I have not felt especially filled with loving kindness these last couple of weeks.
Life all too often gets in the way of the spiritual practice I try to do every day. You’d think I could manage simple meditation every morning. But it’s summertime, and the sun rises earlier, which means my kids get up earlier, and there is breakfast to serve and camp lunches to pack and the dog to walk and the dishes that need washing. I know full well how important that time in practice every morning is for my heart, and yet even I, a minister, am susceptible to the distractions and disruptions of everyday life. Maybe you can relate.
Then there are the thoughts and feelings that sometimes bubble up that in no way resemble the person I want to be, or the values I hold dear. I bet you know the kinds of thoughts I mean. You may have them, too, sometimes. We don’t always wish peace, ease, and lovingkindness for the driver who cuts us off while talking on their cell phone, or the Comcast employees who keep forwarding our calls to other departments, all while unironically assuring us that our call is important to them. In these moments, it can be hard to stay centered in the peace and serenity we may find on walks in the woods, while sitting by a river, during ocean swims, or here with each other at church. Maybe you can relate.
And in times when our country and world are in turmoil, it’s even harder to stay centered. We here today are living through a time of great social, political, and economic stress and trauma. So much feels threatening and uncertain. So little seems reliable and worthy of our trust. The floor has been snatched up from beneath us so many times in the last few years it can be hard to recognize what we’re feeling if we even feel anything in the moment at all. It is so, so easy to get overwhelmed, to become desensitized, to grow cynical. I know it has been for me. Maybe you can relate.
It has been painful to watch as the media keeps giving larger and larger bullhorns to politicians indulging their most racist, fear-mongering, power-hungry impulses. As much as I’ve tried to stay centered, I’ve had a lot of thoughts and feelings that don’t reflect who I want to be, or the values of our free faith. Now, it’s important to remember that in our tradition we value behavior more than feelings and beliefs. We are, after all, the people who proclaim the power of “deeds not creeds.” And as my mom used to remind teenage-me when I was in the throes of hormonal emotions, “feelings aren’t facts, Kristin.” Feeling momentary fury toward a person who is threatening to harm people we care about is not the same as behaving with hatred toward them. Feeling murderously angry isn’t the same thing as committing murder.
And yet, our thoughts, our emotions, our beliefs are related to our behavior. In many ways, they even shape our behavior. That’s why our tradition has long affirmed and promoted “the inherent worth and dignity of every human being.” Inherent worth and dignity is something we believe in, something in which this tradition encourages people to have faith. It is a theological statement that is meant to inspire and shape our behavior as a community.
And yet, there are those people whose behavior is so atrocious, so hypocritical, so harmful and hateful and wrong, that it can be hard to have faith that they, too, are inherently worthy. Rev. Bill Schultz, former President of the Unitarian Universalist Association who later went on to work for Amnesty International, has written about what torture has taught him about humanity. He writes “our doctrines about human nature, such as the [UUA’s] affirmation of ‘the inherent worth and dignity of every person’ rest uneasily in a world full of torturers. In what sense can we defend the notion that a torturer is a person of inherent worth and dignity?”
Howard Thurman also struggled with how to relate to his enemies. Though he didn’t tour refugee camps and interview torture victims like Rev. Schultz did, Thurman was an African American man born in the early 1900s in Florida who faced racism and the threat of violence every day of his life. He writes:
There are some people I don’t want to love. I ought to… A part of my own spiritual life is not for strength to love where I cannot like, to love where I cannot tolerate… My problem is again and again in the long experiences of my days, I find myself facing this terrible fact: that there are some people that I have not grown spiritually mature enough, not to love, but to want to love… My struggle in this aspect of my journey is one that keeps me exploring all the regions of prayer that I can find in order that I might get the strength to desire to desire to do this.
This is about as real as it gets. Thurman beats around no bushes here. It’s one thing to believe we should love others. It’s harder still to actually do it. But he’s not even talking about all of that. He’s laying bare the reality that there are people in this world he didn’t want to love. People whose behavior and actions had been so harmful, so hurtful, he could spare them no goodwill in his heart of hearts. We might know we are supposed to want others to be filled with loving kindness, we should want them to be well and peaceful and at ease. It’s another thing to actually want that for them.
Today’s service is named for the hymn we sang after today’s prayer. #1031 in the teal songbook, it’s called “Filled with Lovingkindness.” UU minister, Rev. Ian Riddel, wrote it as a musical way to do what Buddhists call Metta Meditation. As host of the Metta Hour podcast, Sharon Salzburg, writes:
In metta meditation, we direct lovingkindness toward ourselves and then, in a sequence of expansion, towards somebody we love already. Somebody we are neutral towards. Somebody we have difficulty with. And ultimately toward all beings everywhere without distinction.
Metta meditation is one of my spiritual practices, the one I try and often fail to do every morning. It is both comforting and challenging, and what I think I love most about its consistency and the freedom. I love that no matter what, even on days when it’s really hard for me to focus, I just have to get through the same words, the same phrases. And I love that in metta meditation, I can let go of how I’m supposed to be feeling about the people I’m sending lovingkindness, peace, and ease to, and try to wish it for them anyway. My meditation isn’t invalidated when I feel doubt about whether the person I’m sending compassionate thoughts to deserves them. That’s why it’s called a practice. It’s a behavior, meant to shape my thoughts and feelings, meant to help me become more like the person I want to be.
I don’t know if Howard Thurman was familiar with Metta Meditation, but I believe he understood at least one aspect that I’ve found at the heart of the practice. He writes:
In order to love [you], I must deal with you at a point in you that is beyond all your faults and all your virtues. And I’m always on the hunt for that so that if I am pushed from within by this deep, surging quest for the part of me that’s in you, then I will not let you keep me from loving you. I will not give you that power.
Like Thurman, there are people in the world I don’t want to love. Maybe you can relate. But on the mornings when my Metta meditation practice isn’t interrupted, I send them lovingkindness anyway. Because as Christian mystic, Thomas Merton, wrote “our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether they are worthy.” And even if I don’t feel that love for them in my heart of hearts, I can offer it anyway. Because as Thurman taught, loving them is as much about me keeping hold of my humanity, my capacity for compassion, as it is for the person receiving it.
I share all of this with you today because I think we need church to be a place where we can be real about these hardest parts of living out our faith. We can be honest with each other about how hard it is to love people whose decisions impact an already broken and hurting world. This must be a community where we can be real about how we have hurt others so that we can move from denial to apology and all the way through to reconciliation. This must be a place where we can open our hearts together to the still, small voice that surfaces when we center down and get really honest about our growing edges.
The question should not be whether another person is inherently worthy, whether they deserve our compassion, but whether we want to give up our right to determine the reach of our own hearts. The future we are heading into may become very bleak. So, faith community and spiritual practice are more important now than ever. Because our best hope of being the people we want to be, of continuing to live out our faith of freedom, love, and inclusion – no matter what happens – is to root ourselves in practices that help us grow our hearts capacity for love and compassion.
May it be so, and may we make it so. Amen.