From the Pastor's Desk
 

Reclaiming Love
 

By Rev. Aaron Payson
 

February 2007
 
With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, I think it fitting to pause for a moment on the subject of love, and here rediscover the essence of that faith at the core of all the world’s religions. To wit, I recently reread an address by the famed William Sloan Coffin, to the 1995 Convocation of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association, in which the good Reverend takes up the issue of the Transient and Permanent in liberal religion. Ever the provocative public theologian, Coffin turned attention early on in his address to the famed passage in Paul’s first epistle to the church in Corinth, and his own editorial commentary, “ ‘Though I speak with the tongues of angels’ - preachers, poets, you’re being addressed; ‘though I understand all mystery and all knowledge’ - professors, take note; ‘though I give all my goods to feed the poor’ - radicals, your turn; ‘though I give my body to be burned’ - the very stuff of heroism; ‘but have not love, it profits me nothing.’ A more radical statement of ethics I doubt can be found in any other holy writ.”

For Coffin such biblical wisdom turn’s the philosopher’s adage “I think, therefore I am” on its head. “I love, therefore I am.” says the pastor-theologian; which is to his mind, and mine, the supreme and permanent truth of liberal religion in general and liberal Christianity in particular. But what does this truth matter if it simply stays an oft repeated adage and not something wholeheartedly lived? Here in lies the crux of my reflection.

In its simplest application, such truth suggests that a life worth living is done so in service to something much larger than one’s self. For the love referred to by the Apostle is not love of self, but the expression of love itself. It becomes, therefore and question concerning the orientation of our own daily efforts to repair, sustain, and support that interdependent web of existence, of which we are only a part (this is part of the seventh principle of the Unitarian Universalist Association). Such wisdom admonishes us against the me-first ethic of consumerism, of the folly in attempting to simply strive to keep up with those who seem to have everything in our world, only to discover that without adequate outlets to serve the world, what we have is but an empty shell of a life.

In its most radical application, such truth about love, calls into question the ways in which we continue to operate in a global era. It condemns war as an outmoded way to resolve international conflict, militarism as apostasy, and the concept of holy war oxymoronic as it is popularly employed. It names violence as the antithesis of faith, and reminds the principles and powers of the world that we are not called to control the future, but to trust that by practicing loving-kindness, there will be a future. In the absence of such spiritual discipline, the future itself seems hard to imagine, when fear replaces faith-filled practice.

In an age when we worry about the very survival of the planet itself, can we wait to enact this principle which binds us together as a faithful people? For I believe that love is not only the core belief of liberal religion, but all religion. And those that subvert this core principle through violence represent the very worst of our humanity.

To paraphrase the grandfather of American Universalism, Hosea Ballou, “If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury. If we don’t, there’s no other agreement that can do us any good.”
Rev. Aaron Payson, from The Unitarian Universalist Church of Worcester, is serving as Covering Minister of the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church while Rev. Sara Ascher is on Sabbatical.
    
 
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