The parable of the perfect heart[1] is a reminder that what really matters is the love we give away, the love we show for ourselves and others, and our love in action. As bell hooks the well-known black Buddhist-Christian scholar of theology, race, gender, and class wrote, “The word “love” is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.”[2]
One of the challenges is that the English language uses just one four-letter word to describe many different qualities of feelings, relationships, and the ensuing actions that might arise from those feelings and relationships.
I love my husband. I love my son. I love you, my congregation. I love God. I love the earth. I love swimming. I love museums. I love my uncle’s empanadas. I love the Yankees (is that okay to say here?) I love a good pun. I love old furniture with a story. I love the sound of a harp. I love the color blue. I love a photo on Facebook.
How can it be that the very same word would describe my relationship to all these people and all these things? Love may be the most overused and yet under thought about expression.
The ancient Greeks had different words for the variety of loves. Eros described romantic love, passion, sexual desire, and derived from the Greek god of fertility. Philia described the love between friends and the feeling of kinship in a family. There was also a love called storge connected in some ways to philia, which describes the affection between parents and children. Ludus described a playful love that is experienced at the beginning of a courtship and can often be witnessed at a high school or college dance.
Agape was a selfless love that unleashed compassion for all beings in creation. Pragma described the quality of love between two people as it matured through understanding, compromise, daily acts of care, commitment, and recommitment over the decades. Philautia described love of self, and it was understood that there were two versions. One was unhealthy and promoted narcissism, while the other enhanced your capacity to love others.
Unitarian Universalists often describe what is most essential about our faith with one word… Love. In fact, in the mid-1970s, Robert Miller, a professor at Tufts conducted a study, and found that “Unitarian Universalists ranked loving as an instrumental value and mature love as a terminal value more highly than did respondents from other groups, religious and nonreligious.”[3] By instrumental values, Miller is referencing the values that guide our actions and by terminal values, he is referencing the goals we are moving towards. So, we value love as the path and as the destination.
Many Unitarian Universalists have shared that love is the common theological ground beneath the eight principles. When the Board of the Unitarian Universalist Association charged the Article 2 Commission to explore a fresh articulation of our principles and purposes, the following was in bold: We therefore charge this commission to root its work in Love as a principal guide in its work; attending particularly to the ways that we (and our root traditions) have understood and articulated Love, and how we have acted out of Love.
In Robert Miller’s research, he found that many UUs included the words, “love, compassion, connection, and community” as elements that get at the core of our faith.
Although, we only passed the 8th principle in 2021 in our congregation about dismantling racism and other oppressions and building the beloved community, our faith has been headed in this direction for a long, long while.
Unitarian Universalists are compelled by the form of love called agape in Greek. It is the love that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached about and acted on repeatedly. It is a love overflowing for all of humanity. It is a love that moves us to include care for our neighbors, the ones we like and the ones we don’t like. As King wrote, “it is a love that doesn’t discriminate between worthy and unworthy people…agape makes no distinction between friends and enemy.”
This quality of love requires courage and a fierce faithfulness to a universalist view of the human family. King spoke about the scars on the soul of humanity and in the hearts of both oppressed and oppressor. His practice of non-violence was rooted in a belief that only love of self, God, and neighbor was strong enough to repair what was broken. Perpetuating the cycle of violence and hatred would only breed more violence and hatred. King wrote, “Agape is not a weak, passive love. It is love in action… Agape is a willingness to go to any length to restore community…”
However, this form of love does not mean acceptance of another’s violence, hatred, and oppression. Love is courageous. Love is creative.
The opposite of love is fear, and fear is destructive. What kind of fear? We see this in our society… fear of not having enough… fear of others… fear of difference… fear of uncertainty… fear of change… these are all examples. Fear fuels the illusion that we are separated into camps of who is worthy and who is not. Fear leads to brutish displays of violence, such as the people who stormed the capitol last year, and manipulative power plays, such as limiting access to the vote.
Courage may be quieter than fear, but when it stems from love of self, God, and all our neighbors, it is stronger what will ultimately have the last say. The root of the word courage is cor in Latin, which means “heart.” Courage is about speaking and acting from the heart. It is about embodying an ethic of love for self and others in ever-widening circles.
It is black history month and today is the anniversary of the founding of the NAACP. An organization that has fought tirelessly against injustice, against racism, and on behalf of promoting laws and policies that lead to countering oppression and building the beloved community we dream about.
I want to share a story that I am guessing many of the adults are familiar with, and I want our children to know. It bears repeating. Rosa Parks led the youth division of the NAACP in Montgomery, and she is perhaps best-known for having the courage to stay seated – a quiet, non-violent, but revolutionary act.
Like Tyre Nichols, she was headed home from work. At the time, in 1955, there were seats reserved for white folks in the front of the bus and black folks in the back of the bus. For those of you who are younger and maybe take the bus to school every day, this is a visual example of how people were separated as worthy and unworthy – an image that reinforced something that is not true.
The seats in the front with white people filled up, and so the bus driver asked Rosa Parks and three other black men to move further back. The men gave up their seats, but Rosa Parks would not be moved by fear that day. She says of the experience, “I had given up my seat before, but this day, I was especially tired. Tired from my work as a seamstress, and tired from the ache in my heart.”
Four days before, she had learned about the acquittal of Emmet Till’s murderers.[4] Emmet was a black boy who was beaten to death over a false rumor. Rosa Parks had enough heart ache. She would take a stand by staying seated. She was arrested for disobeying the bus driver, and this significant act sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, one of the seminal events of the civil rights era. It was also in many ways the launch of Dr. King’s national leadership; he served as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association that coordinated the boycott[5].
Rosa Parks said, “You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right.” It was an act of self-love and love of neighbor. It was about her freedom and how it was inextricably linked with the freedom of the black community and ultimately all her neighbors. If anyone is told that they belong in a spot for the unworthy (or in the back), then any one of us could be told we belong there. Her vision and her actions were about collective liberation.
Today, we hear a rhetoric about liberty and freedom that is about individual liberty. This is not a freedom grounded in love. This is not the freedom to which we are called. Liberation is the movement that is fueled by love and that guides us on a path towards the beloved community – the ultimate destination that pulls on the heartstrings of Unitarian Universalists. It is the end of all our theologies and our secular moral understandings.
Womanist theologian Karen Baker-Fletcher writes, “Theology, then, should be written from the heart, from the place where we are most honest. If we don’t write from the heart, how can we act from the heart? If we write what we cannot act on, our theology is lifeless.”[6]
Rosa Parks offers us a powerful formula for a life of faith. What is the source of your heart ache? That is the starting place for how love can guide you to make a difference.
Love after all is the most powerful force. In fact, it literally heals hearts. (I love it when science proves theology!) It turns out that when we have a heart attack, when our hearts are broken, love is necessary for true healing and repair.
Heart attacks lead to damage in the heart muscle cells, the cardiomyocytes, that generate heart contractions. Our bodies often replace those damaged cells with scar tissue, which can lead to heart failure if untreated. However, when oxytocin is released – the love hormone that helps us to bond with other human beings – it actually causes stems cells to become new heart muscle – it leads to repair. Cortisol – the hormone which is produced when we are fearful – inhibits that repair and leads more likely to death.
So, our calling to love is about our scientific nature and our theological nurture. When we not only believe in love, but act on it, healing and wholeness are possible where once it seemed impossible.
In the end, we show love through our commitment to others. As bell hooks writes, “The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.”
Love is the path. Love is the destination. The choice to follow it is yours.
[1] Our Time for All Ages Story was “The Parable of the Perfect Heart,” adapted by Hanna Kiely & Cassandra Scheffman
[2] all about love, by bell hooks
[3] Engaging Our Theological Diversity, a report by the UUA Commission on Appraisal, 2005
[4] https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/civil-rights-leaders/rosa-parks
[5] https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/montgomery-bus-boycott
[6] Sisters of Dust, Sisters of Spirit, by Karen Baker-Fletcher
Topics: Courage