September 4, 2024

“Love is never leaving” 
(Trevor Hall “You Can’t Rush Your Healing”)

Friends–

There’s this song that the algorithms at Spotify offer up to me now & then. It includes this line that catches my notice: “Love is never leaving.” It’s lovely in the melodic context of this particular song, but it’s always made me wince, or wonder if I should be wincing. You know, as in the way of  “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”, suggesting that if you’re a loving person you’ll never leave. Um, yuck and NO WAY–in so many ways and for some very good reasons.

This morning, it occurred to me that maybe I’ve been hearing it all wrong. Perhaps it’s not meant as a moral admonishment, a suggestion about how to be a better person, but as a statement of ontological truth (ontological = fancy philosophical language for describing what simply is), as in LOVE is never leaving, never going to leave, not going anywhere, always fundamental to who we are and how we live, woven into how everything exists and changes and grows. In the language of our new Unitarian Universalist self-description (created in the revision of Article 2 of our UU Association bylaws): “Love is at the center.” 

What a different sentence I heard today, and what a good way to start my morning! 

I hope you are hearing or reading or singing along with words that nourish and nurture and accept you as you are and root you in the love that (as is one of my core beliefs) flows in and around and through us always and always and always. 

Yours in love and hope,
Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org