For Valentine’s Day we look at love. The romantic expression of love flows from an even more powerful life force called Eros. It is the passion of Eros that inspires our justice work. But for a church to “side with love” requires connecting also with the mystic love of agape and the pastoral love of philio.
We are talking this month about the third of the five Developmental tasks that the Unitarian Universalist Association hopes that congregations will work on when they go through an interim period after the departing of a previous settled minister and as the congregation works to call their next settled minister.
The developmental task for today is Identity. Identity is also one of the three major themes of any kind of spiritual work. The spiritual questions of “Who am I” What does it mean to be me? Do I have a soul? Is there a part of human identity that is immortal that might continue on into an afterlife? Are human beings naturally good and the evil in society comes because we have fallen away from our initial perfection? Or are we naturally neutral and have to learn morality? Or are we naturally sinful, and must depend on divine help to be saved?
Questions of Identity move from “Who am I?” as a person. To “Who are we?” as a species.
And It’s also appropriate to ask the question, “Who are we?” as a congregation, which is the way that the Unitarian Universalist Association would like a congregation to ask the identity question during the search process. What is the character of this congregation? What are your gifts? What are your needs? What kind of minister should you look for, because you’re clear about what kind of congregation you are?
When you think about the identity of this conversation, or describe your church to a friend, what do you say? Do you talk about the powerful social justice witness and activism of this church around such issues as racial justice, immigration, and climate change? Do you describe the open and broadly inclusive theology of this church emphasizing not the beliefs that often divide people of diverse faiths but the values that unite us? Or do you feel the real gift of this church is its strong community, the way we laugh together, party together, support each other and care for each other?
Answering those questions is a conversation that we need to have over the next year and a little longer as the search process unfolds.
The other four Developmental Task, just so you know, are History, which we talked about at the beginning of the church year; leadership, which we talked about in November and December, mission, which we will tackle next month. And then we will conclude with assessing the strength of our connections with the larger community of Long Beach and the Unitarian Universalist Association, which has a nice synchronicity with this church hosting our District Assembly the last weekend of April.
One of the most consequential influences on our identity, is our experience of being in our bodies. These particular bodies.
Identity is being this person. Identity is being in this place. And identity changes throughout our lives depending on how our body changes as we age, and the different physical places we are in. As our personal experiences accumulate over the years, as we read new books, and meet new people, and leave one job to start another, and people come in and out of our lives, our experience changes, and so our identity changes.
So one way to talk about the spiritual theme and the developmental task of Identity is to consider the different ages of your life, or the “ages” of a church and the community around us in the corporate dimension of Identity. This isn’t the church you were 100 years ago, or 50 or 20. Long Beach is different, and you are different.
Notice how the various gifts or challenges that you face as you are born and grow and age into maturity and eventually approach the end of your life, influence your identity. Sometimes you might feel strong and confident and courageous and grounded. And sometimes, because life is different, you feel different. You might feel uncertain. You might be doubtful and anxious and drifting. Who you were doesn’t define who you are.
And so, too, the church might be one time confident, and one time doubtful. The church might at one time be most attached to a particular expression of ministry, and sometime another. Neither necessarily is a mark of permanent identity, but may be a temporary response to a shifting context.
At all times of life, we ask the spiritual questions of identity. Who am I? of Who are we? But as we move through time our answers to those questions will change, because we change. “Who are we – now?” is the identity question. Who were we, is the history question. Who might we yet be, is the mission question we will come to next month
This examination of a church that changes identity through time, and our individual slowly transforming identity as we age, and the spiritual transformation that goes along with our growth through time, matches well with the Christian Liturgical calendar for this time of year.
Jesus’ birth is celebrated on Christmas Day, just after the winter solstice. And so we all begin as infants with an immature spirituality to go with our immature bodies. The Christian holiday of Epiphany comes two weeks after Christmas, which is the celebration of Jesus recognizing his identity as the Messiah and beginning his ministry. That’s a good fit for talking about the time in our life, perhaps as teenagers, when we begin to recognize who we are as distinct from our parents and we start to make choices about who we will be and what we will do with our lives.
Next in the Christian calendar we come to the season of Lent, which starts with Ash Wednesday. Lent is late this year because Easter is late this year. Lent won’t actually begin until March 6, but we’ve already begun looking at some of the Lenten Themes in the Healing Paths programs that I’m offering here at the church. The Creative Path on Thursday mornings at 11. The Compassionate Path, had one gathering last Sunday and Rev. Hamre will offer it again on the first Sundays in March and April. And the Mythic Path which is a long exploration of the Exodus story from the Bible as a model of a personal journey of leaving behind a constraining past, traveling through a wilderness or desert time, and coming at last to a Promised Land. Join us this Tuesday evening if you want to be part of that.
Lent is about a similar kind of journey: from a recognition of our mortality, marked at Ash Wednesday, (and we all go through metaphorical deaths” from time to time) through a path of grieving, toward acceptance, and hope for a new life, or a new kind of life, when we arrive at Easter.
Valentine’s Day, coming on Thursday, gives us an opportunity to talk about one of the most significant aspects of living in bodies, the experience of love. Giving love. Feeling love. Being in love. Loving. Who we love, how we love, the people we surround ourselves through love, form a significant part of our identity.
Despite being named for a Saint, Saint Valentine’s Day is not part of the Christian calendar. Valentine’s Day is a secular holiday celebrating romantic love. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m looking forward to a romantic dinner with my Valentine on Wednesday.
But love, in the spiritual meaning, is more than romance. Love is romantic love between two lovers, but Love is also the spiritual energy that holds the universe together. It is the love that guides us, the love that unites us, the love that leads us on our way.
We have one word for love in English. But love is many different feelings. Sexual love is not the same as the love you have for your grandmother (hopefully); or the love that inspires you to help a stranger in need, or the feeling of being loved by something larger than yourself when you look up at the night sky.
The Greeks, helpfully, had several different words to describe the full dimensionality of this big Love feeling.
Eros is the sexy, physical feeling of love that poets write about, and Fred and Ginger dance about, and that stocks the shelves with heart-shaped boxes this time of year. Eros is expressive love, the love that burns with energy. Eros is the passionate life force of physical desire and animal mating.
Agape is divine love. It’s the love you’re supposed to feel for every person, but have a hard time actually feeling for some specific people. Agape is the love that Universalists say embraces all of us.
Philio is platonic love between friends. Philio includes respect, and admiration, and joy. Philio is the word at the root of Philanthropy, meaning love of humanity. Or Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love.
And Storge is love within family relationships. Love of parents for children. Love of children for parents.
The love that we talk about and sing about in church and “side with” in our social justice ministry is a combination of Eros, the passionate fiery love that calls us to justice work, Agape, the divine love of compassion and charity, and Philio, the love that binds us as a connected congregational community.
I don’t want to have to invent a new word, so let’s just call it Love, but understand that the kind of love I’m talking about is the joyful uplifting energy of love, the eternal loving encouragement of the spiritual, and the loving embrace of human friendship and community.
This big Love combines both the blissed out love of the Mystic. And the fierce and challenging love of the Prophet. And the Pastoral love of the nurturing, caring, friend.
All have their place in the identity of a healthy church. The grateful love of the worshipper. The outraged love of the Prophet. The welcoming, healing love of the pastoral heart.
Love is complicated. Anyone who’s been in love, or had a teenager, knows that love is liberating, and infuriating. Sometimes to love someone means to let them go. Sometimes to love someone means to hold them tight. Sometimes love comes in a heart-shaped box. Sometimes love comes in the form of “tough” love, which knows that sometimes we must walk through a desert before we get to a Promised Land.
We are graced by love, in a receptive form, by the peaceful love of Agape. We are bound by that love into caring community by the sibling love of Philio. And we are activated and energized by love in an outpouring form, by the ferocious love of Eros. We are drawn by love that invites us forward with a welcoming whisper. We are held by love that gives us companions for the journey. And we are activated by love that shoves us from behind with a stern command. Sometimes love invites us to rest and enjoy what is. Other times, Love demands we rise and get to work to make it better.
This is a helpful balance to keep in mind as we navigate our way through difficult times in our world. As our hearts open in compassion toward those suffering around us, our hands extend to those we would embrace in connection, as we side with love against the forces preaching fear and division. All three sides of love must be present in our big Love.
Against a fearful and fearsome politics, we have been using a lot of Prophetic “No” energy lately. We are fired up. We are activated by Eros. We are passionate. We are outraged. And rightly so. There is so much to say “No” to.
But siding with love asks us to hold on to an equally powerful “Yes” energy. Yes to our vision. Yes to the people working beside us.
To Side with Love we can shout, or whisper, or replace words entirely with a gentle touch or a sympathetic nod. But always we communicate, “love.”
The fierce energy of Eros love. It feels like anger, outrage. Maybe it feels like disgust or horror. But it is love, ultimately, if we’re doing it in a spiritually healthy way. Love is the underlying reason that you’re feeling the anger at injustice that you feel. Love is why you’re on the street with the sign. Realizing that righteous anger is different from just being angry, will help you frame your action in a healthy and sustaining way.
Prophets don’t hate – they love. It’s Eros – not Thanatos, which is the Greek word for destructive, death energy. Side with love in your justice work. Stay connected to the ideals you are defending, the values you are advancing. Be an activist for the positive, not just a re-activist against the negative. Prophets say some harsh words. Prophets come with a challenging message. It isn’t easy to listen to them, or to be one. But the true identity of a prophet, or a prophetic church, is love. We side with love. We say boldly what must be said, and what needs to be said might be a word of condemnation for a social reality that is seriously broken. But we say it from love.
But Big Love requires more than Prophets. Mystics and Pastors also side with love. We need love in all its dimensions, both in our personal identity and in the corporate identity of our church.
We must say No to injustice, but Yes to the grace and beauty and peace that also surround us. Yes to the healing and welcoming of this community. We must make space in our lives, and hearts and souls, and our worship hall and church programs for grateful expressions of Agape and Philio Love. We must find the things, even in the midst of a present time so harsh and threatened, that we can say Yes to. Maybe that means remembering that the world is more than politics. The world is more than Washington DC. There are other messages to read besides Tweets. Other places to look besides cable TV. There is injustice that demands attention. Climate change demands our attention. But sunsets and stars and the snow-capped San Gabriels standing to the north this month demand our attention, too.
Balance love anger with love gratitude and love healing. Welcome Eros flowing through you. Welcome Agape flowing over you. Welcome Philio flowing around you.
It is not my place to tell you who you are, or what you should be. I can help you explore identity, but what you decide is yours to choose. You can be who you want to be.
But what I will urge you to be, however you choose to express it, is to be a big love church. Claim big love as your identity. Love in all its dimensions. The breaking open love of Eros. The soul-opening love of Agape. The heart-opening embrace of Philio.
Be the yes of love. The no of love. The enough of love. The never-enough of love. Be love. Choose love. Side with love.