The late Unitarian minister and author Forrest Church wrote that "religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die." As we live in that space, aware of the connections we make and the losses we face, love is the quality of faith which carries us through.
For many of us, long before we are faced with our own death, we must lose the presence and love of others. Not all losses are deaths; even lesser losses can break our hearts. A woman loses her husband to divorce. A man says goodbye to his best friend when he moves to another country. Lovers part. Parents drop their teenager off at college. A child starts a new school. A family moves away from their home. And all of us have lost those we love to death come too soon. When we know these losses, we feel as though the tide is ebbing in our lives and we are the shore, diminished and cold.
Still, there is a presence that is always with us, that grounds us and calls us to ourselves, and this presence has the quality of love. The prophet Isaiah spoke to his people of God's great love for them. "You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you," God tells the people. The Psalmist wrote of the love with which we tend our own souls: "My soul is like the weaned child that is with me." Jesus taught the truth of his faith: that the greatest commandment is to love God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind; and that the second commandment is to love our neighbor as ourselves. For eons there has been a quality of faith that people have experienced as love.
Yet how hard it is to bring this quality into our everyday lives! We do not always commune with that big love that the Psalmist or Isaiah are talking about. We know love in our everyday interactions with the people and the world around us. And especially when we have known loss, opening ourselves up to loving the world again may be the last thing we want to do. The feeling of connection to others feels risky when we know that loss is always waiting just outside the door.
It's a risk we're called to take. We know the love that connects us to our deepest selves and our highest calling through the love of other people. I have dear friends whom I only see after years have gone by; I have lost friends and loved ones to death too young. Yet I feel called out of myself by love. There is a quality of openness and love that connects me to others on a soul level, even though it leaves me open to the sadness of losses big and small. I am continually called to that connection, and it is in that connection that I am reminded of the presence of God.
This is what faith is calling us to do. This is how that big love pushes us toward one another and toward our connections to each other. Ironically, in closing ourselves to protect ourselves from loss, our self becomes smaller. It is in making connections and opening our hearts to others that we find growth and possibility. It is in human connection and compassion, even in the face of all possible losses, that we find the spirit of the holy.
We stand on the shore and the tide of loss goes out. But we are not the shifting sands. We are a living thing, planted in our connection to the sacred, opening ourselves to the return of the sea once again.
In faith,
Rev. Sarah Stewart
