“Wild Forces Within Us”
Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
Unitarian Society of New Haven
December 10, 2017
Reflection
I know about love the way the fields know about light, writes the mystical Sufi
poet Rabia.
Words we will hear set to music this morning. Rabia al Basri lived in ancient Iraq in the 8th Century.* She was born 500 years before Rumi, the Sufi poet with whom many of us are familiar. She was sold as a slave early in her life and later became an ascetic and a poet. An oft repeated theme of Rabia’s poetry is the love of God – the love God has for human beings and the love that she, Rabia, had for Allah, her God.
Without You — my Life, my Love – (she writes)
I would never have wandered across these endless countries.
You have poured out so much grace for me,
Done me so many favors, given me so many gifts –
I look everywhere for Your love –
Then suddenly I am filled with it.
(excerpt from My Joy)
“In the Eastern religions and in mysticism,” psychoanalyst Eric Fromm writes in his 1956 work The Art of Loving, “the love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of living.”
Now, many of us, but certainly not all of us, in the Unitarian Universalist tradition, have distanced ourselves from the Western conception of God which is, in many ways a “thought experience” as opposed to a feeling experience. Do you believe or not? Many of us (again, not all of us, but many of us) answer no. But, that feeling…that intense feeling of oneness, of overwhelming love, of being filled by something greater than ourselves is something that many of us have experienced.
So my question is not whether you believe in Rabia’s God, or not, but whether you know about love the way fields know about light? How have you experienced the oneness of love that goes beyond your thinking mind? Fromm suggests that the experience of love, of union, of a reprieve from separateness from our fellow human beings and from the ultimate is something we all need, something for which we all long. Indeed, love, he says is the “answer to the problem of human existence.” It is our greatest hope.
The composer, Jake Runestad, whose piece , The Hope of Loving, the choir will share with us this morning, has used the words of Rabia and others and the powerful music of the string quartet to shape a reflection on love – on the hope of loving and the hope of being loved, both of which each and all of us need to survive.
Many of us find meaning in the love we share for one another, for our families, our friends, our parents, our spouses, our children. Many of us finding meaning in the relationships we have forged here in this community and our relationship to the community itself.
What happens in the act of loving and being loved? We care for one another and, in doing so, overcome our separateness. We become important to each other. When we know love, we grow like the plants in the field. Our being expands; we are more than we ever thought we could be.
The other day, my daughter, Arden, and I spent some time looking at photos of space taken through the world’s most powerful telescopes. We saw stars being born, clusters of galaxies colliding, the rings of Saturn illuminated by the sun. As picture after picture took our breath away, my thought was, simply: We are so small.
We are so small, and the universe is so vast. Just think, clusters of galaxies colliding! The forces that exist within and beyond our world are tremendous, and we are infinitesimal.
And still, we love.
And still we hope.
And still we hold the hope of loving, of being loved.
Still we live with purpose and calling, kindness and care.
We are infinitesimal, and still we believe that each person has inherent worth and dignity. How do we show this? How do we live this? We love and we are loved. We love when it is easy, and we love when it is hard. Love is one of those tremendous forces in our universe, and we know the truth of its power like we know the warmth of our sun.
“There are beautiful wild forces within us,” St. Francis of Assisi writes, “let them turn millstones inside,” he says, “filling bushels that reach to the sky.” Just like the forces that make galaxies collide, the forces within us know no bounds. And though – at times – we may feel the limitations of our humanness, especially, say when we read the news of late, or witness again and again the tragic loss of life to violence, the truth is, the possibilities of love are endless.
Within the first few days after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Scarlett Lewis found it excruciating to return to her home where she says her 6-year-old son Jesse’s light filled the entire house. Jesse had been killed in the shooting on that cold December day in 2012. Scarlett did have to go back to their home, though, to retrieve Jesse’s clothes for his funeral, a horrific task that no parent should have to do.
As she walked through the kitchen, she noticed words scrawled in a six-year old’s hand on the family’s chalkboard easel: Nurturing Healing Love.
The words were written phonetically though clearly, but they certainly are not part of the usual six-year-old lexicon. For Jesse’s mother, they became a message from her son, a message he somehow knew she would need, she says, after his death. This message has guided her in her grief process, in her journey of forgiveness, in her work for a better world.
However they came to be written on that easel, for whatever reason, those words – Nurturing Healing Love – are a powerful message for all of us.
Could we hope to do more in our lives than to nurture healing love? I believe this is what we do here on our best days. Because to come together as we do, to say to one another and to our children – you are loved, just as you are; you matter; you are important – is a powerful act of faith. To gather as we do, as a covenantal community promising each other to live with compassion and care, to hold things lightly when we are able, to respect each other’s truths, proclaims that we still have hope in humanity. We still have hope in each other. We still have hope in love.
Love resists cynicism.
Love resists hatred.
Love resists fear.
How might we, together, harness the power of love and live our faith like we never have before?
“Love is our most valuable resource, our most precious possession, our doorway into fostering compassion,” composer Jake Runestad writes to introduce the piece the choir and the Haven String Quartet will now offer. “May you consider these texts and this music with an open mind and ask yourself, ‘to whom can I give more love in my life?’” he says. “For it is through love, both given and received, that our world can change.”
May it be that we join in living out the promise of nurturing healing love.
May it be that we offer each other hope in what may feel like hopeless times.
May it be that the wild forces within us grow more powerful than we can imagine.
May it be that we know about love the way the fields know about light….
Resources
The Hope of Loving by Jake Runestad
Nurturing Healing Love: A Mother’s Journey of Hope and Forgiveness by Scarlett Lewis with Natasha Stoynoff, 2014.
Nurturing healing love: Scarlett Lewis at TEDxFayetteville https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdxYCX2xX3M
The Hope of Loving by Eric Fromm, 1956
Rabia al-Basri on Sufi Poetry https://sufipoetry.wordpress.com/poets/rabia-al-basri/
Rabia al-Basri on Poet Seers https://www.poetseers.org/spiritual-and-devotional-poets/sufi-poets/rabia/index.html
* Correction: I incorrectly stated on 12/10/17 that Rabia al Basri lived before the Common Era (BC). In fact, she lived during the 8th century of the Common Era (AD).