Love
February 2015
“Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.” —Zora Neale Hurston
Articles
Living by Love
You don’t have to be Christian to admire this ancient and beautiful religion and wish to learn from its wisdom. Read more »
Sharing the Love
Love is a way of life. It should be how we make our way in the world. And truth be told, we should be preaching love every Sunday. Read more »
Love Is…and Isn’t
Love is patient—as opposed to people who rush to judgment; as opposed to those who insist that everybody should agree immediately on the obviously right answer, whether or not they have had time to think it through. Read more »
CLF Invites GA Delegates
Would you like to represent the CLF at the UUA’s General Assembly (GA) this summer? Read more »
Tucked In
On a quiet suburban street on a Sunday evening, just as it was getting dark, I saw a car pull into a driveway, and then the silhouette of a man walking from the car to the front door of the house, carrying a sleeping child. Read more »
Because of Your Dollars
“Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is such a struggle since coming back home from deployment. Thank you for being there for me, as it is hard to be with people right now.” —Tim Read more »
From Your Minister
Before I had the good fortune to serve the Church of the Larger Fellowship as senior minister, I was part of a team that designed and launched the Standing on the Side of Love Campaign at the Unitarian Universalist Association. Read more »
REsources for Living
A few years ago, Unitarian Universalists got a new nickname. In 2010 lots of UUs went to Arizona to protest the way immigrants were being treated. Read more »
Did You Know…
That you can buy many fun items with the CLF “I Carry the Flame” logo? Check them out at CLFUU.org Shop. Read more »
Comments are closed.
Issues
← Living by Love (previous entry)
(next entry) NEW Facebook Groups →
© Copyright - Quest for Meaning
A few comments in parallel with yours on the subject of “Love/ing”:
This is what is said by one of the most sanguinary, most militant, most controversial in his day, of all the martyrs of the Catholic church: “Whatever things are true, whatever honorable, whatever just, whatever holy, whatever lovable*, whatever of good repute, if there be any virtue, if anything worthy of praise, think upon these things.”
— Saint Paul of Tarsus, a Jew from Turkey, writing to the only church which offered him money, Letter to the Philippians, Chapter 4 verse 8.
_____
* “lovable”. From Greek prosphiles. I do not think “loving” or “lovely” — the usual translations — are keenly and ironically reflexive enough.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I venerate St. Francis. He was more righteous and pious than the Popes, but had the decency to laugh and sing songs and care for the poor. He actually started his un-authorized ministry in a lazar leper colony.
Still, his love of Jesus and other men, perhaps taking that love as his religion, is at bottom the quality that so enraged his father. His first “follower” was the nakedly effeminate but brave and preciously diplomatic Bernardo di Quintavalle, with whom St. Francis slept. The brotherhood honored this coupling by burying them together.
Speaking of “gay”, there is no question that early Christianity was a gay religion by the time of its adoption in Rome and Constantinople through the practices of the “Greek” scribes.
I want to state this plainly without bias. Hard to do. Mea Culpa.
Michel Odent, MD writes in his book, The Scientification of Love, that rather than looking for reasons and solutions to all the violence in this country, the question needs to be asked, “Where does the capacity to love oneself and other human beings come from?”. He supports his observations that this capacity begins at the moment of birth with convincing statistics. To quote, “From an overview of our data bank at the Primal Health Research Center, it appears that when researchers explored the background of people who have expressed some sort of impaired capacity to love – either love of oneself or love of others – they always detected risk factors in the period surrounding birth”. I highly recommend Odent’s book for those pursuing a conversation on
love.