As we start a new year, we explore the theme of the month: Liberating Love – challenging us to look beyond cliches, beyond our own habits and patterns.
What do we mean by “liberating love”?
For me, Love is the force of the Universe; for our Universalist forebears, God was love, setting us free: Free from bondage, free from self-imposed limitation; free to be are whole selves; to co-operate, to harmonize, to co-create.
How does “Liberating Love” affect relationship?
I’ve heard more and more people lamenting the lack of mentors for creating friendships and partnerships that support us in growing more courageous, kind and honest with ourselves and each other, relationships that free us from societal restrictions about what we can feel, what we can express, what/who we can be.
Our culture hasn’t known how to create and maintain relationships that liberate and celebrate us in growing into who we can become.
How do we address that need?
Where is our road map to liberating love? The UU principles!
(1) Affirming and promoting the inherent worth and dignity of every person including ourselves; (2) seeing beyond ourselves and committing to justice, equity, compassion; (3) accepting one another and encouraging self and other to spiritual growth, (4) rooted in truth; (5) defending the right to vote, every voice counts; (6) rooting ourselves in the united human family, responsible to (7) the interdependent web of existence.
In congregational life, we get to practice liberating love by creating and living into behavioral covenants, naming and committing ourselves not to condone behaviors that harm ourselves or others, actions that harm relationship and keep us all stuck.
There is nothing more complex or more – well, liberating – than relationships which spark mutual growth. That’s the heart task (and the hard task) of spiritual community: to challenge and change us, to grow our hearts, so we might make a difference in ourselves, each other, and the world.
In Fellowship & Liberating Love,
Rev. Mary
