What Does It Mean for Us?
I started this month with its Soul Matters theme of The Gift of Liberating Love, three weeks ago, talking about how that gift, which I understand to be the gift of Universalism, is that it releases us from the fear of what might happen to us after death. The Universalist strand of our merged Unitarian Universalist faith releases us from the threat of hell. It reassures us that we are held by a Love that will not let us go. But I quickly moved on from there to spend the rest of the sermon talking about how another gift of liberating love is that it also liberates us from judging our fellow human beings, and places that responsibility rightly back into the hands of God. Today I'm turning back to the gift of that liberating love blessing us in our individual lives.
I believe that most of us most of the time are not worried that we might go to hell after we die. I believe that, like the narrators in this morning’s story/poems, most of us worry much more often that our parents love a sibling more than they love us. We worry that our friends love other friends more than us. That our bosses, supervisors, teachers, professors appreciate our coworkers, colleagues, classmates more than us. That our spouse or partner will discover they don’t really love us after all. We worry that our neighbors think we don’t maintain our property properly or that we drive a car that is too new or too old or too large. That whoever judges these things thinks we are not good enough toilers for social justice, or protectors of the environment. We convince ourselves we are spotted, flawed, petty, destructive, cruel. All the things mentioned in the reading from Ken Sawyer.
Mental health professionals would call these worries low self esteem, perhaps, or an over abundant sense of shame, depression or even self-hatred. As a theologian and a pastor, I think some of my colleagues are on the right track when they call it having a God-shaped hole in our hearts or souls. We may not be conscious of that God-shaped hole most of the time–and probably almost none of us would probably use those words to describe what we do experience. But whether from time to time, or once every several years, or nearly every minute of nearly every day, each of us, often secretly, is deeply sure that we are neither loved nor even lovable. I find it useful to think of this belief as the result of a God-shaped hole in our hearts because the belief manifests itself in so many different ways, so many different worries. The doubt that we are loved or even loveable is, at times, so pervasive and amorphous that attributing it to the absence of God–a concept equally pervasive and amorphous, manifesting in ways beyond number–is eminently appropriate.
Unitarian Universalists sometimes talk about our mission being to love the hell out of the world. And often by that we mean that our mission is to love our neighbors and the other whoever that may be and those living on the margins of society and the earth itself. To love them all so much that we work unceasingly to create justice and end oppression and heal our ecosystems, until the conditions of hell–enslavement, poverty, war, climate change, gaps in wages and education and healthcare, hunger, bigotry, gun violence–are banished from the world. While I whole-heartedly endorse this meaning, I believe loving the hell out of the world must also mean working to fill the God-shaped hole, the echoing, aching absence, the fear of being unloved and unlovable from our own hearts and souls. For that hole, that absence, that fear, is also hell on earth.
Over the years Universalists and Unitarian Universalists have used different language to talk about the nature of God and God’s relationship to humanity. We’ve spoken of humanity being too noble to be damned. We’ve understood God to be too good, too loving to damn us. We affirmed our belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We’ve understood ourselves, no less than Jesus, to be children of God. We’ve spoken of the divine nature within each of us–relocating God from out there to in here. Through all the varying emphases of theology, all the shifts in language, we’ve been consistent in our understanding that a Love holds us and will not let us go–as I said three weeks ago, quoting the story that morning–no matter what, no matter how bad, no matter how awful.
Where we have faltered sometimes has been in our tendency to understand that inherent lovability, that spark of the divine, as applying only to the people society generally deems unlovable and unworthy. We will fight with our words, and our time, and our money, demanding that the inherent dignity and worth of oppressed people is recognized and celebrated and preserved. But we forget, sometimes, that “every person” means every person– including us. When we forget too often or for too long, or when we say repeated,“yeah, yeah, I know, I have dignity and worth too, but my attention is needed elsewhere, not on myself, not cherishing and celebrating my divine spark,” then doubt and fear creep in and God-shaped hole appears. Because indifference to ourselves, no less than indifference to anyone else, is the opposite of the universal, liberating, Loven we say rests at the center of our faith.
Reconnecting to and tending our connection with that Love is one of the core tasks of the religious life. And, as with so much about faith and religion and life in general, there are many paths, many practices, many ways we can connect with Love,put fear and doubt to rest, fill the God-shaped hole.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and T. de los Reyes, in two of this morning’s readings, suggest that opening ourselves to the natural world or paying attention to sensory input or noticing the love of another can reawaken our love for ourselves. So, too, can great art, music, theater, poetry, architecture call us, in ways almost beyond comprehension, to back into our rightful place as one of ‘everyone’ who has inherent worth and dignity, is a child of God, carries within a spark of the divine.
Robert Creeley, in another of our readings, asks in what I hear as delighted and bewildered astonishment, “What did I know/thinking myself/able to go/alone all the way? And Ken Sawyer’s words, in our final reading, remind us that being flawed is neither a unique characteristic of any one of us nor a disqualification from love. So it is that participating in a community, this congregation, where we regularly pay attention to each other in our wholeness, and celebrate and honor all of who we are, is a sacred act, one step along the way to believing that the gift of liberating love is meant for us, too.
Together may we continue to turn back indifference, replacing it with honest and clear-eyed assurances of worthiness despite it all, until we begin to love ourselves and be both filled by and rest within the God-shaped Love that holds us and will not let us go. Amen.