Honesty and Love
Thoughts for the Melbourne Unitarian Church by Rev. Dr. David Sammons, February 1, 2009
Love is a word about which I’ve always been confused, though I use it all the time, as I suspect, do you. When I was little, in that blissful realm we must leave when we go to school, I used the word for things I liked, such as the new plush elephant I got at Christmas each year. Then love was a word my mother said I had to say whenever I kissed my grandmother. As I got older love was a word I used as an inducement for getting more familiar – and I don’t mean with my grandmother. It was the word used to express the unusually warm feeling that went with my sealing a marriage and then, finding it gone, ending it. It later came into my life again with renewed meaning after I finally found the soul mate who has remained my wife ever since.
However, love is even more than this – and it’s this “moreness” I’ve always felt a need for in my life. After all it was central in the teachings of Jesus. He found it a necessary counter to the more vengeful side of the Hebrew Scriptures with which he was raised – and we now see being enacted in the Middle East. The Buddha thought of love, in the sense of compassion, as the antidote to the suffering with which he believed life was imbued, as it indeed seems to be. The Universalists who were the co-forbears of Unitarian Universalism in the United States based their theology on it. They believed in a God of love who expected us to be loving, that is, compassionate, in return. It’s the only way, they believed, one could be religious.
But the way people the word “love” can be confusing. Just think of other ways people use the word: “I love the color blue…. I love it when you smile…. Love your neighbor; love the stranger; love the person to whom you should turn the other cheek…. I just love the way you told that bugger off….” It’s no wonder using the word “love” can be confusing. At least it is for me.
Let me tell you something about myself, not because my life has anything to commend it but because it’s my life, so I’ve thought a lot about it. I’ve thought about it not just from a personal perspective, but from the perspective of the religious faith to which I’m committed because there is a great deal about it that’s of use.
When I discovered Unitarian Universalism – Unitarianism as you call it in this country – what attracted me where not only its values but the way people put them into practice in their lives. I admired people willing to live out a faith that values freedom, tolerance and reason, as Earl Morse Wilbur, the founder of the school where I teach, said Unitarians were the central values of our faith. But our faith isn’t just about freedom, tolerance and reason. It’s also about honesty and love.
People in a faith like ours are committed to being honest. If there is one word people use when asked why to say why they can’t belong to a more traditional faith, it’s that they could no longer be hypocrites. But being honest isn’t easy, especially when it comes to being honest about ourselves. Most of us want it to be as open about ourselves as possible; but true to whom and for what reasons? For instance, when I was a teenager most of my friends came from families that were different from mine. Their families didn’t value learning or the arts. Their taste in music, for instance, ran to the Beach Boys, not Mozart. It was hard for me to be honest with my friends about liking to read, wanting to do well in school and wanting to study art. So, I didn’t show them that side of myself. Instead, I showed them the side of me that was like the side of themselves they liked: chasing girls and being an athlete. And I was pretty good at both, so I got by. I never talked about my grades with friends, so it was a surprise to them when I was offered admission to a prestigious college and won awards for my academics. I even told them I went to the college in which I was enrolled because I was recruited to play footy. But I was only recruited as a favor to the high school coach who was a friend of my father. By the time I went to collage I had accumulated too many injuries to be able any longer to make a go of sport.
So, my image of being an athlete had to go and I had to find friends who liked me more as the person I really was, than the person my old friends wanted me to be. The person I wanted to be was more like the kind of people I found when I became a Unitarian. But even with them my honesty only went so far. It only went so far because there were personal things I didn’t want to have to admit to them: like the confusion I long felt about the place of sexuality in my life and the difficulty I had opening myself to the depths of an interpersonal relationship.
Unitarian Universalists in the United States have a marvelous program for young people called O.W.L.: “Our Whole Lives.” O.W.L. is a values-based updating of a curriculum we used to call – in words more to the point – “About Your Sexuality.” It’s a program mean to help young people not only understand the mechanics of sex, as they might in school, but the feelings that go with being intimate. I wish I could have been led through such a course when I was young, as were my five children. It’s helped them be more honest about how they feel felt and about how their feelings relate to their needs. But such courses weren’t taught when I was young – and from the resistance that seems to exist in Victoria to teaching youth about sex and feelings they still aren’t being offered to the young people in this part of Australia.
I’m talking about this with you this morning because I believe our faith demands that we be honest about who we are and what we do. This doesn’t mean we have to share the details of our lives with everyone. We must respect each other’s need for privacy. But if there is something someone needs to know about us because of the relationship we have with them – we’ve got to let them know what it is – and we can’t pretend about such an important word as love.
This is particularly true of someone in my profession – which is, I suspect, one of the reasons I chose to be what I am. Ministers can’t fake who they are. They can’t pretend to know what they don’t or to be better than they are. But, in their honesty, they’ve also got to care about even those people they don’t like. They’ve got to take the Buddha seriously when he said the only way to deal with suffering is to detach oneself from greed and become compassionate. They’ve got to take Jesus seriously when he said that “agape,” a concern for others, is the “greatest” of the “faith, hope and love” Paul talks about in I Corinthians.
In the United States Unitarian Universalist ministers have a Code of Professional Practice that talks about honesty and love. It says, as a Unitarian Universalist minister, I must understand: “the honor of my profession begins with the honest use of my own mind and skills.” It goes on to say a “minister's life and vocation is to reflect honesty, forthright love and service.” It demands of me – as it demands of all in our faith: that we “speak the truth, in love, as best we understand it,” and then live that truth and love in our lives.
And this is true even when it’s hard to do, as it was hard for me to do when I found I was in a marriage in which what I thought was love turned out to be something else – when making use of the word turned out to be a way of avoiding the fact I was in a relationship with a person to whom I was no longer deeply, intimately committed. If I was going to be loving – to be compassionate – I had to be honest and not pretend to feel something I didn’t. It wasn’t easy to be honest about how I felt. A person who is married isn’t supposed to feel like this in our kind of society. For my parents, for instance, marriage was something you held on to no matter what. But it seemed to me that to honor the love that is supposed to be central to a such a relationship, I had to end the relationship if I no longer felt it. It was the loving thing to do.
To not do this would be dishonest to the religious values to which I owed my allegiance – and unfair to the woman with whom I was in a marriage. My wife was entitled to a love I no longer felt. So, the most honest and loving thing I could do was end our marriage so that both my former wife and I could seek the love I believe all of us deserve, even if we haven’t found it – or had it once and now find it gone.
Luckily, I found love again, the love that should exist at the heart of a marriage. And I found it in other ways, too. There’s the unconditional love that I share with my children who, even though they are now all now grown, still need my love, just as I needed it from my parents. There is the love I share with friends, people with whom I can pour out my soul, trusting we’ll remain friends no matter what comes out – and no matter how they respond to it. And this goes for my wife, who is my best friend. Friends, for me now, are not like I thought friends were when I was trying to impress them with my abilities at sport and with girl.
And it’s not just people for whom I feel love. I love books. I love ideas. I love works of art. I love the beauty to be found in nature. I love the kind of ideals that will make our world a better place in which to live. I love to work. I love to generate ideas. I love to help people deal with problems; whether it’s how to organize a church or how to cope with the death of someone with whom they’ve shared their lives. I love the religious faith to which I’ve devoted my professional life. In fact, I love the very idea of being religious: of being a person who cares about Life in its fullness, rather than just those parts of it from which we can take what we want. I love Life, even though it’s filled not only with delight; it’s filled with things that are difficult with which to deal, such as the recent Israeli invasion of Gaza or the rocket attacks from Hamas that prompted it. I don’t like violence or war, or economic greediness because I can see what they do to Life. I don’t like intolerance or hate, even though I’m not immune from them. I don’t like the way make wasteful use of the natural world, even though I have all-too-easily accepted some of the benefits of these desecrations.
So, at the heart of our Unitarian faith – and at least as important as the freedom, tolerance and reason talked about by Wilbur – is being honest and finding a place for love in our lives. Jesus put it well when he was asked by the rabbis to “sum up” the “law and the prophets.” He said: “Thou shall love the Lord, thy God [that is, Life], with all your heart, soul and mind [that is, with the whole of you], and thou shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Sin – Sin with a Big S, the Sin that is the one from which we must escape if we are to have a feeling of wholeness and fulfillment – is a failure to love ourselves, others and Life with all the passion, respect, and caring they deserve. To be religious is as simple and as complicated as that.
The current President of the school at which I teach, Rebecca Parker has co-authored a book called, Saving Paradise, in which she claims that the problem with modern day Christians, along with Muslims, Jews and many others, is they have forgotten this. Instead, they have fostered an ethic of violence and revenge. Instead of believing that the Kingdom of God was at hand for all those willing to put compassionate love at the center of their lives, they centered on sacrifice: being like the bleeding Jesus on the Cross.
With the crumbling of the state around them, something we might be seeing again, the loving Jesus, the compassionate Buddha, the just Moses and Mohammed, became images that were lost. To pursue the Cross became to value vengeance, hatred and death, just as to pursue Islam became to take up the sword, to be an Israeli meant to go on the attack, and to be a Buddhist meant to root out the Hindus in Sri Lanka.
There are so many ways in which the Sin of not loving is kept alive it’s amazing it doesn’t just take over everything. It’s a tribute to the value of love that, in spite of all the violence in which our human race has indulged itself, caring hasn’t ceased to exist. Somehow compassion, like honesty, is still a value to which people allegiance. – and it may yet save our world.
Earl Morse Wilbur, the historian who coined the Unitarian Trinity of freedom, tolerance and reason – and told the stories of Servetus, Francis David, John Biddle and others who were killed because they upheld them – told us important things about the religious faith to which the members of this congregation have long held allegiance. But the one thing Wilbur failed to understand was these people were martyred not only because they believed in freedom, tolerance and reason – and were unwilling to be dishonest about their beliefs – they were also unwilling to let go of their commitment to compassion and love, any more than was Jesus. What caused them to be killed was not just an abstract set of ideas. It was their rejection of a faith that had lost its ability to uphold the values of honesty and love.
No matter how difficult things may become for us or the world in which we live, let’s not reject these values, either. Let’s not let a desire for power or wealth dictate the way we relate to others – and let’s not let it dictate the way those who rule our countries and control their institutions behave. Life is too precious for that. It deserves more from us. Love may be a confusing and like honesty it may be a difficult value to uphold, but in the depth of our hearts – and as an expression of our faith – we know what it means. And we know that living our values, like honesty and love, is what will truly bring meaning and satisfaction to our lives. So, whenever we say we love someone or something, in honesty, let’s mean it!