Love beyond belief, I hear it echoing throughout the land.
These days it is more like a whisper I’ll grant you that.
Yes, it is not the only sound in the wider cacophony.
It is the sound I choose to hone in on.
It is the one I choose to amplify.
Love beyond belief. This is the hallmark of the second part of our faith’s name: Universalism. There is no hell but the one we make for ourselves and each other. There is an abiding love larger than any catastrophe or evil. This love exists independent of us, but we are its embodiment: our actions make love possible to be known here on earth.
And still we breathe. And still we choose.
“Justice is what love looks like in public, just like tenderness is what love feels like in private.” Dr. Cornel West said that and it, too, echoes in my ears. What does that ask of me? What does that ask of us?
More eloquent voices than mine have articulated the first part of that quote: that if we truly practice love, not just profess it, we must persistently seek justice. My bones, made of elements found in the earth and in the stars, know this as true. Sometimes my actions do not show it, but ever I try.
But what about that tenderness? What about how we are with each other one to one, in private? These last few days my temper has been short and I have found myself in conversations with those closest to me that sting, my own words or actions too often being the source of that hurt. While I have watched a tenderness among the folks I have served, I have also watched tempers flare, more so than at other times.
And still we breathe. And still we choose.
It makes sense that our relationships are strained. In Unitarian Universalism, our 7th principle reminds us that we are a part of the interdependent web of all existence. When that “inextricable network of mutuality” (as Dr. King called it) is battered with such an array of hate – racism, sexual battery, xenophobia, religious bigotry, violence as the response to dissent – it makes sense that this would soak into not just our public lives, but our private ones.
So dear ones, in these troubling days and weeks (and months and years) ahead, let us listen for the sounds of love beyond belief. Some days it will mean that we must remove ourselves from the noise, stilling our minds and bodies that we might hear it. Some days it will mean that we must enter the stream of others seeking that love, because it will be in joining together that the love will be made, the tenderness will be found, the justice will rise up.
Love beyond belief, it echoes throughout the land. It is not the only sound in the wider cacophony, but it is the sound I choose to amplify.
I invite you to do the same.