent worth in relationship with others. And, I do believe that love gets us closer to that.
For hooks and for us, Love isn’t just a sweet emotion either. She argues emphatically that we would do better to use love as a verb rather than a noun.
Think about how you have experienced this in your own life. In your families of origin and in your chosen families, you are regularly asked to extend yourself in acts of love that promote the wellbeing of others. This is what adrienne maree brown is talking about when she describes “the tangible offer of love as an energy, resource, and commitment which I can only give to those with whom I am in mutual, consensual and aligned relationship.”
So we pour that energy, resource, and commitment out. As humans, we want to be sure our loved ones are well-fed and have a warm place to sleep at night. And, moreover, that they have opportunities to explore their passions, to experience deep joy.
Our dearest relationships are an exchange of that loving energy. We ask that our loved ones honor these relationships by treating us with respect, by being honest with us. Because we love them, when they fail at this task, we ask them to do better, pushing them toward wholeness, toward spiritual growth. When we have been hurt by those we love, we ask for reconciliation, not exile, because we believe they can do better. It is our love that asks for healing when harm has been done.
These are the types of promises we make when we covenant to build a life with our partners, or when we become parents, forging a relationship of care and commitment with this whole new human. Yes, these relationships are very much about offering warmth and affection, but we know love asks more of us than that. We expect that these relationships will change and grow, and if all goes well, we will too. That’s what Love does.
It is my hope that many of you have experienced or will experience this kind of love in your lives. I hope that your days are filled with moments when offering out this kind of tangible love feels as easy and natural as breathing. Letting your light shine, and being brightened by the light of your dear ones. As humans, this is the kind of love we hardly need to practice for.
But, what of those moments when love doesn’t flow from us with that kind of ease? “Love is hard. Do it anyway.”
So, we acknowledge then, that there are times when Love calls out to us and we respond with resistance. That’s a hard thing to face in yourself, to know how much you believe in the power of love at your core, and to witness how much you doubt or sabotage your ability to love in real life. It’s not just a light that needs to be set free. It takes real energy, real presence to cultivate that light sometimes. We want to get good at noticing and naming that resistance, so that we may practice saying “yes” to Love’s call.
But, remember, this is about starting small. I’ll give a small example from my own life.
A couple of weeks ago, I was waiting for the MAX, feeling tired and a little anxious to get home so that I would have time to decompress before a house dinner. When the train arrived it was one of those cars where you have to climb a few steps to get from the door to the seats, and there was a young woman struggling to get her big suitcase up the stairs. I helped her, because it seemed like a job better done with two people than with one.
Feeling like I had done my good deed for the day, I sat down. In that moment I felt very pleased with myself, and was ready to move on with my evening.
A few stops later, the same woman departed and I noticed that she had left her phone on the seat! And I was the only one who seemed to have realized this. I waited for her to realize her mistake and turn back, or for someone else to shout out to her. Someone should do something about this!
But no one did. It had to be me. I was so annoyed with her, because now I actually had to go out of my way to help her. Annoyance and all, I gathered up my stuff, grabbed her phone, and stepped off the train just as the doors were closing so that I could run to find her in the flow of people moving through Pioneer Square.
When I finally got to her and handed off the phone, I remember her thanking me, but it was nothing special. There was no big reward in the end. In the end, all I had was a slow trudge back to the stop where I had to wait nearly 20 minutes for the next train to come. So, my commute stretched out and I lost my beloved alone time to recuperate at the end of the day before being thrust into the life of my busy household.
And, to tell you the truth, it was fine in the end. That was a day that Love reminded me that often it’s not all about my own personal comfort. Love called me to give up a half-hour of my time to save someone else from a much more troublesome evening.
It’s a small example, but that’s because it has to start small. To get really good at hearing and responding to Love’s call, we have to say yes to these moments. When resistance and annoyance well up in us, and there is no moment of glory after we do the good deed, that is the best time to practice saying yes.
My story is about going out of my way to help a stranger, but I want to remind you that this kind of resistance to love’s call can show up in more personal situations too. Like, when we need to muster care and patience for a loved one who is acting prickly because they’re having a hard day. Like, speaking up against micro-aggressions in our family or in the workplace, even when we were having a nice day and don’t feel in the mood to have that conversation. Like, showing up to that volunteer event when it would be more comfortable to stay home and enjoy the afternoon. There are so many opportunities to push through that resistance and say “yes” to Love as we move through our days in community with others.
Even in these situations, we need to add some nuance. As a culture, we have been learning a lot lately about the dangers of burnout, the burden of emotional labor, and the importance of rest and self-care. With this in mind, I hope to never preach a message that pushes for expending yourself to the point of physical or emotional exhaustion. Yes, even in the name of Love.
Our reading for today began with the wisdom that “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.” This is important because we need to love others and ourselves simultaneously. Love may ask us to make sacrifices, but Love does not ask us to sacrifice our whole selves for the sake of another.
This is why we need to think of saying “yes” to Love as a spiritual practice. There is an intuition here that we are honing. It takes skill to get very clear about what Love asks of us, so that we may love others and ourselves simultaneously, and with appropriate boundaries. There will be days when we feel tired and broken, and on those days it is crucial that we have a discerning ear when we think we hear love calling. We need to practice this so that we can say “yes” with fullness, and in ways that honors our own integrity.
I want to turn now to one of my favorite moments of the Bible: the story of the loaves and the fishes. I have worked with this story for years, because it is a rich example of food showing up in a powerful and interesting way in the Bible, and because the intersection of religion and food is a real interest of mine. A good portion of my undergraduate senior thesis focused on this story because I was writing an ethnography of local Christian leaders in my college town’s food justice movement. This was a story that they turned to often.
Famously, there is a crowd of thousands that gathers around Jesus and his disciples because they are hungry: for his teachings and for food. He spends the day teaching them and healing the sick among them. As the day winds down, the disciples come to Jesus, saying it is time for the crowds to disperse because they are in a remote location and have hardly any food to offer. Five loaves of bread and two fishes, to be exact. But he disagrees, insisting that they share their meager bounty. So, the bread is broken and passed, and miraculously everyone has enough to eat! With twelve baskets of leftovers at the end!
For me, this has always been a story about a “horizontal miracle” when Jesus’ spirit of abundance and generosity inspired others to share what they have. It’s beautiful.
But, when I was in seminary and reading through the New Testament, I realized that there was a part of this story I had always missed before: the context that foregrounds the event in the first place. I’ll read it to you. This is a passage from Matthew 14, just after King Herod has beheaded John the Baptist who he had been keeping as a political prisoner. The text reads:
John’s disciples came and took his body and buried it. Then they went and told Jesus.
When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place. Hearing of this, the crowds followed him on foot from the towns. When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick.
As evening approached, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. Send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.”
Jesus replied, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.”
This is so striking to me because it is a time of great mourning for Jesus! Probably mixed up with fear for his own safety. His dear friend and teacher was a victim of a violent execution, and all he wanted was time alone to process this grief: “When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat to a solitary place.”
Yet, the crowds came anyway, asking for his love, for his labor, for food that he could not offer. In the midst of his grief, in this probably overwhelming situation he said “yes” to Love.
Again, I hope you don’t think that I am asking you to perform miracles, to heal and feed five thousand–or even five–people in the midst of your grief. But, if the time comes when you’ve honed your intuition and know what your integrity needs, and Love calls out to you, and even though what you’re being asked seems impossible, I hope you will be ready to say “yes” if it feels right to you.
Jesus was tapped in, he practiced saying “yes” to Love every single day, and knew exactly how far his generosity could stretch. He knew he was capable even of what felt impossible. So, in this story, he could listen to the inner knowing that told him he could say “yes” to Love.
It’s so hard to reach this inner knowing, isn’t it? It is for me, so I turn to daily practice: my morning meditation that I use to get centered and set the tone for the day. Sometimes I’ll mentally repeat a mantra, a mini prayer with my breath–something like this:
May I open to Love.
May I open to Love.
May I open to Love.
So, there are days when I begin my morning by repeating this call to Love one hundred and eight times. I want that light to shine through me with what feels like all of my being. And still, I stumble. Still, I learn. Still, I promise to do better tomorrow. This is why saying “yes” to Love is a practice of commitment.
And it is hardest in life during times when our relationships with others are in conflict. When we have been hurt, or have hurt others–and often it’s both–and we don’t know how love can help us navigate out of this destructive cycle. Often we don’t even know how we got here in the first place.
I experienced this kind of rupture in an intense way last winter. A very close friend and I came to realize that we had quite different expectations about what this friendship demanded of us. And in those misaligned understandings, we both hurt each other in very deep ways, and we couldn’t see a way to heal and get back in alignment. But we tried. We had long, vulnerable, and radically honest conversations with each other about all that had happened, and all that we wanted moving forward. Those conversations were some of the hardest acts of love I’ve experienced in my life.
Eventually, we both came to understand that we would be better at loving each other and ourselves with considerable distance. We could not offer each other love “as an energy, resource and commitment” because we were not “in a mutual, consensual, and aligned relationship.”
We parted ways. While I mourn that friendship, I am grateful that we were able to end our cycle of harm. It was, I believe, an act of Love to talk it through and come to that decision, even though it was so, so difficult. In that time, my friend and I showed up with more care, intention, and integrity than at any other point in our friendship. That is how I know it was Love leading us. I know I grew considerably in the process in a deeply spiritual way. I hope she feels that way too.
I share this story because it represents a time in my life where I felt so much resistance to Love’s call. I wanted things to keep going how they had, I didn’t want to be vulnerable and risk losing that friendship! I didn’t want to dig in deeper and risk hurting her, or being hurt by her again. Love is hard. Do it anyway.
Maybe there are people in your life who you love so deeply, but who it never feels easy with. I’m not suggesting that distance is always the answer. Ending a relationship may not be the right path forward in your situation, it is no blanket solution.
Instead, my advice is this: have courage and lean into integrity and honesty so that you may better love that person through your resistance. Have faith in Love. Hold onto that faith which exclaims that when Love guides us, we are capable of so much more than we realize. We can grow, and extend ourselves for the growth of others. It is hard work, it takes serious practice, but it is still a miracle.
Love is hard. Do it anyway.
Topics: Love