Love Is the Core

Love really is at the core of it all. Love is the core because we human beings are feeling beings. We do not live a moment of a single day of our lives without the energy of feelings running through us, and they color everything we think, say and do. 

We have called ourselves homo sapiens sapiens–the humans that know and who know that they know, and this gives us a sense of being superior because of our intellect. Human intellect can be amazing in what it accomplishes.  And devastating. But, even as we describe ourselves in intellectual terms, we do so while feeling something. The energies of joy, pride, enthusiasm, victory and success may be what we feel as we declare that we are the human beings who know and who know that we know.

Whatever we are doing at any moment in any day of our lives, we have these feeling energies that move through us, some very subtle, some overwhelming, and many somewhere in between. We even have the capacity to put on an exterior that says to the rest of the world “I feel nothing,” and as we do that we are secretly feeling the anxiety and fear that someone may find out that we are faking it. The feeling of loneliness surrounds such a false but perhaps protective exterior. 

Love is the core energy in us, and on any given day we are working well with it or sort of missing the mark or some mix of the two. It strikes me that when I am feeling sad, or angry, or jealous, or arrogant, in that moment I’m missing the mark of love–for myself and for others. When I am feeling grateful, or happy, or satisfied, or accepted, the love at my core is working well, helping me to see myself and others with clarity and authenticity.
The new image we are experimenting with has sent me down this reflection. I suspect that if we began to think of each of these principles as having their own sets of feelings, we would make quite a list. Equity, for example, might have the feelings of acceptance, warmth, joy, and safety swirling around it if love is working well. And, equity might have the feelings of jealousy, fear, anger and hatred swirling around it if love is missing the mark. 

My own personal perspective in reflecting on this image and our principles this month is that regardless of what we say our Unitarian Universalist principles and sources are, love is the core that holds them in balance. Love is what makes the difference in my missing the mark or living well in this world. I suspect it took us too long to get here. Love is the core.

~Bob Patrick