Rev. Suzelle Lynch, Feb. 6, 2000

When I was a child, when I was about seven or eight years old and a newcomer to the Sunday School class at the Unitarian Fellowship of Midland, Michigan, the teacher said to us, one sunny Sunday morning, "Tell me, what is God."

I knew. I knew the answer. I was shy, but I put up my hand anyway and blurted out what I felt in my heart was the truth. "I know," I said. "God is Love."

Everyone in the class laughed, perhaps even the teacher. That’s all I remember. I don’t know if anyone else offered a more acceptable, less-laughable definition of God that day. All I know is that I was profoundly embarrassed, and I didn’t venture any conversation about God for quite some time.

In the thirty-plus years since that Sunday School class, however, I have learned a great deal about love, and have moved through many different idea-phases about God, only to arrive, today, back where I began. For today I say again, God is Love.

When I was a child, I heard that phrase at the Congregational church we attended for a few weeks while my parents were looking for a suitable Unitarian church. I liked the sound of it, I liked the certainty of it, even if I wasn’t sure what it meant. I don’t think my previous Unitarian Sunday School had really taught me anything I could hold on to about God. I knew that love was good, and that God was supposed to be an ultimate and infinite being, so therefore, "God is Love" made sense to me.

Today, I understand those words, "God is Love" a bit differently and more fully. Becoming a mother has connected my heart to a wellspring of love that seems as deep and inexhaustible as the heavens. That’s part of what I mean when I say God is Love – our personal feelings of love are a part of that inexhaustible Love-source – they point us in its direction.

But when I say God is Love I also mean that I understand love to be that force in our universe, manifested in human lives, through which we can know the eternal. How does this work? Well, the nature of Love is expansive. When we move towards someone else with caring, concern, and compassion, we are refilling the source even as we give from it. Like the Malvina Reynolds song, "Love is something if you give it away, you end up having more." But not only do we end up having more, further proof of love’s eternal nature is that the love that we give to someone allows them to love someone else, and then that person loves yet another person, and the love just keeps moving outward like ripples from a stone dropped into a pond. When I get frustrated because my baby wants me to hold her all the time, I remind myself that from me she is learning to love, and that in her, my love moves out and onward.

Author and philosopher of religion Sam Keen writes, "Love initiates us into an expanding universe. The impulse to desire, know and care that begins at [our mother’s] breast drives us into ever more inclusive concentric circles – from mother to father, to family, to neighbor, to community, to the ‘enemy,’ to the encompassing world…. In the course of a lifetime, egocentric loving of ‘me and mine’ proceeds to social caring about ‘us’ (but not ‘them’) and leads in the end to compassion for all sentient beings. Like a universal solvent, love keeps dissolving boundaries and containers." (To Love and Be Loved, p. 231.) This larger Love, initiates us into a tragic universe, too, for as we come to care for a larger and larger circle of beings, we learn the inevitable limits of our capacity to take action. We find we must learn to be content with what we can do in the face of our moral desire to do more.

I believe that we human beings are fundamentally love-driven creatures who have emerged in a universe to which love is no stranger. There is a force in our universe that moves us to love because our love has the power to shape and change our world in the direction it wants to go. The world, in other words, is designed to respond to our love. And our love is erotic, born of the desire to transcend ourselves by merging in ecstasy with one another and by the desire to perpetuate our species. Our love is maternal, born of the awesome experience of gestating and nurturing new life. Our love is compassionate, born of sharing our joys and sorrows with one another. Our love is selfless, learned and relearned over lifetimes of witnessing the suffering in our world. Love teaches us about the multi-faceted nature of reality.

Imagine that your life is a love story in process. Not only is it the story of all those persons and other beings you have loved or have been loved by or love now and are now loved by or will love and will be loved by in the future, but it is also the story of how love surrounds you, fills you with every in-breath, reaches out from your every cell every minute – even right now, even if right now you do not feel loveable or loved or loving. Your life, and mine, is a love story – a story of how the force of love inherent in our universe moves into form, is multiplied, and changes the world. God is Love. The best thing we can do, the most eternal thing, is to love.

Amen.