In the Name of Love Sun, 9th February, 2014
A beautiful reflection by my wife, Betsy, offered in last night's Feel the Love coffee house…
What’s in a name? Shakespeare told us names don’t matter, but I think we know it’s otherwise. I have a friend named Sprite. How did you get that name? I asked him. It picked me, he said. He heard a name when he was just a kid and recognized it somehow as right for him. How lucky, I thought… but also how brave. He had the courage to claim his name, even though I’m guessing he was the only “Sprite” in his middle school. Mostly I have just recognized when a name was wrong for me. I am still waiting to be picked by the right one.
The right name is important, because names have power. We use them to sort things and to make sense of the world. Am I a theist or an atheist? Or an agnostic? Finding a name for or labeling ourselves allows us to identify the values or beliefs or experiences we share with other people – it is how we form affinity groups and create community. Just last month the New York Times published an article about bisexuality [in the “Fashion and Style” section] which talked about the discomfort that many bisexuals have with labeling themselves. The article asserted that labels for sexuality are a generational thing, and younger people may be rejecting the idea of labeling their sexuality altogether. So will all of those letters in LGBTQQIAA fade out of existence? One of my favorite bisexual bloggers, Patrick Richard Fink, responded to the New York Times piece with an article in the Huffington Post titled: “No Label Is No Community”. He asked: how can sexual and gender nonconforming people, who have historically been and often still are marginalized, discriminated against, and driven into the closet, find each other and create a self-affirming and supportive community if they are told that they don’t need labels anymore?
Of course we should be careful how we use labels – especially when we are labeling others. Names can be dangerous. Instead of helping us to sort and understand, to recognize and affirm each other, they can be used to exclude or condemn. In the wrong hands, names can be weapons.
We should also accept that the most profound parts of life, or of one person’s life, are so unique to that individual person, so mysterious, that no adequate name exists for them. If we do name those things, we must always keep in mind that the name will never encompass the entire reality. Labeling something or someone puts it in a box – it also often makes us lazy and lets us assume we know more about it than we actually do. But what Patrick Richard Fink reminds us is that self-labeling – being able to name and claim an identity for ourselves – can be important in finding a community of people who accept us.
That is precisely why one of the names that I am truly comfortable with is Unitarian-Universalist. “What IS that?” is a common response when I mention it. It’s nice when you can start with a clean slate. But its real significance for me is that the name describes me as a religious person without circumscribing my beliefs. It includes an entire rainbow of sincerely- held religious beliefs that could not coexist in any other church. It includes my religious beliefs even if they change. It includes your beliefs even if yours differ from mine. In this church, we actively fight against the idea that because we are using the same words, we all think the same way … as if we ever could or should. “We need not think alike to love alike,” as a famous Unitarian minister once said. And what a radical idea that is. It means we need not share, or even know or understand, each other’s beliefs in order to love each other. And we’re talking about love here, not tolerance or acceptance of each other’s presence in the pew beside us, but LOVE for each other.
So Unitarian-Universalists would be the people who thought up the “Standing on the Side of Love” campaign but don’t tell us what kind of love we are supposed to be standing on the side of. Love is one of those things we all know is real, enormous, powerful, transcendent, redemptive. And the more I have learned about any group of people, the more I have been able to extend my love to include them. But the question is, do we have to know and understand people before we can love them? Isn’t that maybe a misunderstanding of love itself? Maybe we are supposed to give love first, to every person, simply because each person has inherent worth and dignity, in the hope that by practicing love we will learn to understand it a little better, even though we know it will always exceed our ability to completely comprehend it. In the words of the poet Mary Oliver: “How many kinds of love might there be in the world, and how many formations might they make? And who am I ever to imagine I could know such a marvelous business?”
—Elizabeth Grimm-Howell
Feb 8, 2014
A beautiful reflection by my wife, Betsy, offered in last night's Feel the Love coffee house…
What’s in a name? Shakespeare told us names don’t matter, but I think we know it’s otherwise. I have a friend named Sprite. How did you get that name? I asked him. It picked me, he said. He heard a name when he was just a kid and recognized it somehow as right for him. How lucky, I thought… but also how brave. He had the courage to claim his name, even though I’m guessing he was the only “Sprite” in his middle school. Mostly I have just recognized when a name was wrong for me. I am still waiting to be picked by the right one.
The right name is important, because names have power. We use them to sort things and to make sense of the world. Am I a theist or an atheist? Or an agnostic? Finding a name for or labeling ourselves allows us to identify the values or beliefs or experiences we share with other people – it is how we form affinity groups and create community. Just last month the New York Times published an article about bisexuality [in the “Fashion and Style” section] which talked about the discomfort that many bisexuals have with labeling themselves. The article asserted that labels for sexuality are a generational thing, and younger people may be rejecting the idea of labeling their sexuality altogether. So will all of those letters in LGBTQQIAA fade out of existence? One of my favorite bisexual bloggers, Patrick Richard Fink, responded to the New York Times piece with an article in the Huffington Post titled: “No Label Is No Community”. He asked: how can sexual and gender nonconforming people, who have historically been and often still are marginalized, discriminated against, and driven into the closet, find each other and create a self-affirming and supportive community if they are told that they don’t need labels anymore?
Of course we should be careful how we use labels – especially when we are labeling others. Names can be dangerous. Instead of helping us to sort and understand, to recognize and affirm each other, they can be used to exclude or condemn. In the wrong hands, names can be weapons.
We should also accept that the most profound parts of life, or of one person’s life, are so unique to that individual person, so mysterious, that no adequate name exists for them. If we do name those things, we must always keep in mind that the name will never encompass the entire reality. Labeling something or someone puts it in a box – it also often makes us lazy and lets us assume we know more about it than we actually do. But what Patrick Richard Fink reminds us is that self-labeling – being able to name and claim an identity for ourselves – can be important in finding a community of people who accept us.
That is precisely why one of the names that I am truly comfortable with is Unitarian-Universalist. “What IS that?” is a common response when I mention it. It’s nice when you can start with a clean slate. But its real significance for me is that the name describes me as a religious person without circumscribing my beliefs. It includes an entire rainbow of sincerely- held religious beliefs that could not coexist in any other church. It includes my religious beliefs even if they change. It includes your beliefs even if yours differ from mine. In this church, we actively fight against the idea that because we are using the same words, we all think the same way … as if we ever could or should. “We need not think alike to love alike,” as a famous Unitarian minister once said. And what a radical idea that is. It means we need not share, or even know or understand, each other’s beliefs in order to love each other. And we’re talking about love here, not tolerance or acceptance of each other’s presence in the pew beside us, but LOVE for each other.
So Unitarian-Universalists would be the people who thought up the “Standing on the Side of Love” campaign but don’t tell us what kind of love we are supposed to be standing on the side of. Love is one of those things we all know is real, enormous, powerful, transcendent, redemptive. And the more I have learned about any group of people, the more I have been able to extend my love to include them. But the question is, do we have to know and understand people before we can love them? Isn’t that maybe a misunderstanding of love itself? Maybe we are supposed to give love first, to every person, simply because each person has inherent worth and dignity, in the hope that by practicing love we will learn to understand it a little better, even though we know it will always exceed our ability to completely comprehend it. In the words of the poet Mary Oliver: “How many kinds of love might there be in the world, and how many formations might they make? And who am I ever to imagine I could know such a marvelous business?”
—Elizabeth Grimm-Howell
Feb 8, 2014
