Liberating Love

Our theme for this month is “Liberating Love”. This is a big one. This is the one that directly impacts the other six values we are incorporating into Unitarian Universalism. In the new articulation of our UU values, the Article II now reads: “The purpose of the Unitarian Universalist Association is to actively engage its members in the transformation of the world through liberating Love.” Love is at the center, it says in a later line. Not only the center of the flower logo. But at the center. Of our lives. Of our world. Maybe even of our universe. 

So what do we mean by capital-L Love? “Love,” says the Article II draft, “is the power that holds us together.” It’s the feeling upon which we build our families. Perhaps it is even alive in the forces that bond our very atoms, the gravity between astral bodies, as well as the pull between people. Love is the connecting force, a transcending force. Love tells us to love our neighbors and our enemies. Love makes an individual willing to sacrifice themselves for others, as the heroes do in stories. 

But there are negative kinds of love, lowercase-l love. Buddhism teaches us that love which involves ownership, greed, and fear are actually forms of spiritual limitation. I have often said that love without boundaries is abuse. People can do terrible things to each other in the (perhaps false) name of “love”. We must acknowledge that many folks carry baggage from the wounds of limited, possessive, disillusioning love. For us to desire something or someone so strongly that we want to possess or control them for our own satisfaction, we must first conceive ourselves as separate from them. We mistakenly conceive another living being as an object to be used, whether they like it or not. We fall into the illusion of separateness, which causes terrible suffering.

Instead, generous forms of Love unselfishly wish for others to have peace and wellbeing, in ways that they determine. It recognizes that we are inherently connected and so their wellbeing matters to us as much as our own. Practicing this kind of Love is the purpose of many religions, including ours. Let me repeat, “The purpose of the Unitarian Universalist Association is to actively engage its members in the transformation of the world through liberating Love.” 

There’s an important word there, and it’s highlighted in our monthly theme. “Liberating.” The presence of this word helps us focus on a specific kind of Love. Liberating Love, not possessive love. Liberating Love, not consuming love. Actively Liberating Love, not passive or complacent. 

So let’s dive into what we might mean by liberating. While “liberating” is similar to free, we’re not talking about “free love”. That’s a different talk.

Freedom is a really big concept that means a lot of different things to the staunchly opposed sides of our nation. So let’s look at what the sides seem to mean, and why UUs generally consider ourselves leaning to one side over the other. 

We’ve all seen the stickers on the back of a pickup truck with a bald eagle in front of an American flag with the word FREEDOM in ripped up looking font. For those folks, freedom seems to mean the freedom to determine how your life goes, using the freedom to own property and steward it according to your values. That makes sense to me. Unfortunately, I think that concept has been misused by some folks to emphasize individual and short-term gains over collective long-term well-being, through a worldview of ownership and over-consumption. This kind of freedom has shown itself to be ok with a factory polluting a river, as long as the bottom line is strong. We can call this independent freedom.

Many folks that I know and most of my generation, while we certainly value freedom as a concept, don’t want to be associated with the negative things that have happened in freedom’s name. But it’s funny that both sides are talking about the same basic concept. I mean, we’re about to put this in our religious bylaws. So what do we mean and why is it different?

By liberation, folks are often talking about gaining freedom from oppressive forces, such as destructive forms of capitalism, imperialism, racism and other social prejudices. Because it is often a group of people who are being oppressed for similar reasons, it has come to have a more collective meaning. The indigenous Australian activist Lila Watson said, “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” In this worldview, we recognize that we have to work together. We recognize that we share the river, so we shouldn’t pollute it. This is interdependent liberation.

So when we talk about Unitarian Universalism being welcoming to all, we mean it. And we also mean that all should be welcoming. Welcoming of all people, but not all behaviors. Unitarian Universalists must be clear about what we are and are not ok with. We are not ok with oppression. We are not ok with profit over people. We are not ok with unsustainable systems. Because these cause harm. Maybe we’re lucky that they don’t harm us or our families directly. But we care about those who are different from us or far away. And those things harm them. We work for freedom to thrive for all people, indeed all living beings, not just ourselves. Some UUs will even risk themselves for others, as the heroes in stories do. As the heroes in religions do.

Why is this freedom concept worth talking about in a religious faith, when it seems so political and economic? It’s only in the Western world that religion is considered this separate thing from the rest of our lives. Our spirituality helps us understand the world and decide what we should do within it. Our previous UU President, Rev. Susan Frederick Gray said, “Love is a core foundation of my religious understanding, but it is not a love that is simply an emotion, a feeling, or an expression of the bonds of loyalty felt within a group. In personal relationships, when we love someone, we wish for them the fullest unfolding and development of who they are. We wish for them freedom, safety, joy, and life. Love as a religious practice extends our compassion, solidarity, and care beyond the personal to seek the liberation and wholeness of every person. It reminds us of our fundamental interdependence with all of life.” 

We are here in this room together because we are either curious about or fully identified with Unitarian Universalism. One of the reasons I love this faith is that those two names denote a balance between the individual and the collective. Unitarian is about oneness as well as each one. The early Unitarians, who emphasized the oneness of the Christian God, as opposed to the Trinity, were often oppressed as heretics. They were also neighbors with Muslim communities and had to learn to get along. So, over time, Unitarian came to include meanings about individual freedom of belief and the intellectual force of reason. 

Meanwhile, the Universalists were all about love. God’s love, our love for our fellow beings. We now often substitute the word Love for God in our hymnals, that’s how into love the Universalists are.

So I really appreciate this phrase, “liberating love” at the beginning of our new values statement. I think it gets at both our Unitarian appreciation of freedom and our Universalist efforts to spread love. With the new Article II draft, we are ratifying our support of the kind of love which liberates and the kind of freedom that’s rooted in love. 

So, what will liberating love mean to each of you individually and to us as a collective? A congregational consultant named Cameron Trimble wrote, “Congregations at their best are ‘schools of love,’ places where we can be with others who make us more compassionate, generous, peace-filled, and kind.”

Many of us have been raised in a Western worldview that conditions us to see other people as objects, as means to a goal, as competition. In my view, one of the purposes of Unitarian Universalism and my own profession of ministry is to help us, including myself, unlearn all that. To remind us, over and over, of the basic fact that we are interconnected with the world and to encourage us to work for the well-being of others just as hard as we work for our own.  

Liberating Love means we are in this together. Toni Morrison said, “I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.” You have power. How are you using it? Light a candle of liberating love in your daily life. Let’s build those world-changing muscles back up a little at a time. Our liberation is bound up together. Love is calling you. It’s time to answer.