Revolutionary Love: The Weekly Liberal May 17
Read this week’s newsletter here: The Weekly Liberal May 17
A message from Rev. Jen Crow in this week’s issue:
So many things have broken my heart this week. It started with the killings in Gaza, and was quickly followed up by our president referring to immigrants as animals. A few days later I was sitting with a Jewish friend as he described people calling him a Nazi and sending him pictures of himself burning in an oven after he made the radical public statement that both Palestinians and Jews are worthy of basic human rights. Coming from a place of fear, we do so much harm to one another.
What would it be like if we could embody our Universalist faith that reminds us that all people are born whole and holy and worthy of basic human rights and care? What would it be like if we could embody the three practices of Revolutionary Love that the Sikh activist and author Valerie Kaur outlines for us? Love of others, love of our opponents, and love of ourselves.
To love others, we have to wonder about others. We have to move past your animal response of putting people into one group or another, of feeling afraid of those who are different than us, and instead move into wondering. Wonder what they are making for dinner tonight, she says. Wonder what they hope for for their children. Wonder how they met their beloved, or what makes them laugh. If we are going to practice loving others, then we need to move toward relationships that span differences.
Loving our opponents can be incredibly difficult. When we remember that we are all born whole and holy and worthy, then we know that our opponent’s participation in oppression hurts them, too. And we remember that while oppression hurts everyone, it does not harm everyone equally, so sometimes we need one another to practice loving our opponents. Sometimes we need to take turns, asking others in our community to love our opponents for us when we cannot.
The practice of loving ourselves may not be as straightforward as it sounds. I love some yoga and lattes, Valerie Kaur says, but that is not all that loving ourselves is about. Love of ourselves sometimes means being called back to ourselves by our spiritual practices and by each other. And sometimes, when the pain is too great with us, we cannot love ourselves all on our own and we need to let others help us with it. When we are grieving, or hurting, or in the process of creating something new, we need others to tend to us. When someone is giving birth or dying, you don’t tell them, good luck loving yourself and getting your own water – you tend to them, bringing water and clean clothes, easing their pain, breathing with them, and when the time comes for them to do something really hard, you look them in the eye or whisper in their ear – you are brave, you can do this, I am with you. This practice of loving ourselves asks us to let other people in, allowing them to love us when we need this kind of care the most.
These three ways of being: loving others, loving our opponents, and loving ourselves can move us into deeper alignment with our faith as we labor together for the birth of revolutionary love – as we live from love instead of fear, healing our hearts, our homes and our world.
In faith,
Jen
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