The Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica

"Love is the Doctrine "

Why is it that this anniversary - five years, tomorrow, of the 9/11 terrorist attack - looms so large and so present and so menacing now? I wasn't planning on this topic for our service this morning. Yet it became unavoidable; not just because of the barrage of "where are we five years later" stories in the media, but because of the insecure feeling that goes with it. Anxiety is rising. Friday's "Los Angeles Times" reported that law enforcement officials joined religious leaders this week and called for "peace and calm in advance."[1]

The anniversary is potent. It marks not only the passage of time but the jumble of emotion and the accrual of consequences - the burned bridges, lost lives, and rekindled hatreds - that are part of where we are now. And simmering, barely below the surface, is the fear that it can and will happen again.

I feel like I should apologize now for bringing up this glum topic today, our Ingathering Sunday. This is the time to celebrate our community, not to scare ourselves out of our wits. It's a time to recall the values that bring us together, not the hatred and fear that are driving the world apart.

At the beginning of our service today, we read the words of our covenant, "Love is the doctrine of this church." A covenant is an agreement we make together, a statement of "mutual obligation,"[2] an invocation of the ideals we choose to guide our lives. It is a positive declaration about love and truth and service. A nice antidote to the more cynical view of reality we cannot also help but carry these days, our covenant calls out our better selves and our higher hopes. It is potent too.

The other day I happened to be talking to one of my dog-walking friends, who was recounting in some detail how he spent the summer embroiled in a homeowners legal dispute. The whole experience left him in a misanthropic state of mind. I sympathized. Then I realized that in my work, I have fewer of these ugly, disillusioning encounters than other people do. The reason for this, my non-religious dog-walking friend told me, is because we church people have an "idealistic contract" with one another. This "idealistic contract" is our covenant - spoken and unspoken, to be together in a way that makes us better people. Even someone who is not part of our community somehow already knows that.

People in our faith tradition have made covenants with each other for hundreds of years. As early as 1629, the people of Salem, Massachusetts declared, "we . . . doe bynd our selves to walke together,"[3] invoking an image of community that went all the way back to the Hebrew prophets. The prophet Amos first posed the question, "Can two walk together except they be agreed?"[4] The Puritans answered "yes," we can walk together; we do not need to think alike to be in relationship with one another. Our covenant still carries the same intent. We can have different points of view and share the same community, as Catherine Farmer demonstrated to us earlier. It's a simple concept, challenging to live, but that is why we are here. We understand that belonging to a community helps us to live by our values.

But is our covenant - and the community we shape from it - any match for the struggles of our times? Unitarian Universalist minister Fred Wooden, who lived just a couple of subway stops away from the World Trade Center, asks that question too.[5] "The attack rattled our minds and souls," he writes, "because it reminded us of something we have been able to ignore for generations: Existence is precarious. Our survival is never secure . . . ."

We acquired a new kind of fear that day, one we have yet to understand or face. We have reacted - God knows, we have reacted - but we remain victims of trauma, our assumptions permanently shifted. Fred Wooden writes of that day, "I saw the contrast between the sunny weather, singing birds, and playing children, and the smoking rubble. Which was foreground and which the background? Is the world a perilous place occasionally redeemed by shafts of sunlight and hope? Or is it a noble and beautiful place sometimes bruised by the consequences of chance?"

We don't know. We never have known, though we have lulled and comforted ourselves in various ways, all to give ourselves a false sense of certainty. We can't get it back anymore. Instead, we find ourselves asking the existential questions of all time: what is real? what is good? what is evil? how can we live without the answers?

The Friday night after 9/11 we held a hastily planned service here in our sanctuary. I imagined it would be an intimate Quaker-style gathering, with readings from various world religions on the theme of peace, interfaith understanding, and compassion, and people quietly sharing their reflections. That was the biggest miscalculation of my ministerial career. The doors opened and church people, neighbors, friends, and folks with nowhere else to go filled our sanctuary, spilling over into Forbes Hall and the courtyard. Even my non-religious dog-walking friend came and brought his family with him. All together, we tried to make sense of the horror, the hatred, and the fear. It couldn't be done, of course, for all we really could do was huddle together and grieve for all that was lost.

Thinking back to that overcrowded, chaotic gathering, and the choice so many people made that night not to stay home alone, but to go be with others, knowing there would be no answers but they might just find hope - and it comes to me that the reason why they did so is this covenant of ours. Spoken or unspoken, love is the doctrine of our church. We don't always say it in such a way, but it lives among us, it even lives outside us - for why else would people seek us, except for the inchoate yearning for the thing we all need - a place to remember that love is always stronger than fear?

People were drawn to our sanctuary that night for the same reason we all come, week after week. Because people in covenant with each other hold the power of love over fear, hatred, and the unknown. And that is what helps us to live: even in these troubled times.

"Love is the doctrine of this church" has various meanings. One is that we have no doctrine, except for the love that we have to give. That is consistent with our tradition, which has always avoided dogmatic pronouncements and placed its faith in the human capacity for goodness.

As a covenant, it also means that we commit ourselves to the work of building an institution - this church - on the value of love. We want our church to be an agency for the work of love in people's lives. Out of this commitment comes church programs, like small group ministry, which has the mission of building relationships within the context of this community. The work of love also inspires acts of outreach, large and small. It challenges us to find new ways to live by this value. When I meet with committees and small groups of people in our church, I often hear how much we wish we could do this better. It's time to take this wish a few steps further.

And then there's what love means to each of us, as individuals - some alone, even lonely; others well connected by family and friends; all of us needing a place that stands for hope and the promise of joy in the midst of heartache and peril. The church exists as a living reminder that such hope is real and human and life-saving, and that love is the strongest power there is. Consider the hundreds of us who gathered here that Friday night five years ago, seeking something - a place to mourn, but even more, a place to hope - and finding so many, many others with the same sadness and the same yearning.

Love is why we are here. In these insecure times, we need it more than ever. As Fred Wooden points out, we live in a "nation making choice after choice based on fear." What else can we do but turn to the work of love? What else will calm our anxiety, tame our cynical tendencies, and guide us when we are lost? How else can we live with this "utter insecurity," the reality that we can never know enough to be sure of anything, except that love is our doctrine, and there are endless ways to live by it, and that, in the end, it is why we are here.



[1] Sam Quinones, “Officials Plead for Tolerance as 9/11 Anniversary Nears,” "Los Angeles Times," September 8, 2006.
[2] Conrad Wright, "Walking Together: Polity and Participation in Unitarian Universalist Churches" (Boston: Skinner House Books, 1989).
[3] Ibid.
[4] Amos 3:3.
[5] W. Frederick Wooden, “What Will We Build?” "UU World," Fall 2006.