Looking for Love

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Blacksburg, VA), February 15, 2009 (the day after Valentines Day), by the Reverend Christine Brownlie.

When Jared, our wonderful pianist, asked me for some thoughts about the music he might prepare for this service, I told him to have fun and select some things he enjoyed playing. I was delighted when he got back to me with his list of tunes from The Beatles. These guys have composed so many songs about the phases of love and life. So many of their tunes like “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” “Something,” “Yesterday,” and “Norwegian Wood” speak so well of the ups and downs of romantic love. But there’s one song: “All You Need is Love” that seems very appropriate for these days when the grim specters of financial greed and stunning loss are haunting us all. Here are the lyrics, which were written by John Lennon

There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game
It’s easy.
There’s nothing you can make that can’t be made.
No one you can save that can’t be saved.
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you
in time — It’s easy.
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.
Nothing you can see that isn’t shown.
Nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.
It’s easy
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.

ALL we need is LOVE? Really? Is John telling us that love can fix everything? The economy? Global warming? All the human miseries that afflict people all over the globe? The skeptics among us might be sneering, but I say that in honor of St. Valentine and his holiday, let’s go with this crazy idea. Who knows? Maybe the Fab Four are right. Maybe if we can learn that love is more important than some of the other things that we’ve been devoting our time and energy to over the past three or four decades, our planet, our economy, and even the human race (meaning you and me!) would be in a better frame of mind. If all we need is love, then maybe there a glimmer of hope that we can emerge from these troubles with a better sense of what it’s all about.

My hope is that we’ll come out of this worrisome mess with a much stronger ethic of love. By that I mean the kind of love that is grounded in some of the simple truths that have been proclaimed by the great teachers and prophets of the world for thousands of years. A few minutes ago, the children in our fourth-and-fifth-grade class shared the various iterations of a famous “rule” that is central to all of the world’s religions. The teacher we know as “Jesus” expressed this rule in two sayings: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

For a long time, it seems that we’ve been caught in the snare of a false and narcissistic understanding of love. Love is about me as an individual person. Love is about my happiness, my wants and needs. If I want a happy life, then I must find some way to have the power and the cash to buy the things and the experiences that will make me happy. If I choose to spend my money on others, my motive is to get them to love me. No matter what I might claim as the reason for my generosity, it’s really all about me and my happiness.

I know quite well that this kind of happiness will soon evaporate. It’s not just that money can’t buy me love. The reality is that in a very short time, most of the stuff that I buy becomes boring, outdated, or useless. But I’m not worried. I know that there will be new and even more exciting things to buy. Even better, my credit card(s) will let me buy that new bit of love as soon as I find it. That’s the way our economic system works: up, down, round and round. The fun never ends, right?

Not any more! For one thing, as all this love produces more people by the day, it’s not sustainable. I’m not just talking about new gadgets and high-end shoes here. We’re discovering that the basics of life: clean air, clean water, and safe and healthy food are threatened by our relentless consumption of goods and services. In the face of a global economic meltdown, some people are just beginning to realize that we’re all — and I do mean every single person on the planet — in this together. Maybe we need to put off buying the next generation of i-phones or the cruise that will take you to Alaska so that you can snap stunning photos on your new digital camera as you watch the glaciers become seawater. Dear friends, in the words of another great song writer of my over-consuming generation: “The times, they are a’changin’!” As Hal David, another lyricist of the 60s proclaimed, what the world needs now is “Love, sweet love.”

You might be wondering what kind of love I’m advocating here. Let me tell you about the source of my inspiration. At the beginning of this millennium, feminist author bell hooks wrote a book titled All About Love: New Visions. In this hopeful work, she calls us to base our lives on an ethic of love. She reminds us that while we tend to think of love as a noun naming an emotion, the word is really a verb. Hooks is a Christian, and she says that her belief in the supremacy of love as taught in the scriptures of that faith has sustained her on her own long and difficult search for love. She notes that this idea of the supremacy of love as a verb is found in other religious traditions as well. Sharon Saltzberg, a Buddhist teacher and author, understands spiritual practice as “the liberation of the heart, which is love.” Like our Western theistic faiths, Buddhism too calls believers to lives based on an ethic of love. So what might such a life look like in this time of anxiety and fear?

Hooks says it would mean that we’d stop looking for love in the twin gods of power and money. We’d give up the belief that our possessions define us. We would know that the things we buy are not really an expression of our precious individuality. Nor do they make us more loveable. We’d get over the idea that love is about those transient moments of personal happiness and would come to see love as a powerful, active force that can lead us to a greater communion with the world. Hooks writes that committed active love helps us to bring our deepest ideals and our thoughts and actions into a unity that can be expressed in our daily lives as love for others.

Yes, love for self is still essential, but we express this love in true self-care, in compassion for our own humanity with a level of acceptance for who we are. Self-love leads us to a devotion to living in a way that is truly fulfilling, through the expression of our unique love for others and the world we live in. No one can offer the unique gifts of love that you or I have to give. Should we fail to extend that love, the world will be a poorer place and our own lives will be diminished.

As we bring our lives into line with this kind of love, we develop what hooks refers to as a “love ethic.” This ethic calls us to place relationships over material acquisition, the well-being of others over our own brief pleasures, and our own spiritual growth above the attachment to the culture of the latest and greatest. She believes that this ethic, if widely embraced, would lead to radical and far-reaching changes in our own lives and our society because we would be living within a profound recognition of our interconnectedness with others.

Where can we find examples of this active transformative love? In truth, it’s all around us but we just don’t see it. Maybe we fear what love — meaningful risky love — can do to us, to our lives, and to our world. As hooks says, to live our lives in the principles of a love ethic, which means showing care, respect, knowledge understanding, integrity, and the will to cooperate with others for the common good, requires courage and commitment. There are no promises of “happily ever after.” We simply live each day offering the best we have to give, day by day. And we encourage others to do the same. All we need is love, right?

Love might be the foundation of what we need, but John Lennon was wrong about one thing. Living an ethic of love is not easy. It can be tough and scary. To grow a strong ethic of love, we will need to face and overcome our fears and petty self-centered tendencies. This is hard hard work. And there are dangers as we walk this long and winding road. For as we learn the ways of love, we will certainly know failure and betrayals. Despite the costs of this work, hooks is clear that cultivating an ethic of love is the only way to ease the damaging loveless-ness of our harsh world that damages so deeply our spirits, our families, our communities, and our planet.

This kind of active and embracing love has always been seen as a dangerous idea. It has been run off by both the state and the church, because it disrupts the systems that empower an elite few. But I believe that it is at the very heart of our Unitarian Universalist way of the spirit, in that it affirms our connection to all people and the great web of life.

On this day when we are celebrating the human capacity for love in many forms and expression, I hope that we will find we are growing an ethic of love within our congregation, our neighborhoods, and our workplaces. It might not be easy, but if love is truly all we need, then we can let go of our worries and live in hope.

May it be so!