Revolutionary Love
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When I gave birth to my daughter, I had already been laboring for days—not hours, but days. Later we learned we were waiting for her to turn so she was in the right position for productive labor. But at the time the excruciating contractions just kept coming and coming. Doctors call this part of labor transition.
Perhaps now our world is in a stage of transition. One of my classmates from divinity school, the Sikh activist Valarie Kaur asks: What if this [time] is not the darkness of the tomb but the darkness of the womb?
That day in the hospital room, when our daughter finally turned in my womb, all of a sudden it was time. The doctor told me, It’s time to push. And I looked at my husband, Ethan, terrified: Could I do it? I couldn’t.
But he told me I could. He stood beside me and held my hand. So, I breathed and I pushed. And I breathed and I pushed. Ethan rooted for me so loud they could hear him on the whole floor. We all—he and the doctor and the nurses and even my own baby—we all worked together to bring that new life into the world.
Transition. “What if this is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?”
Valarie Kaur founded the Revolutionary Love Project. Years ago, a man she considered her uncle was murdered standing in front of his gas station, because he was wearing a turban. He was of the Sikh faith, and the first person killed in a hate crime after 9/11.
Fifteen years later, Valarie returned to the gas station where he was killed. She set down a candle in the spot where he bled to death. His brother, Rana, turned to Valarie and said, “Nothing has changed.”
Valarie then asked, “Who have we not yet tried to love?”
They decided to call the murderer in prison. In her talk, “Three Lessons of Revolutionary Love in a Time of Rage,” Valarie describes what happened:
The phone rings. My heart is beating in my ears. I hear the voice of Frank Roque, a man who once said: “I’m going to go out and shoot some towel heads. We should kill their children, too.” And every emotional impulse in me says, “I can’t.” It becomes an act of will to wonder. “Why?” I ask [him]. “Why did you agree to speak with us?” Frank says, “I’m sorry for what happened, but I’m also sorry for all the people killed on 9/11.” He fails to take responsibility. I become angry to protect Rana, but Rana is still wondering about Frank. Rana says: “Frank, this is the first time I’ve heard you say that you feel sorry.” And Frank—Frank says, “Yes. I am sorry for what I did to your brother. One day when I go to heaven to be judged by God, I will ask to see your brother. And I will hug him. And I will ask him for forgiveness.” And Rana says: “We already forgave you.” Forgiveness is not forgetting. Forgiveness is freedom from hate. Because when we are free from hate, we see the ones who hurt us not as monsters, but as people who themselves are wounded, who themselves feel threatened, who don’t know what else to do with their insecurity but to hurt us, to pull the trigger, or cast the vote, or pass the policy aimed at us. But if some of us begin to wonder about them, listen even to their stories, we learn that participation in oppression comes at a cost. It cuts them off from their own capacity to love.
We Unitarian Universalists talk a lot about love. Many UU churches say the words every week: “Love is the doctrine of this church.” My congregation preaches love from multiple sides of our building. The quote on our sign out front says: “We need not think alike to love alike.” The big yellow banner on the side of the church says: “We are Standing on the Side of Love.”
What does it mean to Side with Love?
Standing on the Side of Love was an official campaign of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Recently it was changed to “Side with Love” to acknowledge that not all can stand. And the UU composer who wrote the song, “Standing on the Side of Love” recently changed his lyrics to “Answering the Call of Love”—also in response to concerns about ableist and exclusionary language.
The campaign grew out of our denomination’s support for same-sex marriage. We said that while some might side with judgment, discrimination, and shame, we side with love. As playwright and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda says, “Love is love is love is love…”
Over the decade since the campaign’s founding, it has evolved and expanded to include many additional kinds of activism such as immigrant justice and racial justice. Since love is clearly such a central part of Unitarian Universalist identity and theology, we would do well to consider what we mean by love. What do we mean when we say we side with love?
Too often, the kind of love our culture talks about is actually “emotional bosh,” as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it. There are so many ways that commands to love can in fact be abusive, manipulative, weak, or condescending. For example: “Love the sinner; hate the sin.” I find this refrain is most often used by those who are vehemently anti-gay, both in their attitudes and in their efforts to deny gay people basic rights and dignities. How is that loving?
After the death of so many unarmed black boys and men by police, Regina Shands Stoltzfus reflects on her fear for the life of her own black son. In an essay entitled, “I Cannot Speak of Love to You Today,” she wonders whether love is enough to save his life:
The systemic nature of oppression means that oppression functions despite the good will, intentions, and yes, the love, of many, many people. …At the end of the day I am more interested in my son coming home alive than I am with someone learning to love him.
So if we are going to rely on love, it must be a radical love, a revolutionary love. What is that? The psychologist Erich Fromm said that mature love has four characteristics: care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge.
Likewise, the feminist writer bell hooks says, “Embracing a love ethic means that we utilize all the dimensions of love—care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge —in our everyday lives. We can successfully do this only by cultivating awareness. Being aware enables us to critically examine our actions to see what is needed…”
So love requires us to lean in, to listen, to learn deeply, to be transformed, to act. Valarie Kaur talks about revolutionary love having three directions.
First: Love for others means that we “see no stranger.” Think of what you might do for a family member in danger. Think of the ways you stay in relationship with family even when you don’t like them, or even when they hurt you. What if we fought for every one on this planet as if they were family? If we see everyone as a part of us, we can then wonder about them. We can jump in to protect them when they are in harm’s way.
Second: Love for our opponents means “tending the wound.” Valarie says: “Tending the wound is not healing them—only they can do that. Just tending to it allows us to see our opponents: the terrorist, the fanatic, the demagogue. They’ve been radicalized by cultures and policies that we together can change.”
Third: Love for ourselves—breathe and push. Valarie asks: “How are you breathing each day? Who are you breathing with? …How are you protecting your joy each day?” We cannot do this difficult work of loving others and our opponents if we are not continually grounding ourselves in the reality that we are loved, deeply and unconditionally.
Finally, let’s dig a little deeper into what it means to side with love. Given everything we’ve just said about love, it seems we should have abandoned the idea of “sides.” But, as with most spiritual truths, here we come to the paradox: revolutionary love calls us into the fray, where we must take a side in order to create a world where sides are dissolved.
As Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”
Radical love allows us to see that we are all interconnected, and so any action or inaction we take mends or tears that fabric. There is no “neutral” position. No way to stay “out of politics” or stay on the sidelines while the bull in the ring is slaughtered, while the Jews are hauled away to Auschwitz, while people of color are treated as second-class citizens. Staying on those sidelines implies that we approve.
The really tricky thing is how we can work to love our opponents—such as torch-bearing white supremacists—while still stopping them from murdering our siblings of color. Or: how we can love ourselves unconditionally, while still holding ourselves to high standards of accountability?
The late writer and activist Barbara Deming wrote about “two hands of nonviolence”:
With one hand we say to one who is angry, or to an oppressor, or to an unjust system, “Stop what you are doing. I refuse to honor the role you are choosing to play. I refuse to obey you. I refuse to cooperate with your demands. I refuse to build the walls and the bombs. I refuse to pay for the guns. With this hand I will even interfere with the wrong you are doing. I want to disrupt the easy pattern of your life.
[And] then the advocate of nonviolence raises the other hand. It is raised outstretched—maybe with love and sympathy—maybe not—but always outstretched… With this hand we say, “I won’t let go of you or cast you out of the human race. I have faith that you can make a better choice [than] you are making now, and I’ll be here when you are ready. Like it or not, we are part of one another.
So radical love requires that we resist and dismantle the systems that oppress some of us more directly than others, and all of us in the end.
As we resist these systems, we hold out a radical love for all the people within the systems—which is all of us. That love isn’t just “emotional bosh.” It’s a commitment to listen, to wonder, to “tend the wound,” to act, and to humbly consider that we can just as easily be hardened by hate, immobilized by indifference, or stifled by ignorance.
As Valarie Kaur says, “Love is more than a feeling—love is sweet labor that can be modeled, taught, and practiced.”
So let us lean into this time of transition. May we know that we are assisted by partners and midwives of many kinds. May we be brave when it’s time to push, and remember to breathe. For when we side with Love, when we labor for Love, something
revolutionary can be born.
- Revolutionary Love - September 1, 2018
