Happy Valentine’s Day
February 12, 2023
On this Valentine’s Day, I want to explore love, not the Hallmark card kind of love. I am thinking of the many afternoons my father and I sit at the back stoop of our house, eating watermelon and spitting seeds into the yard. I am thinking of my mother in her flowered dress, sitting next to me every summer afternoon fanning away the mosquitos while I studied. I am thinking of my lover’s gentle touch, paying attention to every slight rise and fall in my body. I am thinking of Bill’s scent inside his jacket after they took his cold body away. And I am thinking of my circle of friends who came together quietly to carry me through pain, grief, and elation. Love is the chemistry we breathe out and the air we breathe in. It is the fuel that keeps us going.
Then, there is another kind of love that is universal and big enough to bind the world together. It has been four years since I was called to ministry. I was not there to search for the God sitting on a throne. I was there to search for the forever present but sometimes elusive thing called love because I noticed repeatedly that strangers jump in to help strangers during disasters. What propelled us is not the hatred or division but the essential love like a river that flows through us.
During my ordination process, I was asked to prove that I am interfaith. To me, being a Unitarian Universalist is being interfaith because I have received the gift of love shared by all religions, and spiritual and humanistic practices regardless of what they call themselves. Without the essential love, why are we even here on earth? With or without our 7 principles, now adding the 8th, I have a hunch that what brought us here is the hunger for love in the name of the community.
My Buddhist teachers taught me that to love is to break our hearts whether to a person or the universe. To love those whom we don’t like or disagree with takes courage, but it is the spiritual journey we need to take to restore our wholeness.
Psychologist Sigmund Freud said, love acts as a force, more than an emotion, that melts away the perceived boundary between a lover and the beloved. “You and I” are one.
13th-century Sufi poet, Rumi, wrote:
“Why struggle to open a door between us when the whole wall is an illusion?”
“If I love myself, I love you. If I love you, I love myself.”
“Love is the bridge between you and everything.”
“This is a subtle truth: Whatever you love, you are.”
Philosopher Plato said:
“Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.”
“Love is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.”
Quantum physicists including Schrödinger, Planck, Rosenblum, and Kutner seem to all agree that objects and subjects are one. Separability is an illusion.
From all these angles, if there is no separation, then love is the glue that holds us together as one. I cannot hate you because you are me. I hope that enough of us come back to this basic truth, perhaps there will be no more war and man-made destruction in the years to come.