Rev. Joseph Boyd
I’ve appreciated talking with Melissa about this time post-inauguration and on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. First I want to say to those who have made the difficult choice to have an abortion or if you of know of someone who has, that you are loved and most certainly not alone. For too long religious leaders, family members and friends have tried to limit the scope and depth of love, often offering judgement which is harmful and ultimately untrue. On behalf of my fellow religious leaders, if this was your experience, we were wrong to do this, and it was a mistake. I say we, because people have called me Father as if I was a priest or belonged to some other tradition. When you see the robe, and even a stole, it can be easily confused for representing judgement, hubris and hurt. So I say we, because what people may see is just religious authority. I do think I and really all of us have a great amount of authority often without realizing it, and it behooves us to respect this and use this authority toward making this a place where people can flourish rather than languish in judgement.

So again, if you have ever felt left out of the circle of love and community because of your choice to have an abortion, my hope is that you can see this morning that you are still in that circle, whether you feel it or not.

It is humbling for me to notice all the great unnecessary lengths we and institutions have gone to, to try to put limits on love. Especially in this era, post-inauguration, I think there is an opportunity to see all the limits we’ve put on love as an illusion. It is very easy to want to limit love to our own preferences, and to shut everyone who doesn’t align with our preferences, as outside that circle. We can live our whole life that way. We are witnessing generations, going back 4 centuries now of people who have lived that way, and creating pain and hurt for the next generation to carry in the wake of that decision.

But this is a special moment, and there is good reason to feel hopeful. There is good reason to look at the day we are living and the days to come with optimism. But the optimism must be rooted in something deep and large, something that is beyond our personal preferences and limitations. I have come to doubt that time is linear in the way we have been trained to think it is in the Western world – with a clear past, present, and future. I’ve come to see that perhaps there is only now, what Dr. King called the fierce urgency of now in his famous I have a dream speech. The now we are in is fierce, beautiful, and bursting with urgent need for truth telling, justice  and reconciliation. We are witnessing the turning of an age, and all of this is happening now. Now is the whole past, the whole present, and the whole future. Now is where we cast the dye for the next generation, and we decide whether they will live in love, or they will live having to go to battle with the small circles of love we’ve constructed according to our preferences.

I usually don’t talk this much about love, and maybe that’s a mistake, I’m not sure. Let me first say what love is not, in my opinion. Love is not complacency, love is not a passive acceptance of violence, whether that violence is physical, legal, institutional or systemic. Love is not ignoring our conscience when we feel it pricked, and we see harm being done, violence being done toward any living creature. Love is not a passive sense of anything goes, without our involvement in the world. Love like hope must be active if it is to be made manifest while you and I are alive. But love is bigger than our preferences, bigger than any circle we can cast on our own.

I read an excerpt from Lama Rod Owens, who is black, queer, and a Tibetan llama in his book Love and Rage. And in the excerpt I found something completely startling, but resonated as possibly true: we must love the unlovable. The first thought I had when I read that is perhaps this is the definition of being an American: someone who has to love the unlovable. Each of us have our circles of people who are inside, and people who are out. I think it is quite a task to follow our conscience in protecting every creature from violence while at the same time casting our circle of love bigger than our preferences. I know no other way to save ourselves from hatred, bitterness, and despair. I know of no other way to save this precious earth, where we all live. Many rightfully so will say this goes against our biology. That we are built to be tribal, and we are hardwired to cast our circles according to who looks like us, acts like us, thinks like us. They may not be wrong, but we will be guaranteed to destroy ourselves and our precious planet, if we don’t live into a new era, a new way of thinking and imagining, a new way of being. We may never want to cast our circle beyond our preferences…we may never want to…but we’ll need to if we intend to survive and thrive into this new era.

It seems to be true, proven especially during this past year that we fundamentally belong to one another. None of us is outside that circle, even if you live in a remote part of the earth away from most human civilization. You are included and you belong. What one of us does, impacts all of us. This is beyond theoretical at this point. We are beyond hearing stories about the butterfly effect. We are living examples of this.

I would not be who I am without those who hold beliefs I find unlovable. This is a startling fact. Many of those people may be our family members, our neighbors, our employers. I’m not saying you need to love their values. But I do think we are being asked to love the unlovable, to love a people and a nation so mired in violence and ignorance seeking to find a place to settle in peace. For me, I can only do this through imagination. I’m really limited by my preferences, and it feels close to impossible to cast a circle so large nobody is left out: nobody is left out from the past, nobody is left out from the present, nobody is left out from the future. Even if I think this is impossible to practice completely, I can imagine such a thing. Can you?    

I think this kind of imagination is the kind of soul work we need to undertake in this era. When I allow myself to imagine a love beyond my preferences, I feel truly free. Free from judgement, free from hatred, free from fear. And yet I am also compelled by an active hope, as Joanna Macy writes, to love this beautiful world and all her living creatures. An active hope demands I protect the vulnerable, which is all of us, from violence. It demands that if I can alleviate conditions that cause suffering, I will do it. It demands that if society is built to cause premature death due to color of skin or employment status, that society must be reimagined. Active hope demands that we protect each other’s bodies in this body politic. And yet, no person is my enemy. My only enemy is a lack of imagination. Every person belongs in that circle of love, so you do too, and so do I.