The Caring Universe
Rev. David Takahashi Morris
December 3, 2006
The story
of the little boy in the science museum in
What’s left behind is the bitter residue of anger and anguish, the weary aftertaste of emotional upheaval. And a bruise on our spirits, and a gnawing doubt. Do they love me? No matter which side of the interaction we were on, the question is the same: Do they still love me? Once we’ve started to ask it, that question never really leaves us. Do you love me? Do you really love me? Am I really loved?
That’s what I was left with after I witnessed that painful moment in a family’s life, that moment so like many moments I’ve seen, heard, read about, and been part of myself. I don’t know what chemistry of meaning went to work in me right then, but what was left behind was the reminder of how much we need to know we are loved. Especially when we are hurt, or frightened, or lonely, or feeling rejected, our deep and powerful need is to hear a positive answer to that tender, heartfelt question: Do you love me? Does anyone love me?
When we are children, we want to know that our parents love us. As young adults, we want to know that there are friends and maybe a partner for us. When we are partnered, it is our partners’ assurance we need; if we’re parents it’s our children’s. The need adapts to our situation, but it never disappears. We need to know that we are loved.
Yet I don’t think this hunger, this need for assurance actually comes from early wounds in our childhood psyche, or from our later experiences of hurt, loss, betrayal, or rejection. That’s just what called it to my attention that day. Those experiences do sharpen the longing, sometimes even to the point of desolation or despair. They can lead us to make harsh judgments of others—and of ourselves. They can even give our longing a desperation and urgency that perversely leads us to ward off love that we could receive.
Yet I don’t think it’s the gaps in our experience of love that put the basic longing in our hearts. I think we are born that way. From the moment we first learn to question anything in the Universe, this is the first question we ask: Am I loved?
Jewish and Christian theologians teach that humankind is constructed to long for God—and that the longing is mutual. Friedrich Schleiermacher, one of the greatest voices of liberal Christianity in the early 19th century, argued that the basis of all religion was found in that human longing to be connected to the core of the Universe, ant that this longing was our natural response to the nature of God—which is love. The Jewish mystical school called Kabbalah teaches that God created the Universe as an infinitely complex array of hiding places—and created humankind to find God in those hiding places. God hides and wants to be found by us, in this vision, and the signs of our longing are the most precious thing in the Universe to God.
The recurring theme of the faiths of the world is the story of humankind forgetting or losing its connection with the Holy—and being called back by longing. We’re called back by the need to know that we are not, as a reading in our hymnal says, isolated beings, but connected in mystery and miracle to the Universe and to each other. I think this is why we feel the need so strongly in times of spiritual adversity, when we’re angry or hurt or alone or afraid. In those moments—whatever triggers them, whatever our age, however simple or sophisticated our language for what we’re feeling is—in those moments we experience ourselves as being alone, unloved, unaccepted—and worse: Unlovable, unacceptable, unworthy.
In the moment, the longing is directed toward our relationships with other human beings. But our healing comes when we recognized the larger longing. In those moments of crisis and beyond them, we need to know that the Universe cares whether we exist or not.
Does it?
Whatever our feelings of any moment, the deep truth of the Universe is that it is impossible for us to be truly separated. We walk every moment in the embrace of an unimaginably complex interweaving of physical matter and energy, of experience and circumstance and history. This is the character of our Universe: Everything exists in the context of everything else. We have no existence apart from that interwoven fabric; nothing about that fabric is unconnected to us. Our place in it is unassailable; we belong.
We may understand this theologically, as Paul Tillich does when he calls God the Ground of Being, or as the Kabbalah does in teaching that only God is ultimately real. Nothing that is can possibly be separated from that kind of God. For process theologians, the interactions and relationships that make up the Universe are God. On the personal level Marianne Williamson says it this way: God is not outside our relationship with the rest of our life; God is our relationship with the rest of our life.
We may understand our connectedness from a Buddhist perspective as the unity of being. Thich Nhat Hanh teaches, “we are here to be awakened from the illusion of our separateness.” From the rational standpoint of the scientist, we are inextricably part of the fabric of the Universe. Evolution declares our kinship with all living things; physics tells us that the matter of our body and the matter of the Universe are one. The U.U. humanist William Murry says: “Even breathing exhibits our relatedness. One estimate holds that owing to the thorough mixing of the Earth’s atmosphere, each of our inhalations contains at least one atom breathed by each person on Earth within the last few weeks.” Even if this is an exaggeration, he goes on, the point remains: We are breathing common atoms.
We are related, in mystery and in miracle, to the Universe and to each other.
Is this caring? It feels like caring to me. . .
If love is the ability to make a connection on a deep level that is mutually transformative—then we are in love with the Universe and the Universe is in love with us. We affect it profoundly; it affects us profoundly. It gives us life, and sustenance, and the unbelievably rich experiences of our existence; we give it our recognition of all it is; our appreciation for all it gives us, our engagement in its life, and our own delight and sorrow. We give it meaning.
Is this caring?
I have a choice when I look at this interconnected, interdependent Universe. I can see it as impersonal, mechanistic, and indifferent. Or I can see it as embracing, inviting, accepting and sustaining. Which do you see?
I believe there is a deep and abiding Source of Love in the Universe. I see a caring universe in the love among human beings. There is love in a friend, in a family member, in a partner or parent or child; even in a stranger who offers a gentle hand or a healing word. There is love in my ability to reach out and offer healing to another human being in pain, even when I am fractured and feeling nearly empty. There is love in those who work for compassion and justice and equality and healing in the world. There is love in those who risk their own lives to cross borders and walk into combat zones with medical supplies and who care for the victims of violence, and there is love in those who work anywhere in the world to put an end to the destruction and terror of war, and poverty, and injustice.
I see a caring universe in the fact that we are never truly without hope of being loved. Please don’t think I am being so naive or so cruel as to claim that we should never feel unloved or hopeless, or that it’s somehow our own fault if we love someone who is abusive, or who cannot love us in return. The wounds of love are real and deep. What I am suggesting is that there is always more love somewhere. When the love of this moment fails me there is more love somewhere. We miss seeing it sometimes because our hurt is too great, or because we are only prepared to receive love in the form we think we want or need, when it’s being offered to us in some other way. But there is always more love somewhere.
I see a caring Universe even in the houses of the grieving. It breathes in every breath the mourners take, it weeps in our tears. It lives in the capacity of our hearts to break, to love in the face of death and to offer each other our shared sorrow and our slow healing.
The caring Universe is all around us; we are its hands and its heart.
I see a caring Universe in the endless array of gifts the world offers me. It feeds me and clothes me; it nourishes and sustains my body and spirit. When my heart is shattered I can walk out into the world. Look here, the world will say; here’s a sunrise, here’s a wildflower, here’s the wind on your face. I’ll see and hear and smell the dry leaves rattling against each other. I’ll catch a glimpse of a rabbit scrambling across the path or the flag of a deer’s tail bouncing up the side of a hill; I’ll hear a hawk shriek. I can be surrounded by all of that and slowly, gently be restored, refreshed, brought back to life. Who is to say all this isn’t a caring Universe offering its beauty to me in a gesture of love?
“You are accepted,” the Voice of Grace says to Paul Tillich. “You are accepted by that which is greater than you. . . . Do not try to do anything now; do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!"
“You are loved,” the voice of a caring Universe whispers in our hearts. “You are not alone, not separate, not unloved, not isolated, not unwanted. There is beauty for you. There is wonder for you. There is love for you.
“You do not have to be good,” Mary Oliver says; “you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”
You are accepted.
There is love for you, and for us all.
So may it be.