Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring

Is Love the Answer?

by Colleen Meiman
Service at UUCSS on November 25, 2001

Reading: a letter on Septermber 11
Sermon: Is Love the Answer?

Reading

Webmaster's Note:
The letter in the box to the right has been falsely attributed to His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

However, His Holiness did release an official statement which the websmaster acquired from the office of the Dalai Lama through e-mail correspondence through www.tibet.net.

>> View the official statement in Adobe® Acrobat® format.

Dear friends around the world:

The events of this day cause every thinking person to stop their daily lives, whatever is going on in them, and to ponder deeply the larger questions of life. We search again for not only the meaning of life, but the purpose of our individual and collective experience as we have created it-and we look earnestly for ways in which we might recreate ourselves anew as a human species, so that we will never treat each other this way again.

The hour has come for us to demonstrate at the highest level our most extraordinary thought about Who We Really Are.

There are two possible responses to what has occurred today. The first comes from love, the second from fear.

If we come from fear we may panic and do things-as individuals and as nations-that could only cause further damage. If we come from love we will find refuge and strength, even as we provide it to others.

This is the moment of your ministry. This is the time of teaching. What you teach at this time, through your every word and action right now, will remain as indelible lessons in the hearts and minds of those whose lives you touch, both now, and for years to come.

We will set the course for tomorrow, today. At this hour. In this moment. Let us seek not to pinpoint blame, but to pinpoint cause.

Unless we take this time to look at the cause of our experience, we will never remove ourselves from the experiences it creates. Instead, we will forever live in fear of retribution from those within the human family who feel aggrieved, and, likewise, seek retribution from them.

To us the reasons are clear. We have not learned the most basic human lessons. We have not remembered the most basic human truths. We have not understood the most basic spiritual wisdom. In short, we have not been listening to God, and because we have not, we watch ourselves do ungodly things.

The message we hear from all sources of truth is clear: We are all one.

That is a message the human race has largely ignored. Forgetting this truth is the only cause of hatred and war, and the way to remember is simple: Love, this and every moment.

If we could love even those who have attacked us, and seek to understand why they have done so, what then would be our response? Yet if we meet negativity with negativity, rage with rage, attack with attack, what then will be the outcome?

These are the questions that are placed before the human race today. They are questions that we have failed to answer for thousands of years. Failure to answer them now could eliminate the need to answer them at all.

If we want the beauty of the world that we have co-created to be experienced by our children and our children's children, we will have to become spiritual activists right here, right now, and cause that to happen. We must choose to be at cause in the matter.

So, talk with God today. Ask God for help, for counsel and advice, for insight and for strength and for inner peace and for deep wisdom. Ask God on this day to show us how to show up in the world in a way that will cause the world itself to change. And join all those people around the world who are praying right now, adding your Light to the Light that dispells all fear.

That is the challenge that is placed before every thinking person today.

Today the human soul asks the question: What can I do to preserve the beauty and the wonder of our world and to eliminate the anger and hatred-and the disparity that inevitably causes it - in that part of the world which I touch?

Please seek to answer that question today, with all the magnificence that is You. What can you do TODAY...this very moment?

A central teaching in most spiritual traditions is: What you wish to experience, provide for another.

Look to see, now, what it is you wish to experience-in your own life, and in the world. Then see if there is another for whom you may be the source of that.

If you wish to experience peace, provide peace for another.

If you wish to know that you are safe, cause another to know that they are safe.

If you wish to better understand seemingly incomprehensible things, help another to better understand.

If you wish to heal your own sadness or anger, seek to heal the sadness or anger of another.

Those others are waiting for you now. They are looking to you for guidance, for help, for courage, for strength, for understanding, and for assurance at this hour. Most of all, they are looking to you for love.

Sermon

Is Love the Answer?

Good morning. My name is Colleen Meiman. I've been a member of UUCSS for about 2 years now. I'd like to thank the Worship Committee for the opportunity to do this service today, and to thank all of you for your willingness to participate in it.

I'd like to talk this morning about a topic which has been rattling around my brain quite a lot over the part 2 months or so. The topic is love.

I wouldn't blame anyone if they decided to pass on church this morning in favor of hitting the after-Thanksgiving sales. I can easily envision people looking at the blurb in the Uniter about this service and thinking "a whole service on love? Sound idealistic and nice, but rather naïve and not too practical. Besides, I hear about love all the time - but that sale at Hechts, now that's a rare opportunity."

And the truth is we all do hear about love all the time. In our society, we use the word to apply to just about everything - from food and clothes, to ideas and concepts, to people, just to name a few. We use "love" to describe how we feel about everything from the trivial- such as "I love pumpkin pie" - to the transcendent - such as "I love God".

There are all types of love: puppy love, romantic love, platonic love, maternal love, brotherly love, love of country, love of freedom, love of life. There are more songs and poems on love than on probably any other topic. And then there are the cliches -- We are told that love is blind, love is all you need, love conquers all, love is a many-splendoured thing, and love is the answer -- just to name a few.

So we hear about love all the time- how it feels, how powerful it can be, who or what it is that we do love or should love. But one particular use of this word really got my attention recently - that was when several learned and thoughtful people proposed love as the most appropriate response to the events of September 11. These people have ranged from the Dalai Lama, who may or may not have written our reading, to UUCSS's own William Hartung.

Like most Americans, I have struggled to come to terms with the horrors of that clear autumn morning, and more importantly to figure out, in the words of our earlier reading, "how to be in the world in a way that will cause the world itself to change" so that such events will never occur again. In my struggles, I found that I kept coming back to the idea of love as being the best answer. But once I got to the idea of love as the answer, I hit a very large roadblock - What exactly did that mean? I knew what love felt like, I knew lots of things that I did love or should love, but I wasn't quite sure how to DO love - at least not on the scale that September 11 required.

You see, I am a very practical person. Vague concepts don't do much for me - I'm don't know what to do with them. I need concrete suggestions on specifically what to do, when, and how to turn an idea into a reality. And I was at a loss for concrete ideas for how to "love" in a way that could ever hope to improve the world.

So I thought, well, there's so much talk about love out there, surely if I just pay better attention I'll figure out what the action steps are. So I started listening. But to my surprise, I found that for all the talk of love, it's pretty much all at the theoretical level. Let's just take the UU hymnal as an example. There are easily 35 readings and hymns that talk about love, and I've read them all. They talk about how wonderful love is, how powerful love is, how important love is, etc. - but with only one exception -- none of them talked about what love is, let alone how to do it.

So I finally decided to stop looking for a "cookbook" to tell me how to love, and to start writing a recipe myself. And, to continue with the cooking metaphor, I'd like to share that "recipe" with you today. Please note that this is a very home-made recipe - it's not based on any experts' studies or books, it's still very much under development, and the results are far from 100% guaranteed. But it has been prepared with care and an honest desire to figure out how to improve my little corner of the world.

My first step was to clarify what I meant by the term "love". And I quickly realized that there are two broad, and very different, types of love. The first I shall call "the feeling". This type of love describes how I feel about various things or people - everything from chocolate to my cats to my husband (at least most of the time!). I realized that I really like this type of love - it feels warm, and happy, and satisfying, and makes me feel generous towards the world. It would be lovely if I could feel that way consistently about everyone and everything in the world.

But both the good news and the bad news about this type of love is that it is essentially passive or involuntary. That's good news because it means that it's easy -it just sort of happens that I feel this way. It doesn't take any real effort on my part, and it feels great. The bad news is that I can't just make this happen. There are some people or things in my life which I know I should love - that I truly do want to love - but that I just can't muster this feeling for on a consistent basis, no matter how hard I try. And because I can't make this feeling happen, I don't think that this type of love is "the answer" to September 11 and the other horrors and inequities of our world.

But the second type of love, I think, may have potential to be at least part of the answer to these issues. If the first type of love is a "feeling", then the second is a "choice". By this I mean that it is a set of principles and actions that we consciously choose to adhere to when interacting with others. In many ways, it is the opposite of the first type of love. While the first type of love - the feeling -- is involuntary, this type is very much the result of a conscious decision. Feeling love is easy and natural, while choosing love can often be very difficult and unnatural, particularly when we choose to "love" someone whom we really have difficulty liking. But the wonderful thing about this type of love as a choice is that, if we have the discipline and commitment, we can choose to act in a loving way towards anyone.

But once I reached this point, I was led back to the question - HOW do I act towards someone whom I have chosen to love? In other words, what are the action steps for living out love as a choice? And after a lot of thought and conversations, I came up with four elements or action steps which I have started to help me operationalize this type of love. I'd like to share these action steps with you now.

I think the first step is best summed up by one of our key UU principles -- to affirm the "inherent worth and dignity of every human being". At first glance, this one may sound very straightforward. But in practice, I find it involves respecting a person on many different levels.

On its most basic level, it means accepting that a person or persons have a right to be here, on the planet, taking up space, looking however they look, belonging to whatever social groups they belong to, and consuming the resources they need to survive.
That last one - consuming resources - is a really tough one for me. When I think about the millions of people around the planet who lack access to adequate resources for a safe and healthy survival, I can not say that I think their inherent worth and dignity is being respected. And to the extent that I participate in and benefit from the system that perpetuates these inequities, I seriously question the degree to which I am adequately choosing to love such people.

On another level, respecting a person's inherent worth and dignity means respecting their right to have opinions, perspectives, and reactions that are different from my own. I don't think it means I have to agree with their opinions, but I do need to respect their right to think or feel the way they do. To be honest, this one hits really close to home for me. On just about every major issue you can think of - from politics to religion to how to raise children - my opinions are vastly different from those of just about every other member of my family of origin. There are times when these differences make me want to throw my hands up in the air and say: forget the whole bunch of you. But once I've calmed down, I remember that no matter how much I disagree with their opinions, they have the right to have them. That certainly doesn't mean that I have to agree with their opinions, or allow them to act them out towards me, but if I have truly chosen to love these people, I must to accept their right to have different opinions.

My second element of love as a choice is to truly seek to understand the other person's perspective. There's an old Native American adage that applies here: "Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins." I have often been amazed how differently the world can look when I see it through another's glasses. But I must admit that this takes effort. For people who are close to us, it takes the psychological effort of trying to see how events that we both participated in may look different from their perspective. And for people in far away places - such as those in Islamic countries who do not share the standard US view of Mr. Bin Laden - it takes an intellectual effort as well - an effort to learn about and understand geopolitical events that have affected their lives but which we are largely unaware of.

My third element of love as a choice is to want good things for the other person - to want them to have their basic needs met, to grow and learn, to be happy. This one sounds so simple, doesn't it? I'm a good person, of course I want good things for other people, there's no effort required here. But I'd like to ask you to think twice about this one. Because I sometimes wonder how often the "good" thing we want for the other person is more about what we think is good for them, than what they think is good for them. I have seen this happen in trivial affairs - like gift giving - as well as in momentous ones -- like international development efforts. For example, I can think of several gifts I have given with very good intentions, but that were more about what I liked or thought the other person should have, than about what they really needed or wanted. In retrospect, I realize that these gifts probably did not give much joy to the other person, and may even have complicated their lives. And from my brief exposure to international development work, I suspect that many such efforts are guilty of trying to force Western-style solutions on cultures for which they are not a good fit.

So my third element of love entails watching out for this paternalistic, "I know what's best for you better than you do" attitude. And I think the second element - trying to truly understand where the other person is coming from - can help a lot in avoiding this pitfall. Now I'm not saying that there aren't times that I'm justified in thinking that what I want for someone is more legitimate than what they want for themselves. For example, my 16-month-old daughter definitely thinks that she's better off not taking her antibiotic, while I have a different opinion and have no intention of changing it. But even with a 16-month old, it's still important that I take her opinion into account when deciding how to respond to her.

And finally, once I have decided what is truly best for the other person, my fourth element of love as a choice is to act on these good intentions. This is where the rubber really hits the road. As I've said, I think it's very important to respect people's inherent worth, to seek to understand their perspective, and to truly want good things for them. But if we stop there, I don't think we're ever going to change the world -even our little corner of it. That's because all those things I've mentioned so far happen at the personal, intellectual level. We must go the next step - taking concrete actions to help make those good things actually happen. We must demonstrate this type of love in the actions of our everyday lives - in how we spend our time and money, how we treat our friends and family members, and how we seek to influence the international political scene. Mother Theresa summed this up when she wrote "Love cannot remain by itself - it has no meaning. Love has to be put into action."

In conclusion, I'd like to return to my original question: Is "love" the answer to the events of September 11 and similar atrocities?

If by "love", we mean that wonderful warm feeling we get around people that make us happy, then I doubt there's much potential here. It would be great if we could all just think and feel nice thoughts and make the world a better place, but it's not that easy.

But what about love as a choice - meaning as a set of principles and actions that we consciously choose to adhere to when interacting with others? I think there may be some potential here.

If "love" means seeking to reduce the inequities in how resources are distributed across the human population, then I think "love" is part of the answer.

If "love" means respecting others' right to have opinions that differ from ours, I think that's part of the answer.

If "love" means seeking to understand others' experiences and perspectives, I think that's part of the answer.

If "love" means truly wanting good things for the other person - not just what we think is good for them, but balancing that with what they think is good for them - then I think that's part of the answer.

And if "love" means not just wanting good things for others, but acting to make these things happen, then I think that's part of the answer.

I don't think love is the whole answer. There are forces out there that I truly believe are beyond the power of love to touch, at least in the short run. But I do think it is part of the answer, and a part that everyone in this room can put into action.

On September 11 the Dalai Lama asked the citizens of the world to each ask ourselves how we can show up in the world in a way that will cause the world itself to change.
And here's one possible answer -- we can each choose the discipline and hard work of choosing to love one another.

Amen.