Unitarian Universalist Church of Delaware County - Sermon: Days of Fasting, Days of Awe

Loving the World

Rev. Peter A. Friedrichs

February 15, 2009

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet set the standard against which all romantic love is measured, even today. It presents a vision of all-consuming, soul-shuddering passion that turns our world upside down. Browning's love is as pure as childhood and as constant as the sun and stars. It was, is and always shall be. Would that we all experience love "to the depth and breadth and height our soul can reach." This is what we all hope for, isn't it? We're raised with fairy tales that tell us there are knights in shining armor who will come to rescue us from our hum-drum lives. Our media sells us shows that tell us we can find true and lasting love by process of elimination, sorting through twenty-five eligible singles who themselves are convinced that they alone are just the right person for the bachelor or bachelorette. We read of epic love, like the couple who met during World War II: he a young boy trapped in a concentration camp and she a local village girl who brought him bread, separated by war and culture but reunited years later. Destiny. Fate. God's will.

Our hearts are lifted by stories like these. It's why Cinderella and Snow White, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast are embedded in our culture. It's why we hope that the latest Bachelorette and the man she chooses will actually live happily ever after. We all love a great love story, and we all hope we'll live one ourselves. Entire industries - greeting cards, flowers, candy - have been built upon this hope. After all, we're told, "love makes the world go 'round."

As optimistic and as hopeful a people as we are, we must admit to ourselves that the odds are stacked against us. That "twu wuv" as they call it in The Princess Bride, is as elusive and as fragile as a rainbow. There are very few King Edwards who will give up their crowns for us Wallis Simpsons. Some of us are lucky enough to find it once or even twice in our lives, and a few are even lucky enough to hold onto it for much of our lives. And so we search for it, and we celebrate it, as celebrate we should, when we find it, and mourn grievously when we lose it, or it turns out to be a lie, like that story of the boy and the girl in Nazi Germany.

What we cannot do, though, is allow our desire for desire, our craving for romantic, poetic, even epic storybook love blind us to the other ways to love, the other ways of love. For all its glory and its passion, romantic love is but one manifestation that love takes among so many other life-saving, life-affirming, life-giving kinds of love.

***

Long Distance II (Tony Harrison)^[1]

Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.
He'd put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he'd hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she'd just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven't both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there's your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

The love of a son for his mother. Of a sister for her brother. Of brothers in arms and sisters in faith. Familial, familiar, filial love. The love that calls us to the bedside of an ailing friend or a failing parent. This kind of love is not sought out, but handed to us, perhaps even at birth. It is the love experienced between those with whom we share a special relationship. It could be the blood that courses through our veins, where we hold our very DNA in common, or the blood that we have spilled on the streets or the battlefield. Brought together through birth, fate, or shared principles, we love each other because, and sometimes in spite of the fact that, we know each other. We know each other's hearts and minds and spirits. We share common values and common struggles, or at least a common history. We seek to mold the future into the same shape and work together side by side. This is the love of a community of like-minded individuals, drawn together in shared purpose. It is the love we experience in this room, in this congregation, in this community of faith.

This filial love is a powerful force. It joins together hearts and hands to move mountains, to overthrow an inadequate and unjust status quo, and to build the world we dream about. But danger lurks in the shadow of this kind of love. It can be exclusive and off-putting. We can, if we're not careful, draw boundaries and build walls between the "us" inside and the "them" that are not. Ties of clan and kinship can create conflict and engender hatred for those who are not like us. Consider the Irish and the British, the Catholics and Protestants. The Palestinians and Israelis. Pick your battle, and you'll likely find that the lines are drawn between people who share more in common than the issues that separate them. Filial love, when exercised with an open heart and practiced with an open door, can be invitational and welcoming, ever expanding and limitless in its possibilities. May it always be so here in this house.

***

Turnstile (Elaine Sexton)^[2]

I carry the prints of a hundred thousand
strangers in my hands, their palms
on the turnstile this morning like mine
touching the kiosk buttons, fingering
coins to pay for the Times. At Union Square Station,
the stale breath of others
inhabits the boxcar air. The scent of lilacs
shuttles with us from the garden to work
with our spring colds, our smokers' coughs,
the Daily News the others left behind
on their seats, vacant, invisible debris,
tubercular, airborne like grief, theirs
not like mine, not like anyone else's.

Elaine Sexton's poem speaks to another kind of love, another level of awareness. It takes the notion of filial love one step further, to a place where we are bound together not just to those whom we know, or to whom we're related. We are bound instead to strangers we pass on the street, on the subway, in the cars stuck in traffic on the Blue Route. To people we likely will never meet, much less come to know. We love others not because we know them and share their values, but because we recognize the simple fact of our common humanity, that we all share a common fate. When we experience this over-arching love of our fellow human beings, the fate of a mother in Darfur struggling to survive and feed her children becomes our fate. The families of the Lower 9th Ward become our families. The starvation of the so-called "slumdogs" in India leaves an emptiness in our bellies. With this kind of love, we experience the truth in Martin Luther King's statement that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. I witnessed a poignant demonstration of this kind of love just this past week. You may have seen the video of the actress Salma Hayek, who was visiting a village in Africa where children are starving of malnutrition, in part because mothers there refuse to breast-feed their children. Hayek, who is still nursing her own young child, took a starving infant to her breast and nursed it in an act of selfless, life-giving compassion and love. This baby was not hers, and yet it was hers, and she loved it as her own.

***

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son…"^[3]

This passage from the Gospel according to John is probably familiar to many of you. In its entirety, John 3:16 reads "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Today we'll let go of the second part of this passage and just focus on the first part. Consider what kind of love it takes to be willing to sacrifice the thing you love most dearly in the world. The term you might have heard for this kind of love is "agape." Agapic love is the love that empties itself out for the sake of others. Early Christian communities spoke of this kind of love as both unconditional and voluntary, and it is said to be the embodiment of the love that God has for humankind, as demonstrated by his willingness to sacrifice Jesus on the cross for the salvation of all. In my own theology, I would represent agapic love in the person of Jesus himself, who was prepared to give up his own life for the principles he believed in.

Christian philosopher and theologian Thomas Jay Oord sounds more like a Buddhist when he defines agape as "an intentional response to promote well-being when responding to that which has generated ill-being." Compare that definition of agape to the metta sutta of Buddhism which states, in part, "With a boundless heart may we cherish every living being, bathing the entire world with unobstructed and unconditional loving-kindness."^[4] We would all like to believe that we're capable of demonstrating agapic love, that we would be prepared to sacrifice our most precious possessions, our very life, or even the life of our loved ones, for the sake of saving the world. Whether we would is another story, of course, and most of us thankfully are never put to the test. But agapic love knows no bounds. Unlike filial love, agape melts all differences between "us" and "them." It erases distinctions based upon class, color, religion and even species, recognizing that all inhabitants of this planet are deserving of compassion, of peace, of love.

Agapic love draws us inextricably to a love not just of our fellow human beings, but of the rocks and the trees and the stars. Agapic love is a love of all creation. Thus it engenders an ecological ethic that drives us to treat not just our brothers and sisters, but the entire planet as we would wish to be treated. Agapic love does not require one to know the object of one's affections, the way romantic and filial love do. It is a fullness of spirit that claims a love of life, of all creation, in all its most terrible and its most beautiful manifestations.

***

Of Love (Mary Oliver)^[5]
I have been in love more times than one,
Thank the Lord. Sometimes it was lasting
whether active or not. Sometimes
it was all but ephemeral, maybe only
an afternoon, but not less real for that.
They stay in my mind, these beautiful people,
or anyway people beautiful to me, of which
there are so many. You, and you, and you,
whom I had the fortune to meet, or maybe
missed. Love, love, love, it was the
core of my life, from which, of course, comes
the word for the heart. And, oh, have I mentioned
that some of them were men and some were women
and some - now carry my revelation with you -
were trees. Or places. Or music flying above
the names of their makers. Or clouds, or the sun
which was the first, and the best, the most
loyal for certain, who looked so faithfully into
my eyes, every morning. So I imagine
such love of the world - its fervency, its shining, its
innocence and hunger to give of itself - I imagine
this is how it began.

And so, my friends, I wish you romance and passion and the power of a lover's embrace. I wish you the love of a thousand friends to walk with you on your life's journey, kith and kin to call your very own. I wish you the love of sisters and brothers whom you will never know, and a breaking open of your very heart to all who share this small blue marble with you, those whom you will never meet, but who are just like you in all the deepest ways, who yearn for health, for happiness, for tomorrow's meal and their children's smiles and bright futures. And I wish for you the love of all creation, of mountains and mysteries. Of oceans and stars, and the wind that speaks through the trees. May your hearts be open to that one special person, to all whom you know, to those who live but you will never encounter, to all that was, to all that is, and to all that will be. May love, in all its manifestations, guide us in all that we do.

Blessed be and amen.

Closing Words (Mark Belletini):

Do not think that you can take away
each other's troubles,
but try to be with each other in them.
Remember that you are part, not all,
great, but not by far the greatest,
small, precious brief breaths
in the great whirlwind of creation.

^[1] From Norton Anthology of English Literature (7th ed., Vol. II)
^[2] From Causeway, New Issues Poetry and Prose (2008)
^[3] John 3:16
^[4] Meta Sutta
^[5] From Red Bird (2008)

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