Sermon delivered at Unitarian Church North, Mequon, Wisconsin, on July 20, 2014.
Copyright 2014 Dr. Jennifer Thomson
Non-commercial use encouraged with credit to author and source.
True Love
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in
peace and breathe out love. Beautiful words, beautiful thoughts so comforting
that I use them to calm myself when I feel anxious. But I’m not certain how
that calm relates to true love. Especially not the kinds of “true love” that popular
culture pelts us with through images, stories and song:
[Sing “I will always love you”—Whitney
Houston style.]
That kind of love is true in the sense
that chemical reactions in our brains do actually lead us to experience
overwhelming feelings of bliss in the presence of the loved one. When we feel
attracted to someone, our brains produce an amphetamine. And as often happens
with drugs, we soon become accustomed to the original dose—so the brain ramps
up production. After 2 to 4 years of continuously increasing doses of “love
amphetamines,” we become inured to the euphoric effects and can no longer
achieve the “true love” high of the early days with a partner. That’s when the
real work of love in a relationship begins.
As Emma and Zack planned their wedding
ceremony with me, I asked them to tell me how they met and what was important
to them about each other. Emma and Zack’s story illustrates how love shifts the
focus from “I” to “we,” even in—no—especially in—difficult circumstances.
I call this story:
Emma and Zach’s Third Date
It was their 3rd
date. They were on the way home from a day hiking in the mountains outside of
Ashland, Oregon. It had rained the day before, leaving the ground soggy and
muddy. Zach drove them home in his pickup along the mountain roads edged in mud
and surrounded by the dark of night.
As Zach &
Emma’s vehicle met a curve in the road, it slipped over the edge toward the cliff.
Zach struggled to get the wheels back on solid ground, but the mud was too deep
and they were too far into it. Everything Zach tried brought them closer to the
drop off.
They were stuck.
Zach worked and worked on getting the truck out of the mud. Finally, it
moved—over the side of the cliff. There, a very small tree growing out of the
cliff face barely kept the truck from plummeting all the way down. They sat
there in the truck, half over the edge of the cliff, precariously balanced on a
tree that looked much too small to hold it.
Emma managed to
climb out while Zach continued—very carefully—to get the truck back on the road.
When he realized there was nothing he could do to get unstuck, he called
friends for help. It would be an hour or so before the friends could make it up
the mountain to them. He climbed out—very carefully.
While he had worked to get the truck
back on the road, Emma figured they’d probably be there for a while—in the dark
and wet and cold of the nighttime mountain road. Zach saw that Emma had
gathered firewood and built a fire. As they told me this story, Emma shrugged
it off—when stuck on a mountain in the dark, what else would a person do?
Zach told me: “When we were in trouble,
Emma made light for us—and she’s been my light ever since.”
They did, by the way, get the truck off
the cliff and home safely.
Instead of panic over their own danger,
Emma and Zack thought about how they could support each other, how each could
make the bad situation better for the other.
Another couple planning their wedding
told me about their relationship.
Julie is the master planner of the
couple while Matt’s more easygoing and laid back. As they’ve found out, being
in a relationship where one person approaches tasks, problems—life—in a vastly different
way than the other can ignite trouble: misunderstandings, hurt feelings, anger,
resentment.
Fortunately, Julie and Matt are two
people who, for fun, enjoy chain sawing—they know about the joy of hard work. Each
feels some frustration when faced with the other’s different ways of doing
things, but they also know and talk about their different approaches to life. Most
importantly, they’re both willing to take risks to keep their relationship
strong.
On the way up to Door County to meet
with the wedding cake person, they saw a billboard advertisement. Less than 2
hours later, they were jumping out of an airplane. They never met with the cake
person. (In case you’re wondering, there was cake at their wedding.)
Picture it: Two young people, getting
ready for their wedding, standing in the open door of a rickety old plane, the
wind blowing: shshshshsh.
You don’t jump, they told me. You just
fall out. “Scary but fun,” said Julie. Matt said, “It’s the most intense thing I’ve
ever done.”
Julie & Matt found a shared love—of
hunting and the Green Bay Packers, of chainsaws and land management. They
shared the calm of ice fishing and the excitement of fighting wildfires. But
these shared interests form only the first step on the bumpy road of love. To
navigate that road (and if possible avoid driving off cliffs) requires a mutual
commitment to doing the hard work of true love—the difficult, messy, painful,
uncertain . . . and joyous . . . work of building a relationship between
human beings—difficult, messed up, uncertain human beings, as we all are.
We expect that people who choose to get
married know they’ll have to put in the hard work necessary to maintain a mutually
supportive relationship. We expect a spouse to give selflessly to her mate; we
expect a parent to put his child’s needs and desires and even comfort above his
own needs. That kind of love is difficult enough.
The kind of true love promoted by
religious traditions requires even more work. Love your neighbor as
yourself—are you serious? Imagine what it would take to actually do that.
Love led Unitarian minister James
Luther Adams to take extraordinary risks. Adams became the most influential 20th
Century UU theologian only after his experiences working with religious
underground resistors in Nazi Germany. On one occasion, he was captured and
questioned by the Gestapo for his work. “Ultimately,” Adams would later say,
“our love determines what we give our attention to.” And “We become what we
love.”[i]
Our love determines what we give our
attention to. We become what we love.
In the early 1940s, millions of
European refugees flooded Lisbon, Portugal, because it was the only open
port in Europe—the only way out from Nazi occupation. Unitarian minister Rev.
Charles Joy (Isn’t that a great name for a minister?)—Rev. Joy supervised work
at the newly formed Unitarian Service Committee, the precursor to today’s UUSC.
During World War II, the USC helped thousands of people, mostly Jews, escape
death in Nazi concentration camps.
Danger was constant. To avoid as much
danger as possible, Rev. Joy and others worked as secret agents: they would
meet at night, secretly escort refugees and illegally create travel documents
to help people escape Nazi occupied Europe.
In addition to the constant danger,
they faced other difficulties—the many different languages of the refugees, for
one. Even worse, the USC was new and not well known. That made it hard for
people to trust them—and trusting the wrong person in Europe during those days
could lead to capture instead of escape.
Rev. Joy enlisted an artist who worked
with the USC in Lisbon, named Hans Deutsch, to create a symbol that immediately
told people, no matter their language, that they had found the help they needed
to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. Deutsch later wrote in a letter to Rev. Joy
that he had long admired Joy’s willingness to sacrifice everything—his time,
his health, even his life—to help others. As Deutsch said, [quote] “[Y]our life
is the profession of your faith.” [end quote]
Deutsch’s design for a symbol was
official, immediately recognizable and representative of the USC’s lifesaving
work—as well as Rev. Joy’s personal sacrifices. Deutsch combined two well-known
and ancient religious archetypes: a chalice and a flame. The simple design
became the official seal of the Unitarian Service Committee and a powerful
symbol of hope, sustenance—and sacrificial love.
Today, the flaming chalice represents
the lifesaving spiritual illumination of Unitarian Universalism. Each Sunday
during worship services, you light your flaming chalice as a reminder of the
spiritual values and traditions you share with other UUs.
True love is by no means reserved for
married couples. Anyone willing to risk and to put in the hard work to care
more about others than about self can experience true love—because the true joy
of love comes from this selfless giving. When we commit to giving of ourselves,
freely and without expectation of anything in return, we put the welfare of
others ahead of our own brokenness.
Religious sages tell us that it is in
giving that we receive, that in healing others we help heal ourselves. Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., reminds us in his “I Have a Dream” speech that we are
all caught up in “an inescapable network of mutuality.” Unitarian Universalists
affirm that each of us is part of “the interdependent web of all existence.”
True love takes us out of ourselves. True love shifts the focus from ego to
relationship, from the myth of independence to the inescapable truth of
interdependence.
True love involves true risk. When we
reach out to others and put their welfare ahead of our own, we risk losing our
familiar and comfortable existence. We risk exposing both ourselves and our
illusions of safety. True love invites us to make profound changes in how we
live our lives.
Like the pebble tossed into the pond,
everything we do creates ripples in the web of existence, making things happen
that we will never know about. We will make mistakes. We will occasionally
drive off the cliff, taking who knows how many others with us. Interdependence
entails risk. Our religious tradition, including the example of Rev. Joy and
Hans Deutsch, encourages us to embrace the personal risk of acting in truly
loving ways.
My UU faith tells me that Rev. Joy, Dr.
King and the UU 7th Principle are right. When we act to bring safety,
comfort, nurture, laughter, healing, joy …
to even one other person, we help love the hell out of the world and make
it a better place for us all. As Rev. Joanna Crawford writes:
To love the
hell out of the world means to see with our hearts, fragile and unprotected. To
accept that life is shattering and excruciating. To see the hell in a world, in
a group, in a person, in a tear.
Our job, our
mission, is to take all of that love, all that overflowing, passionate, undying
agape and train it on the hell that exists in this world.
We are
Unitarian Universalists—from one source, to one destiny—here to love the hell
out of the world.
“What’s
Past Is Prologue”:
James
Luther Adams and the Unitarian Universalists
By George
Kimmich Beach
The James
Luther Adams Forum on Religion and Society, presented at
AndoverNewtonTheological School,Newton,Mass., November 10, 2011
[per Adams] “ . . . Ultimately our love determines what
we give our attention to.”[37]
Adams declares, “It is not reason alone, but reason
inspired by ‘raised affections’ that is necessary for salvation. We
become what we love.”[43]
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