by Laura E. Montgomery
Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation on June 2 2013
Good morning. I’m here to share a few of my thoughts and experiences related to my ongoing search for life’s meaning and purpose. Some call this search a spiritual journey, but it doesn’t matter what we call these efforts.
Many years ago I read somewhere that love is a choice. The author was mostly talking about romantic love, and speaking against the notion that we fall helplessly into love. Love is really about choices we make to act in certain ways. At the time I read this I was struggling to survive in a marriage to a husband who was not dealing very well with alcoholism and addiction. I am not saying that to choose to love means to become a doormat or to give up your selfhood.
Over the years I’ve learned that love is truly a choice regardless of what kind of love you mean, whether romantic or some other form. To choose to love says almost nothing about the object of the loving. To love says a great deal about the person who chooses to Be Loving.
And yes, I do believe that love is sometimes a mystical, magical thing that can capture us and carry us into an incredible world of joy and beauty. One of my favorite songs is “The Rainbow Connection.”
What’s so amazing that keeps us stargazing
and what do we think we might see?
Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection.
The lovers, the dreamers and me.
……………….
In the book Man’s Search for Meaning, a study of Holocaust victims, Viktor Frankl concludes that even when our lives are thoroughly controlled, and we have no liberties left, we still have a choice in how we will respond to our predicament and our environment. After much thought, I realize what a huge, difficult choice and responsibility that is.
Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the horrors I see human beings inflict on each other. I sometimes feel cynical, but those times are brief. I have to admit that I choose to be an optimist. I choose to see the magic, but it’s the magic of love and the real natural world. I am the least superstitious person you could ever meet. I don’t believe in ghosts or the traditional afterlife. I believe in the power of reason and clear thinking. I believe in science and empirical observation, but I am also fully aware that even the scientist brings to his or her studies all the prejudices and influences of his or her own experiences. There is no such thing as pure objective science. All knowledge bears the colorations of our subjective lives.
Sometimes I despair. I sometimes feel totally inadequate and helpless when I consider the enormous power and wealth of the corporations that control, not just my air, my water, and the rest of my physical environment, but also most of my food supply. I have looked through literally hundreds of cereals, breads and other foodstuffs to find just one that does not have added sugar – to find only one cereal, only one bread.
The times when it is the hardest for me to choose to be loving is when there is something about a person that feels so completely alien to everything I believe in that I have to remind myself that this opponent is also a human being like me. That person who feels alien can also be a member of my own family or a close acquaintance.
Choosing to love is perhaps a stance, an attitude expressed in everything we do. But even if I choose to love, how am I, how are we to survive as optimists in a world full of evil, ugliness and pain? Well, I’m part of this group of heretics because we all need each other in order #1 to act collectively to make this world a better place, and thus to make more of an impact, and #2 to be a moral support to each other and to nurture each other’s growth and survival.
My UU forebears tell me that there is no original sin; there are no devils bending my will. I want to see the positive, the rainbow connection. So call me a Pollyanna or tell me I’m corny or naïve or whatever, I know who I am. I choose to love. The alternative world is so much worse.