Standing on the Side of Love

Sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
September 11, 2005

First Reading:
from Song of Solomon

Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. If one offered to exchange for love all the wealth of one's house, it would be utterly scorned.

Second Reading:
from For the Inward Journey by Howard Thurman

At times when the strain is heaviest upon us,
And our tired nerves cry out in many-tongued pain
Because the flow of love is choked far below the deep recesses of the heart,
We seek with cravings firm and hard
The strength to break the dam
That we may live again in love's warm stream.
We want more love; and more and more
Until at last, we are restored and made anew!
Or so it seems.
But when we are closer drawn to [the source of our love],
And in its radiance stand revealed,
The meaning of our need informs our minds.
“More love,” we cried; as if love could be weighted, measured, bundled, tied.
As if with perfect wisdom we could say—to one, a little love; to another, an added portion;
And on and on until all debts were paid
With no one left behind.
We can see the tragic blunder of our cry
Not for more love our hungry cravings seek
But more power to love.

 

Third Reading:
“Will to Harm; Will to Hope” by Brian Stratton

Twin wolves war and roar inside
one aglow with knowing dreamlight,
the other painted with tainted blight.
I watch, my exes transfixed,
my mind drinks in glimpse after glimpse.
I wince; how long shall this war song sound?
Can either impulse win this round?
Questions like ticks stick thick in my skin.
No scratching or thrashing can oust the vermin.

As I oversee this fray,
the adversaries try
to sway me their way.
Into my mind they pry,
and their speeches they say. 

A thicket of crickets
ancient twisted mystics
whisper misleading mist in my ear;
They explain I am flawed
overawed with this world’s enormity
my self-pitying nitpicking
paralyzing me
surprising me with words
tossed from my mind
like jeering spears
that pierce porcelain persons.
I placed the putrid putdown.
I raised a fist and aimed to maim.
I have laid claim to willful harm.
I’ve fed the beast that crushes dreams.
I’ve sundered hope and torn love’s seams. 

Then my mind lurches to loftier perches;
a chorus of seagulls, sublime and divine
lends sage avian council.
I do the best I can do
as I fly through time’s ocean.
I swoop down at fish
and sometimes I miss
but there’s plenty more left in the sea. 

And though the salt stings
as it gets in my eyes
and though the years bring
disillusion and strife
I uphold holy hope
as I fly through my life. 

Which shall be the victor?
To that I have no answer.
And when all is said and done
I can but hope that hope has won.

Sermon:

A six year old boy was sitting in a restaurant with his young parents as the waitress came to take their order. After jotting down what the parents requested, she asked the boy what he wanted. “A hot dog!” he replied. His parents barked in unison, “No hot dog!” Then the mother said to the waitress. “He will have the vegetable, grilled chicken, and milk.” The waitress looked at the boy and said, “What do you want on your hot dog?” The amazed child said, “Ketchup and a pickle. And can you bring milk with that?” The waitress said, “Coming up” and turned away. The boy shouted to his dismayed parents, “She thinks I’m real. She thinks I’m real.”

There is something deeply affirming to be heard as an autonomous individual. Yet, so many people move through their days without being genuinely heard or seen. Alienation, isolation, loneliness all run rampant in our culture. It may sound rather simplistic, but I believe it is also deeply profound: What this world needs is more love.  Religion in our day should be about helping people to manifest love, and to generate love by practicing it, demonstrating it, embodying it.

This summer I was drawn into learning more about the namesake of Pope Benedict XVI when I learned that liberal Catholics such as Joan Chittister expressed hope that this papacy might hearken back to St. Benedict. Who was that original Benedict? He lived 1,500 years ago, inspired a contemplative movement, and taught a way of love that has transformed people then and now. He taught that the core of religious life is listening, profoundly listening with an open heart, to allow oneself to be stirred by one’s encounter with both strangers and loved ones, and to respond to the humanity within. Benedictine priest Daniel Homan calls this way to love “radical hospitality”. Also the name of his book, Radical Hospitality calls for a type of listening that is not simply intellectual comprehension but instead an attentiveness, a sharpening of the ears of the heart. By hospitality Benedict means engaging in a spiritual practice of authentically loving, a practice that is not easy or comfortable.

I don’t know about you, but I get so involved with my own thoughts and hopes and plans, that I frequently need to be reminded even while eating breakfast to be present to my partner. It is odd that even in one’s own home, one needs to work at being attentive. Although I am without children, I fully appreciate the Story for All Ages that Bob told this morning. If we don’t pay attention to our children, they will grow up and they will disappear—is there any better time than now to get to know our children, to see them for who they are today? What a gift it is to them when adults witness and nurture their process of becoming. If you’ve never been in the classroom, it will be a gift to you as well. And with two Sunday services, you can still attend worship!

Unfortunately our children aren’t the only people from whom we human beings often withhold our attention. American culture is becoming more and more fragmented, such that people tend to associate only with those who share their cultural norms and ban from consciousness all others. I will return to this in a bit.

Four years ago on this day, the vast majority of us wept in horror and helplessness after passenger planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, followed by the collapse of those majestic buildings filled with human beings. We learned that two other planes were hijacked, one which reached its target in our nation’s capital. Our nation became united as our common humanity became so gut-wrenchingly clear as we cried together, mourned together, and tentatively put our hope in a world more united as people around the world recoiled in horror. Until then, many liberal Americans, neither in my generation or my parents’, had never before displayed an American flag in front of their home or from a balcony. A newfound hope stirred in the hearts of many, a sense of genuine unity. For the first time in my life, this country seemed united and poised to give itself to its highest ideals; people were willing to sacrifice something of themselves for a greater good. That idealism quickly dissipated as the rush to war in Iraq split the country and squandered the goodwill this nation suddenly had received throughout the world.

Now, nearly two weeks after Hurricane Katrina wreaked devastation through southern Louisiana and Mississippi, demolishing entire towns and flooding New Orleans and its suburbs, the enormity of human need has united the general public again. What does genuine national unity looks like? It doesn’t look like war. National unity comes when we as a people are pulled into helping one another, when we set our sights on something greater than ourselves, when we are collectively called to love.  

The levees protecting New Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain were not the only barriers breached. Millions of Americans had their own hearts flooded with sympathy and compassion. The relentless series of images and stories of suffering have broken down the barriers around many people’s hearts, including mine.  

As Daniel Homan notes, “Benedict calls us to hear the more. Listen, the ancient monk tells us, listen. It will break your heart, but it will also give you a heart. And it will give you more—it will give you life. Only Love is strong enough to hold all the pain in the world. Love will listen. If you aren’t listening, you aren’t loving.”

Countless stories have gotten under my skin, but for days I noticed a resistance within myself to avoid feeling the enormity of the pain. The one that broke my own inner dam, that is, the story that finally caused my heart to burst and the tears to begin streaming forth was about nurses coming across seven children, the oldest of them aged six. The children were holding on to each other, wandering dazed at an evacuation site in New Orleans, with a six year old as the leader. That article said two hundred and twenty children are missing and that number is expected to rise. These seven children were lucky—they were reunited with their parents. Since then, my eyes get wet each time I hear about a child who has lost a parent, an adult who has lost partner, or a person losing a dear one. 

Hurricane Katrina did more than wreak devastation on the Gulf, it brought front and center to the American public’s attention the vast divide between privilege and poverty. Prior to the storm, an order of “mandatory evacuation” was made. But so many were left behind who had no means to leave. Why not? How could tens of thousands of American citizens, almost all of them poor and Black, live in evacuation centers in unimaginable conditions with little or no food and water, waiting for days while evacuation buses passed them by to pick up tourists from luxury hotels?

It’s all so unsettling, and now New Orleans has literally become unsettled. The residents are no longer there. They are now with us. Responding to those displaced from southern Louisiana and Mississippi is the moral response. It is the appropriate response. It is a good first step, a necessary step, to reach out to these people who have been invisible. But there is another awful reality to acknowledge. There are invisible people all around us. The privileged have effectively disappeared the impoverished. They were there before Hurricane Katrina hit, and they will be there when the city of New Orleans is rebuilt. The question lingers: will we, will our media, our leaders, our congregations keep the light shining on this deplorable fact that the richest nation in history has so many people with so little?

I am saddened and appalled to learn that from a Unitarian Universalist pulpit this past Sunday, a member who addressed social action plans to help evacuees who reached their town said, “These are people who left town in their cars before the hurricane hit. They're good families. You don't have to be afraid of them.” The message is “No one expects you to deal with someone who looks differently, talks differently, or thinks differently from you. You don’t have to deal with strangers—these people are like us. And because you don’t have to deal with strangers, you don’t have to change.”

Brian Stratton’s remarkable poem acknowledges the war that wages within the human heart between the will to hope and the will to harm. He asks about the twin wolves that war and roar inside, which shall be the victor? My answer is whichever one you feed. The will to harm feeds upon fear, hatred, and deception. The will to harm doesn’t refer simply to people who engage in violence. The will to harm often manifests in subtle actions and attitudes that turn us away from the needs of others. If we fudge a little bit regarding our ethical behavior, we are prone to fudge a little more another day, and then a little bit more until, without realizing it, our psyche has spiraled into a morass of immorality. When our hearts fill with prejudice, suspicion, anxiety, or jealousy, there’s no room for welcoming, listening or receiving. Possibilities for love are choked away, because the dam blocking love’s warm stream can get so big that only a major flood can take it down. Turning that spiral around takes more than a moment of willfulness. The same goes with practicing hospitality and love. If we consistently take small steps to open our heart to the world, we learn how to engage with ever more graciousness and hope. I’m certain you know people who have spiraled into despair, into addiction, alienated and alone, losing faith in humanity. And I’m sure you’ve witnessed people changing the direction of their lives such that they now spiral towards wholeness, constructive action, and a faithfulness to their deepest held ideals. As a faith community, one of our core roles is to provide the sanctuary and community where all people can catch themselves when in downward spirals and to challenge and encourage us all to put our lives toward the ways of love, so that we overcome the illusion of separateness, the fear of change, and the dread of strangeness.

Benedict, that Benedict of Nursia, who lived so long ago, provides a good roadmap for how to stand on the side of love. To love, one must listen, sharpening the ears of the heart. One must be stirred within. And one must respond from that inner stirring, with humility and within community. It is that simple and that complex.

Benedict was not an “ancient twisted mystic” nor was he some fluffy fad with his head in the clouds. Benedict, like all authentic sages through the ages, was a realist about loving. True love is no cakewalk. Sustained love comes only through effort and practice. Real love is costly and fatiguing. Authentic spirituality rarely makes you comfortable but instead obliges you to move through your fears to engage the world with deeper authenticity. And the Benedictine ideal of hospitality ultimately puts an end to all injustice.

As Homan says, “Our resistance to others, resistance to change, these are housed in the mysterious realm of spirit. Our minds cannot conceive of solutions to our dilemma until our hearts are convinced to love. … If you want to be a person of great spirit, you can’t do life alone. If spirituality matters to you, you can’t do spirituality alone either. To really grow as a human being you need other people.” And I would add, you need all kinds of people.

Here at Unity Temple, it behooves us to ask who are we? Who do we mean when we say we? When I served another congregation, one member drew up an image for posters and refrigerator magnets for the church that read, “Birds of a feather, flock together.” It seemed sweet, but there was something that just didn’t sit well with me. I didn’t think of it again until just this past week and I realized my discomfort when reflecting on the awful images and stories that came out of Hurricane Katrina. An authentic spiritual community is not a social club, not even a liberal, enlightened social club. It is far more. Let me explain.

Within each and every one of us, rages a battle for our identity, whether we will identify ourselves first and foremost as human beings or whether we give priority to a transient layer of our identity. The essence of who we are, according to our faith tradition, is that humanity we share with all other human beings. The transient layer of identity includes education, job, and income, as well as our cultural preferences: what we read, eat, and do for fun. There’s nothing wrong with the transient layer of identity as long as the essence of who we are doesn’t get lost, as long as you willingly engage people who don’t share the same transient layer.

If you believe that every person, adult and child holds inherent worth and dignity or that every person bears the presence of God, then the implications are enormous. When some human beings consistently get ignored, when all that is significant to an individual never gets acknowledged, such people are in grave danger of becoming far less than who they are capable of being. It is a moral imperative to welcome the stranger, to get over the dread of strangeness—and if we do, we will invariably change and overcome the fear of change. There’s only one catch. This practice requires of us to push the envelope of our comfort zones and to grow—to overcome the all-too-human propensity to admire people for their social status, the natural tendency to associate with only people with your educational, cultural, and political bias.

These days of tragedy are just the beginning for us as a community and a nation to transcend ourselves, to move the focus of our priorities from our immediate needs and consumerist desires to the power of love, the power to love, that transcending power within each and every one of us—the call to love.

Love cannot be quenched. Just as the Song of Solomon says, “For those who set a seal upon their heart shall have a depth of love that no floods can overcome, a love for which no amount of material goods can replace. Love always beckons.”

What are you called to do? Where does the longing of your soul meet the brokenness in the world? Which vulnerable people have stirred your heart to affirm their existence and engage in relationship?

As we gather this Homecoming Sunday, this first Sunday back in the Temple, I am awed by the work this congregation has done to get our sanctuary in such great shape. The paint and the carpet and the purchase and restoration of the piano. We are a vital faith community. We have attended to our needs here beautifully. May we as individuals and a community take this devotion and find ever more creative ways to attend to the needs beyond our walls.

On this homecoming Sunday I challenge you to engage in some loving endeavor that pushes you to grow. Maybe it’s volunteering to work with PADS or the Madden Mental Health Center to assist those made homeless from Hurricane Katrina—information is in the office. Maybe it’s volunteering at an elementary school with children who rarely are heard and seen for who they are. Maybe it’s joining our Community Minister, Rev. Clare Butterfield in her work at Faith in Place. Maybe it’s joining Rich Pokorny in two weeks, who will lead a bi-partisan group to Washington, D.C. to protest the government’s stance on torture. Maybe it’s joining me on a trip to Fort Benning, Georgia in mid-November, to call for the closing of the School of the Americas, the U.S sponsored training camp that teaches techniques of torture. Maybe it is investing yourself in our children, getting involved in our religious education program and engaging our children as human beings here at Unity Temple as a part of their faith development.

Who and what do you need to bring more fully into your awareness?

Who is tugging at your heart to be seen and heard?

How shall you move forward standing on the side of love?

Blessed be. Amen.

© Copyright 2005 Rev. Alan Taylor, All Rights Reserved.