TOWARDS A SYSTEMIC THEOLOGY OF LOVE FOR UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS (AND ANYONE ELSE WHO MIGHT APPRECIATE IT)

Introduction

This summer, the Unitarian Universalist Association voted on, and adopted, a change to their governing document. Included in this change was a section on “values and covenant”, which listed Unitarian Universalism’s shared values as justice, interdependence, equity, transformation, pluralism, and generosity. As a focus and origin of these values, the text states that Unitarian Universalism “builds on our foundation of love”. It further states:

“Love is the power that holds us together and is the center of our shared values. We are accountable to one another to doing the work of living our shared values through the spiritual discipline of love.”

It should probably be noted that the beloved congregation I serve voted overwhelmingly, though not unanimously, against the changes to “Article II”, this section of the governing document. There were many very thoughtful, important reasons given, from a preference to the seven principles and six sources (the previous language of the governing document), to concerns about changes to our congregational polity, and many more. As I said to them in a sermon, while I am more or less a lifetime Unitarian Universalist, I have never felt the seven principles as the center of my Unitarian Universalist faith – though I admire them greatly, and I can certainly see why others draw so much strength and wisdom from them. That said, I had my own questions, reservations, and wonderings about the new values, many of which they shared.

I have been especially intrigued by this notion of “putting love at the center.” This move makes a certain intuitive sense: almost all of us feel that love is something pretty special, and that our lives would not be the same without it. But we very rarely define what love actually is. There is always a danger in religion – especially within Christianity, that has centered love for two millennia now – that we may become wishy-washy in our talk about love, and dissolve into meaningless platitudes, that either call us to too little meaningful action, or – even worse – are accompanied by calls to action that do not follow from the original principles, and thus come across to participants and arbitrary and domineering.

The essay that follows is my attempt to say something meaningful about love. After I started it, I read the excellent book of essays, Love at the Center: Unitarian Universalist Theologies, put out by Skinner House Press and edited by our president, Rev. Sofia Betancourt. I highly recommend it to you. Many of its authors were influential to me – too many to list here, but I want to express my gratitude to all the contributors to that worthy read. I also skim the surface of some intro-level philosophy and theology, and, for the sake of brevity, I presume some basic familiarity with these concepts from readers of this essay. But if you’ve never heard of Kant or St. Paul, you can easily still get the basic gist in what follows, I think.

At the time of this writing (September 2024), this is very much just a draft. I try to say some interesting things, and I’m happy to be challenged on them. I know that I’m a bit too prolix in places, and too unclear in others. In other words, this is very far from the final word – or even my own final word! – on anything at all, much less on the majesty of love. But if we can keep the conversation going on this deeply, deeply important topic, I believe it will be so much better, than if we all take for granted that we’re all talking about exactly the same thing. And with that, here’s to love.

1. Love and Evolution

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

1 John 4:7-8

Christianity – generally speaking – teaches that God created the world, and God is love. Just what is meant by “God is love” can be, and has been, argued by many a theologian. But the basic idea is that love is foundational to the creation of the universe.

These days, Unitarian Universalists, including myself, generally believe the theory of evolution to be true. There are still many people in our world who are skeptical about the theory of evolution and describe it as “just a theory.” However, evolution is a theory that explains untold millions of phenomena in our world, from the minute to the vast and multifarious.

Evolution does not rule out the existence of God. Evolution does not even rule out the existence of a God who plans each and every detail of the cosmos – let’s call such a deity the “Total Designer God,” or TDG for short. if there were a Total Designer God, this God designed things in such a way to make it seem like evolution is the case. Why a TDG would do such a thing is unclear, but from our human vantage point this act alone – given the amount of suffering and chance that is involved in evolution – makes the TDG seem like a trickster, or a lover of cruelty, or both. The existence of suffering has always posed a problem for theologians looking to square a loving God with a capricious universe. Evolution found a system in which the capriciousness of the universe fit into a fairly logical system – but not one in which a TDG, or even a God of love with less than absolute control, has an obvious place.

Evolution is not merely “survival of the fittest.” Cooperation between species, or symbiosis, has been a feature of life on this planet for billions of years. In fact, the classification of each organism as a separate individual belies the interwoven nature of biology. For instance, there are instances of fungi co-existing with plants, in which it is impossible to firmly define where the plant ends and the fungi begins. It is worth noting that in the nineteenth century, when the theory of evolution was first discovered by humankind, the idea of the autonomous individual was very much the rage in much of Europe and North America. We were keen to see the universe as composed of many different individuals, each one classifiable as such, at least in theory – when the reality is a little more complicated than that.

Even with all cooperation and interbeing woven into our evolutionary fabric, suffering and death feature prominently in evolution. There is, from our human vantage point, a terrifying, even gruesome aspect to it. I’ll give an illustration by means of a little vignette: once, my kids were playing in an elementary school playground close to our home. This particular playground had an unfortunate feature of a set of stairs where there was a five-foot potential drop, onto the asphalt below, without a railing. (I had a few questions in my mind for the human designer of the playground, not to mention the designer of the cosmos). I worried about my kids falling down it and warned them about the pitfall. They said “sure, Dad,” and kept playing. It didn’t seem very likely they would actually topple over; if the risk was really as bad as I imagined, lots of kids would have already suffered and injury and someone, presumably, would have fixed it. Plus, I consoled myself, my kids are pretty good at balancing – and pretty good at falling, too.

This last thought got me musing on evolution. The main reason my kids didn’t tend to fall over all too often – and tended to escape with just a few scrapes when they did fall over – was millions of years of evolution. And what “millions of years of evolution” really meant, when you came right down to it, was countless examples of children of various species who did lose their balance; who didn’t find a footing on the edge of the tree or cliff; who didn’t shift position in the last second; whose blood didn’t clot as ours does; and who, for these and dozens of other unfortunate reasons, died tragically. And because of a miniscule advantage that our ancestors with better balance had over their contemporaries, these genes were passed on to us.

What a glum place to start an essay on love! And yet the Buddha, a very compassionate one, lists as the first noble truth that “life is suffering.” So well before the theory of evolution was discovered, human wisdom knew all too well there was a tragic dimension to life. 

To believe in evolution, is to hold that the obvious capriciousness of life is not pre-ordained, meticulously in every instance, by a God whose love is utterly inaccessible to our understanding. In plain English, if there is a God, She is not giving children cancer to teach us a lesson, the truth of which we will never grasp. This does not mean that love cannot be interwoven into the process in some fundamental, albeit mysterious, way.

It does, however, cast doubt on the attractive idea that love is the basic substance of the universe. Augustine of Hippo wrote, “evil arises when there is a lack of perfection that ordinarily ought to be present.” In his theology, God is love, and that love, under normal conditions, is present everywhere throughout the cosmos. Evil is not a thing in itself; it is merely the absence of God, who is good, who is love. If love is good, and this loving good is the basic nature of the universe, then evolution would seem to need to be a moral process. Curiously, in the twentieth century, both modern fascism and modern liberalism sprung out of different versions of this belief, that evolution is a moral process. They are each vague echoes of Augustine: the purpose of the processes that undergird our life tend toward our betterment. In liberalism the betterment is collective; in fascism it is for the chosen few. But both are, subliminally, an attempt to rescue evolutionary reality from nihilism. And both began their reigns on pretty thin ice, philosophically speaking, under the relentless heat of scientific scrutiny.

Process theology is, in simplest terms, a form of liberalism in which God is in the middle of the action rather than merely the cause of it – but it falls back on the same scholastic pseudo-defense of evil as necessitated by absolute freedom, and I do not think it absolves God – a God who perhaps, wasn’t there when the first shot was fired, but nevertheless a God who holds back the bandages – from moral culpability. Plus, if God exists and there is any kind of prescriptive element to G-ds existence – from the Final Judgment right down to the general encouragement to love each other more – then we cannot say that God grants us absolute freedom, for this freedom is hemmed in by certain conditions, and makes of life is more of a puzzle or a finite game, than an exercise in perfect freedom.

2. Love as Experienced by Us

Before attempting a definition of love, it is worth reflecting on the manifold ways love shows up in each of our lives. All of us, as infants, were cared for by someone else, at a time when we could not survive alone. Our caregivers may have been imperfect (they all were, to some degree); nevertheless, without their care for us, we would not be here. Throughout our lives, we live in a society fostered by countless acts of devotion, meted out over the course of many generations: public school teachers putting in so many hours; workers and cleaners and architects and nurses and cooks, who made of their tasks a sacrament of joy and care; artists and poets who doled out dreams of a better future; citizens who thought of others before casting their ballot. We are inheritors of a vast love. And we ourselves get to live this love out loud: in romantic love; in friendship; in commitment to others; in interest and curiosity in certain endeavors; in a thirst for justice; and so on.

The word “love” describes a variety of emotions and actions, played out in many different types of relationships. But perhaps we can attempt a simple working definition of love, based on three related features of what love entails.

One common feature of love may be said to be attraction ­– love tends to pull us closer, in some way, to the object of our affections. One might not say, except in poetry, that the electron is in love with the proton, or the earth is in love with the Sun, but there is that sense of love drawing us in.

Another aspect of love, related to the first, is the sense of favor. We esteem those we love. We want the best for them. In the most glib sense, “I’d love a piece of cheese” may be said to be an attraction without especial favor – we feel pulled toward it, so that it ends up in our belly. But even so, we might argue that we esteem the flavor of the cheese – so I suppose at a very basic level perhaps type of “love” could be said to have some of the characteristics of love proper.

A third aspect of love – again, closely related to the other two – is that of stirring. Love changes us. Because of our attraction, because of our positive interest, we are changed over time. If we just said of someone, “there is something very admirable about them, and I wish them well,” and that was the end of it, we might say that it was admiration and respect, but not fully love. Love changes us in some way, however subtly or profoundly. This stirring is something that brings us out of our current state, and nudges us toward a new, slightly altered, state of being.

Putting these together, we might define love, very simply, thus: Love is a positive interest for another, that brings us out of ourselves.

This “another” that we feel a positive interest towards, need not be a person. We can love nature, as it brings us outside of ourselves. We can love G-d, the numinous mystery that surrounds us and contains us. We can love justice, thirst for it and work for it. We can love beauty. We can, of course, love animals, even cats. Love is our felt devotion to something outside of ourselves, that moves us from where we are, to some new reality. It may not move us very far, in a single instance. I pet my beloved cat, and experience a slight change in my heart rate, a steadying in my breathing, as I look at him and think of him. My cat thus evinces an ever-so-slight change in my being. Over the decades, the changes that love wrings are significant and lasting.

A seeming flaw in this working definition of love is that it doesn’t include self-love. The Golden Rule (as expressed by Jesus, quoting the Torah) counsels us to “love our neighbor as ourselves.” If we love ourselves, how is that loving another? I think we can tease out two senses of “loving ourselves” from the Golden Rule. The first is that we are extend our natural self-interest, to include others. Naturally, without thinking about it, we often protect ourselves, promote ourselves, and think of ourselves first and foremost. This is not ironclad, even as a natural impulse: we may well protect our family, completely instinctually. Jesus and the writers were well aware of these natural impulses. The Golden Rule encourages us to widen the circle of our concern, to give others the care that we naturally take with ourselves and our families. This instinctual self-interest, I would propose, is not love – at least not under our working definition. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a terrible thing. We have an ego for a useful purpose, to help us, and our progeny, survive in the world. It’s not an awful thing to have a healthy ego; it’s just not love. Love is that which takes us outside of ourselves, and widens our self-interest, as the Golden Rule proposes we do.

But there is a second sense of self-love suggested here. We can turn the maxim around, and love ourselves as we love others. For example, I can say to myself, “you know, Bob, you’re being terribly hard on yourself, maybe be a little gentler – take some time to do something you enjoy, or just relax.” In this case, se are loving ourselves as the object of love – in reflection, we are loving ourselves as if we were a separate person, the one receiving the love. This could be said, under our definition, to be a form of genuine love, because we have a positive interest in this “perceived self” that stirs us and brings us outside of where we are in the moment of the loving. In the case of people who hail from marginalized traditions, this self-love is often a source of collective strength and collective resistance to ongoing oppression. Self-love could be tied very much to self-interest – but then, so could any type of love. Just as self-interest is not necessarily always a bad thing, we don’t want to commit, at this point, to saying that reflective self-love is always a good thing. We are simply acknowledging that it could be considered a form of love, according to our working definition.

3. How Love Functions in the Universe

As far as we know, everything in the universe is connected. Electromagnetic forces, gravity, and nuclear forces create physical effects from one object to another. The chain of cause and effect, as far as we can tell (pace Hume), links the future and the past. Just as the physical synapses of our brains create an intricate web of connections with each other, consciousness reaches out and makes mental connections between different parts of our world. Any object has the potential to directly interact with any other object and, under the right conditions, will interact with that other object. Nothing in our universe exists, or can exist, in isolation.

Amongst all these connections, we can describe loving connections as those characterized by a positive interest, that create a stirring in the lover towards the loved.

By “positive interest”, we’re not saying that love is merely rational. We’re certainly not saying that the practice of love is limited to human beings! At the very least, our extended family the animals are clearly capable of loving others. A positive intention can be a positive interest, but so can a feeling of affection or an inclination towards devotion.

It regularly happens that connections, that may not qualify as love, become more loving. It also happens that already loving connections become more loving with practice. Beyond our working definition, I’m not going to propose a hard-and-fast rule for what counts as love and what doesn’t. However, it may be worth exploring the ways in which we become more loving in our connections. I propose that one feature – perhaps even the defining characteristic – of becoming more loving is the move to acting increasingly “on behalf of” the recipient of our love.

This “on behalf of” momentum can even happen with our connection to inanimate objects. I may have a painting that hangs on my wall, and I grow more sentimental about it over time. One day, my home floods, and the painting is damaged beyond repair. I grieve the loss. While much of the loss Is merely pure self-interest – I have lost the opportunity to view that one particular square of beauty – there is also a sense of grieving on behalf of the painting. Even if insurance gives me the money to replace the painting with a similarly expensive object, I still mourn the loss. I have become attached to that painting – I was “rooting for it”, you might say – and its destruction in a flood makes me sorrowful. The Buddhists and the Stoics may both counsel us to be wary of such attachments. But we’re not here trying to ascertain whether this momentum toward love is a good thing – only describing how it frequently occurs.

Let’s move on to people. Romance provides a classic milieu in which desire, camaraderie, and other emotions turn to love, but in order to widen our frame, let’s first consider a non-romantic example. I’m at the supermarket, and I’m hoping for someone to help me bag my groceries. A young man approaches, who works as a grocery bagger. In that first moment, I’m merely grateful for his functional help, as I could not have easily bagged my groceries alone. Within a few seconds, I’m chatting to him, getting to know a little about his personality, maybe sharing little stories about our lives. Before long, my merely functional, self-serving desire for this person to help me bag my groceries has turned into a (somewhat) loving affection on behalf of this near stranger, whom I’ve just met. I’m thinking and feeling on behalf of this person.

When it comes to friendship, family bonds, and romantic connections, we all know how feelings can grow. Sometimes this can happen very quickly. For instance, we might feel strong feelings “on behalf” of a newborn child almost instantaneously (though the anticipation of pregnancy, or the adoption process, might help these feelings build up over months.) With each day, we learn more about that tiny human, and how we might care for them better. In our romantic relationships, a major aspect of desire is wanting to get to know the person better. In the initial attraction, we may want what’s best “on behalf of” the other person in a general, abstract sort of way – as we would with the bagger at the grocery store – but most of early desire revolves around some combination of our own needs and this ongoing urge for discovery of the other. As we get to know a romantic partner, over time our “on behalf of” feelings grow more intense and more real. The same goes for our friendships. There are obvious personal benefits to friends and lovers – elation, companionship, inspiration, uplift, and the rest. But a relationship is not a business transaction; it involves a development, over time, of a robust and transformative fellow-feeling. Love takes us outside of ourselves. It expands our sense of self, heightens the colors of our view of the universe. All too often, we scarcely notice this happening in our day-to-day lives. It’s in those rare moments when we look back in retrospect, that we notice how profoundly the people we care about have changed our sense of who we are, and what is important to us. We are no longer for ourselves alone – if ever we were, which is doubtful.

4. Love and Justice

Those we love, we tend to favor. Favor is not the only component of love – I mentioned attraction and stirring – but we naturally act on behalf of those we care about.

The human moral imagination is capable of us desiring what is best for people outside our personal circle – even people we have never met. Perhaps, in our evolutionary history, the general sense of justice was a natural extension of our love for those around us – if we want our Aunt Dee to be happy, surely (we can imagine), we are capable of also wanting this happiness for the members of the people on the other side of the hill. As we surmise that the people on the other side of the hill our as real as our Aunt Dee, we begin to grow in our fellow-feeling towards the members of the distant tribe. This does not entail that we always become more compassionate over time. Conflicts and the us/them dynamic frequently challenge this extension of “on behalf of” feeling. Other, less magnanimous feelings have a role in our survival too, drawing us emotionally away from those outside of our inner circle. But some version of Kant’s moral imperative has been latent, and widespread, in global human society for thousands upon thousands of years. We have the capacity to see people as people.

As well as compassion for others both near and far, we have an inbuilt sense of fairness. This sense of fairness, decency, and duty goes far back in our history – in fact, scientists have found inbuilt mental structures of fairness in great apes and other species. When we see a vast unfairness, or a gross disrespect, it offends us beyond just feeling for the suffering of the individual(s) involved – the unfairness itself is a source of repulsion for us. Conversely, we are attracted to values such as fairness, equity, authenticity and honesty, taking care of those in need, respect and dignity, and so on, as beautiful goals in their own right. So we see two, different but related, stirrings in us towards the good – first, the extension of natural compassion, and second, our sense of moral beauty (which is also, generally speaking, natural to us as human beings).

Most of us possess an innate pull towards justice. it is far from inevitable that we become more just over time – as we all know, there are many different draws on our energy, from fear to self-preservation to shame. But the possibility is there. And we know, in broad strokes, what the movement toward justice entails: becoming more loving, in the sense of living on behalf of others. According to our sense of moral beauty, which is both innate and cultivated over time and reflection, this movement towards justice especially entails living on behalf of those who have the least, and those who need our loving actions the most. By acting in proportion to need and in inverse proportion to injustice, the goods of fairness, equity, and charity are satisfied.

5. Ramifications of this Theory of Love

I have said throughout this essay that love is not inevitable; it is perhaps not even foundational; it is a possibility of our living. Love can then to be said to be something of a choice (leaving aside philosophical arguments regarding the nature of free will, which we won’t get into here). We choose to love. Generally, we do not choose objectively – there are great passions involved, and all our previous experience up until the point of the choosing can sway us one way or the other. But we do not have to love. We may be drawn towards love, and there may be fears and concerns that make us hesitate to love. In the moment – in so many moments – the choice is made.

Whether the choice to love is a good one, is far from a given. A person might love another person who is selfish and cruel, incapable of returning love, perhaps even incapable of benefiting from that love. A person may experience a lifetime of loving devotion towards their career of strip mining the Amazon, or selling weapons to bad actors. It’s possible that a lesser love for someone or something might take out time and attention away from a potentially greater love – greater or lesser from our own perspective, or perhaps, in some wider moral sense. Love can cause us to sacrifice a great deal, losing much of what we have, even losing much of who we are. Particular loves may be destructive to us or others, or ill-advised, or ultimately of little benefit to anyone. Discernment can help us assess where,  and how, our loving energy is best expended. Even with discernment, though, we can never know for sure  what the full results of our loving will be.

For all this, most of us will agree that, generally speaking, over the course of a lifetime, the choice to love is a choice worth taking. For one thing, while love is not inevitable, it is natural – part of our makeup as human beings. Loving one another is coded into our DNA. It’s complicated – love is not the only thing coded in there. There may even be a few sociopaths who, through no fault of their own, are incapable of love. But overwhelmingly, we have a tendency to love. We feel better when love is a part of our lives – our lives are fuller, more meaningful, more vibrant. We also have a natural inclination towards egoism – to not go outside of ourselves, to protect ourselves and our egos. The instinct towards self-preservation could arguably be said to be an opposite of love, but in reality both are important and valuable. But when we do choose to love, and the choice is a right one, we often feel wonderful about it. And if we always choose the route of self-preservation, and never choose to stretch outside ourselves and act on behalf of another, most of us feel our lives are gradually cheapened and less than what they could be. Loving is a natural part of our chemistry.

In addition to our personal feelings – and even more importantly – on the whole, love makes the world a vastly better place. A world where people do not act on behalf of others is a nightmarish world, from a human perspective. We’ve all caught at least a glimpse of that world, perhaps more – an empty wasteland of selfishness and fear. In millions of ways, each and every day, love makes the world a more morally beautiful place. Love allows us to live with trust, with a deeper sense of connection, with generosity and purpose. So in a general sense, we can say with Paul that “love is kind, love is patient; it does not envy, it does not boast.” Love is an overwhelmingly positive force in the world. Our lives are infinitely better because of it. 

Seeing love as not essential to the formation of the universe – but rather, as a benevolent possibility arising out of it – has ramifications on theology and practice. Many people, particularly of a Christian upbringing, have had the idea rammed into them from an early age that they should love – and if they fail to love, they are bad people. Because love is foundational to the universe, love is our true nature, we are taught, and only in loving we are living correctly. Often, this sense of duty around love leads to a sense of shame. It can also encourage bad decisions when it comes to love, loving in hopes of convincing ourselves we are good people.

This essay does not deny that there is a moral component to love. Whether manifested as justice, or compassion, or even friendship, there is a sense in which the world is often better, because of the choice to love. However, the idea of love as a non-original, non-foundational choice shifts the emphasis from the exhortation that we should love to the invitation that we could love. If, in any given moment, we choose not to love, we may be denying a small part of ourselves – because love is part of our genetic makeup – but we are not denying the basic essence of who we are, in some deep and profound way. Over time, we are likely to become fuller people, with spiritually richer lives, if we give ourselves to love devotedly and often. But this does not mean that every choice not to love is necessarily a bad choice, or a turning away from ultimate reality, or a denial of who we are.

Love is a daring choice. It is transformational, meaning that we will be changed by the choice to love. Furthermore, expending attention and resources on behalf of someone or something else, means (generally) we spend slightly less attention and resources, at least in the loving moment, on our own needs. Love, like so many of life’s actions, often involves considerable risk.

Love is also a complex choice. While I tried to create a simple working definition of love in this essay, in practice, love involves millions of possibilities. And these possibilities are rarely straightforward. For instance, acting on behalf of a six-year-old child is not necessarily the same thing as giving the child whatever she wants. It takes skill and practice to love better. We continue working on how to love better, throughout our lives. And we continue to be transformed by the times we choose to act on behalf of others, following our natural inclination to love.

Conclusion – Ubuntu

Ubuntu – “I am because we are” – is both a literal reality, and a perspective we can grow into over time. It is literally true that none of us would be here on our own. But in our practice of loving others – in our practice of being brought out of ourselves, to act on behalf of someone or something else – we gain a lived awareness of ubuntu, of just how profoundly our lives are intertwined with others. I offer here no absolute proof that the life of ubuntu is the more meaningful life. Drawing on the work of Parfitt, I would say that if someone were to argue for a life of egotism, they would have the philosophical grounds to do so. But most of us discover that the life of ubuntu is, for ourselves, the better way.

We have the option to love. It could be that this option did not come automatically with the arbitrary swings of celestial bodies, nor with the first movements of life. Perhaps this option was a later blessing, bestowed upon us by the universe. But we have this option now. It’s an option, as Deuteronomy 30 teaches, not so very far away – we can choose to love in every moment of our lives. And our lives, and the shape of the cosmos, is the better for the addition of love.

Postscript: Ramifications for Unitarian Universalism

Love is much larger than our denomination, and in the body of the essay I wanted to speak of love more generally than just within our beloved Unitarian Universalist tradition. But having started the essay with a nod to the changes to our governing Articles, I thought I might – treading a little carefully – speak to what the above essay might suggest about the practice of love within our faith. Of course, many people may not agree with this essay, especially not the contention that love may be a contingent possibility and a choice, instead of foundational to our ultimate reality. It’s an extreme enough contention, that I’m not sure I entirely believe it myself – but I do think, in light of the theory of evolution that, 170 years after the fact, is still sending shockwaves through our dominant modes of thought, this idea, far from original to me, deserves more of a hearing.

I do think this slight change in perspective on love can help us parse out two related tensions, that have been part of our movement for centuries: the tension between individualism and collectivism, and the tension between puritanism and libertarianism.

Our spiritual ancestors, the Puritans, could be said to have demanded absolute freedom, in order to perfectly follow God’s bidding. In this, we can see the roots of both libertarianism and puritanical dogmatism, individualism and collectivism.

At times in our history, we have stressed the importance of individual freedom: every person should have the right to follow their conscience (we see in “follow their conscience”, a non-theistic throughline from “follow God’s bidding”), and to choose their life path. While almost no-one in our movement would want to trammel individual liberty, sometimes this emphasis can lead to a lack of meaningful change. It can even allow terrible behaviors to fester, under the false guise of freedom. Often, it takes some sort of greater alignment, some shared higher good, between free people to create justice in any significant way.

As a counterbalance, we have also stressed, at times, the importance of doing what is right. Few of us would deny that we can and should improve the world and help one another. However, sometimes this emphasis on mission can lead to orthodoxy and a disparagement of ideological diversity. While this tendency to orthodoxy may be a little less close to the surface in Unitarian Universalism than it is in some of our other Protestant cousins, we have seen in Puritanism and the Halfway Covenant a tendency to view our own numbers as “chosen” and outsiders, and other ways of thinking as inherently suspect. And many would argue this knee-jerk insularity is not alien to twentieth and twenty-first century Unitarian Universalism.

Viewing love as a possibility, rather than an innate calling, may enable us to hold these tensions in a slightly different way. Putting love at the center, we can view our Unitarian Universalist congregations as communities where we are invited and encouraged to make the choice to love in responsible, benevolent, and life-affirming ways. We can be clear that acting on behalf of others is part and parcel of the spiritual journey. If we’re not here to love one another, what’s the point of community? We can take note of those who are most of need of some sort of action on their behalf, as well as taking note of the causes of that need – systemic inequalities, prejudice, hatred and fear. Collectively, we can make discerning use of our resources, using our time, energy, talents and treasure to make a difference in the world where it is needed the most, and can have the most impact.

We can encourage, explore and support the free choice towards love, while still acknowledging that it is a choice, a free choice, and not a redeeming of our original sin, or uncovering of our original blessing. As a free choice, we might be a little less inclined to disparage to those who appear to choose not to love. As spiritual, loving people, we feel that, on the whole, the choice to love leads to a fuller, more meaningful life, but the person who looks to be making a different choice may have their own reasons.

In recent decades, many Unitarian Universalist theologians, particularly Alice Blair Wesley, have reestablished covenant as a feature of Unitarian Universalist ecclesiology. What makes covenant greater than mere agreement is the shared acknowledgement of love. If even God makes an agreement of us, but there is no mutual love between the parties, then there is simply no covenant. When love is shared between the parties of a covenant, then something truly special happens: for then the agreement is not merely about the terms of the agreement, but a shared understanding that both parties will work on behalf of the other, and on behalf of the idea of love generally, the option we have to act outside of ourselves and on behalf of others. This shared understanding thus extends beyond the two or more covenantal parties (speaking, at least, of covenants between mortals), because ordinarily parties in covenantal relationship will seek for the betterment of others generally, and not just those with which they are in explicit covenant. For instance, even in a wedding covenant the two people are not only signaling their intention to care for each other – in so doing they are pronouncing their faith in love generally, and in so doing recommit themselves to the general idea that it is worthwhile to live on behalf of others.

With love as a choice, we see covenant as, essentially, “the love option” in human relations. It is not a binding contract we are born with, nor is it something that goes immediately into force when we sign the membership book. Though covenant is more than mere agreement, it contains the elements of agreement. So, it is vital that the parties are aware of the terms or expectations, and agree without coercion. Power imbalances and other barriers to full, mutual participation are best considered carefully. Covenants can be stated explicitly, though they are more than mere words, or be implicitly understood, though it is more than just a positive feeling. A covenant is some sort of framework, whether in words, modes of relation, and/or shared habits, that makes clear that there is an agreement about how to be together, and that this shared living is undergirded by love.

Within congregations, we sometimes say divisions, or at the very least shifts in emphasis, between those whose stated value of membership is principally “community”; those who see the most important action as “social justice”; those there first and foremost for their or their family’s “religious education”; and those who most value “spirituality.” While not wanting to paper over those very real differences in emphasis, we can see all of these as encouraging and supporting the choice to love. Far from being “just a social club,” those who cherish community are seeking avenues to prioritize possibly the most important, and the most daring, choice they will ever make, the ongoing choice to live outside of themselves. And yet so are those with picket signs at the rally, those focused on teaching our children and adults, and those loosening the bonds of ego, and/or connecting with a higher power outside themselves, through habitual practice and prayer. There are many paths over the mountain that separates us from others. A congregation can celebrate multiple paths over the mountain, even if it can’t – and shouldn’t – be all things to all people. Given human diversity, it is probably best that it highlights multiple paths toward love. It is rare that a large group of people are perfectly in sync, and infinitely better that complexities arise when people – complicated enough on their own! – come together. We do well to be mindful, even skeptical, of any dogmatic approach up the mountain, whether Calvinist predestination or Frierean pedagogy. From the vantage point of this essay, dogma is the suggestion of a single path towards loving the world. In limited contexts, dogma can be very helpful. When we are unsure of a clear path towards love, having one pointed out to us can be an incredible blessing. But if love is a free type of behavior made possible by a capricious universe – and not a singular mission encoded in our robotic code – then ultimately, it follows that there are many “correct” ways to love one another, and insisting on one will exclude more people that it benefits. Better than “correct”, when it comes to ways of love, is the word here empowering, as in love we grow the capacity of others. We can check the effectiveness of love, mostly subjectively, by viewing its impact on others – and at the same time, we can acknowledge and celebrate that learning to live outside our own egos takes many forms.

This theological framework of love makes it practically even more difficult to propose a single methodology of loving practice. To truly covenant together would involve a great deal of groundwork, coming to a shared understanding of what we expect from one another, and what we are hoping to inspire out of one another. Given the complexity of the task, and the difference in our perspectives, forgiveness is more than just a nice possibility: the practice of forgiveness, in everyday ways as well as huge acts, is essential to any kind of lasting effectiveness whatsoever. We need also to learn the arts of patience, resilience, diligence, and the capacity to be presently surprised, as this work takes time, and has so many unexpected twists and turns. But when has the work of love ever been simple or easy? The basic task can be stated simply – Jesus and others have already done so – we choose to love one another. The best part of life is learning what that means.