Love is All You Need
Rev. David Owen
Previous U2C3 Minister
If I speak in the tongues of humanity and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know only a part; but then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Sermon
Love is all you need
Paul’s poetic passage on love has a great line that goes “now we see in a mirror dimly.” Trying to come to terms with this wondrously confusing thing called love is bit like looking into a dimly lit mirror. Especially when we try to answer the question “what is love?”
The Beetles insisted that all you need is love in a song by the same name. Maybe you remember it “all you need is love, love… love is all you need.” It sounds so simple. That is until you hear the other lyrics like “Nothing you can know that isn’t known. Nothing you can see that isn’t shown. Nothing you can make that can’t be made. Nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be. Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time.” Now I’ve looked over these lyrics very carefully, subjecting them to scholarly analysis, and although they create a catchy tune, I truly cannot make any sense out of them whatsoever – a bit like love. Maybe John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote this song for all of us who have been victims of Valentines Day confusion… let me explain.
The time was 1976, Valentines Day. The place, the second grade classroom at Vieja Valley elementary school. Her name was Shawna, although to me she was Sha na na. As our class took the morning to hand out our valentines cards to everyone else I found myself for the first time in the clutches of romance. I had a valentines card for everyone, but for Shawna I had decided to move in a decidedly new direction. And so in what I felt to be a supremely romantic gesture, I put an extra gum-drop in her valentine. I’m not entirely sure what I had hoped to achieve, but to my surprise she came up to me at recess and she kissed me, right on the lips. As it turned out Valentines Day was a lot more complicated than I had originally thought, because getting kissed by a girl was really not what I was hoping for at all. So I spent the rest of recess washing off whatever girl germs and cooties Shawna had given me, not realizing that I had taken an irreversible plunge into the confusing world of the heart.
When we ask “what is love,” we often immediately think of the romantic. Two souls meeting, fireworks going off, going to movies you wouldn’t normally be caught dead at, and you know the rest. The notion that two people become one has a romantic allure as old as time itself.
I had a girlfriend once who had an aquarium with the type of fish that kiss each other. It seemed to be a beautiful metaphor for romantic love. The sight of these two beings touching their lips together evoked dreams of a blissful, loving union.
Then one day I went to her house and I noticed that the fish were taking an extremely long kiss. It seemed as though the two fish had truly become as one. As I looked a bit closer I realized that somehow their teeth had caught on each others lips. The romantic scene was immediately transformed as the two fish wriggled and struggled to pull away from each other. The metaphor shifted from one of beauty and bliss to something altogether quite disturbing. An image of romance had turned into a twisted entanglement which served neither creature.
So often romantic love is imagined as two people becoming one, yet is this truly what love is? Perhaps this image of two souls becoming one is popular because of the power of loneliness. It seems to be a fated part of the human condition that we need to find connections that overcome our isolation. Our inner life cannot thrive without connecting with another. I imagine this was the inspiration for the Beetles to sing that “all you need is love.” And perhaps it is the strength of this need that can drive us from the one extreme of isolation, to other extreme of entanglement, and back to isolation again.
The Sufi poet Rumi recognized how easily love’s life-giving power could be distorted into something snarled. In one of his poems he writes; “Love one another, but make not a bond of love, let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each others cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.”
Rumi’s words suggest to us that love is indeed about making a connection. Yet the connection is not about becoming one and losing one’s self in the process. Rather love is about two unique hearts finding harmony with one another, as two strings find harmony as they quiver to the melody of a single song.
Generally when we think of love, it is romantic love that we think of. The Greeks spoke of this kind of love as Eros. Eros stood for the desire of love, the erotic. Simply put, Eros is the passion of love. I think that this is the type of love most associated with the word because of its intoxicating power. For it is the power to bridge the chasm between two souls. It is the power of romance, the power to find the harmony between two individual minds. It is the power that creates pleasure at the physical touch of flesh to flesh.
As high as love can bring you, the loss of love can bring you just as low. I imagine the vast majority of us have not only experienced love’s heights, but have also experienced its lows. It probably doesn’t matter how the loss of love occurs, so much as that it does occur. If you loved the one you lost it can be like waking up one day to discover you are living on a different world altogether. Everything may look the same, but its different, and even if no one else can see it, you know it. Recovering from such a loss is like being lost in a wilderness and needing to create a new map.
At such times there is a different kind of love that can serve as a compass. It is not the love of romance, but rather the love of family and friends. These are the connections that keep us going during the sadness and confusion of loss. Unfortunately it seems like there is often a tendency to respond to such loss by retreating into the extreme of isolation. It is a tragic tendency because it is at such times that the love of family and friends can be the surest source of strength and health. Isolation is the trap that depression lays for us, and it is a trap that we all are susceptible to.
So love certainly can be romantic, yet it also emerges in other forms. Eros is not the only way in which we affirm our connections to other human beings.
Seattle, the spring of 1992… Billy is a nine-year old child with downs syndrome who is preparing to run the 60-yard dash at the Special Olympics. Billy, like the other seven kids preparing for the race, is really excited. He has visions of running like the wind and maybe even winning the race. Billy is also a little bit nervous because he’s never run in a race before, but he has high hopes for himself.
When the whistle is blown Billy takes off running. He is running as fast as his little legs can take him. Billy is feeling the thrill of doing his best. But then, he trips, he stumbles for a bit, and he falls to the ground where he skins his knee and starts crying.
A girl who was racing in the lane next to him sees that Billy has fallen and is crying so she stops running to see what’s wrong. All of sudden the other runners notice that two of their competitors have stopped, so they all stop to see what’s going on. Now the race is still going on, but all the kids gather around Billy to see if he’s OK. Then the little girl leans over and kisses Billy on his skinned-up knee to make it feel better. And it does make it feel better.
So Billy gets up off the ground. What happens next is that all the athletes remember that the race is still going on. So all of them take each other by the hand, and holding each other hand in hand, they walk across the finish line together.
The children received a standing ovation that lasted for 20 minutes. The spectators knew they had witnessed something special, and they had. They had witnessed a revelation, and what was revealed was love.
They had witnessed first hand how “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” The children had shown the path, they had shown that “love is patient, love is kind.” The love that was expressed that day was not about passion, it was about compassion. It was not about Eros, it was about what the Greeks called Agape. The Greeks understood Agape to be the divine love, the love that has no bounds.
Going back to the Beatles’ hit song, “all you need is love,” we might rightly ask why? Our intuition might affirm the Beatles’ message. But our minds still ask what is provided by this mystery called love. If its not solely about passion, then what’s its true power.
A possible answer might be found as we go back to the second grade once again. Perhaps some of you recall a book called the Velveteen Rabbit. It’s a book that was first read to me back when I was six-years-old. There is a passage where two toys, Rabbit and the Skin Horse, are discussing what it means to be real.
“What is real?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying sided by side… “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out-handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t’ understand.”
What is love’s power? Love helps us become real.
Love is singing a wonderful song where the lyrics make no sense. Love is putting the extra gumdrop in a Valentine’s Day card. Love is two stings quivering to the same music. Love is the compass that family and friends provide during times of loss. Love is leaning over to kiss a skinned knee to make it feel better. And Love is even becoming shabby and having your eyes drop out and knowing that it doesn’t matter at all.
If I say that our faith should promote a life of love, I do not mean we all have to be romantic about one another. I certainly do not mean that we should pretend that we are more intimate than we truly are; such false sentimentality only degrades the meaning of truly intimate circles of friendship and family. Rather a call to love is a call to understand, because when we understand, then no one is ugly. A call to love is about connecting authentically with another; it is about recognizing our mutual humanity. A call to love is to break through our isolated lives, to reach across the chasm that separates people from one another, and to use the power that lies within to make someone real. And if we choose to name the power that makes us real, if we choose call it love, then maybe the Beatles were right all along, and love is all you need.
Amen
