Reverend Jennifer Nordstrom

In her book Writing to Wake the Soul, Karen Hering tells the story of French Poet Robert Desnos writing to his lover from a Nazi concentration camp. He told his love that although he did not have the time or energy to write it in the camp, he had an idea “for a love story in an entirely new genre” and he would write it as soon as he was released. He died of typhus two days after his release, leaving us to wonder. What sort of love story can we imagine having ideas for amidst such suffering? And what “entirely new genre” would this love amidst suffering prompt the creation of?

 

Unitarian Universalists often use Love interchangeably with God. We rarely specify whether we mean that Love is the essence or God, the being of God, an attribute of a more complex God, an action or doing of God, or a concept we can trust that we think roughly correlates to concepts of God. We may mean all of these, or we may mean to be broad enough to include all these possibilities.

 

Universalism has often focused more on experience, on love of “being,” and on God’s love for the world. Universalist theology sees God’s love for the world as the reason we will ultimately not be separate from God, and it encourages us to experience that love in the present through loving one another. Unitarianism has focused more on reason, on love of ideas, vocation, and “doing.” Unitarian theology has seen humans’ love for God as the reason to walk towards perfection of the soul. Our human expression of love for God appears when we work for justice, make art, and find the work of our hearts. In our own lives, we can work to find the balance between these two expressions of a love relationship with the ultimate.

 

Sociologist and psychologist Erich Fromm reframes this traditional juxtaposition of “being” versus “doing.” Fromm argues that the real difference is between being and having, which are the primary modes of human existence. The being mode is based in being present, being human, and experiencing and acting in the current moment. The having mode is based in acquiring resources, owning, and accumulating something that feels missing from being. What we often characterize as “doing” can fit into either category. When doing is an expression of being it is a way humans practice love in the world. When doing is an effort to acquire, it is an expression of something missing and a frantic race to get whatever that appears to be.

 

Other religions have various concepts of love, and ways of linking love and God. Christian theologian Paul Tillich said God is unity, and love is humans’ feeling of longing to return to that unity. Buddhism prioritizes the concept of compassion, and understands that compassion is the given reality of all being: we do not need to return to the interconnected reality, because we have never been separated from it. Many religions understand God as the Beloved, including Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam, particularly in Sufism. How might thinking of God, the ultimate, or the power larger than ourselves, as our Beloved alter our experience of religion? Of worship?

 

--Written by Jennifer Nordstrom with input from the theme team: K.P. Hong, Ruth Palmer, Lisa Friedman, Pat Haff, Karen Hering, Karen Van Fossan, Janne Eller-Isaacs, and Rob Eller-Isaacs