Today we begin the theme for the month of November: Living Love Through the Practice of Repair. I see this theme as a couple of beautiful bookends with a center that could be troubling for us.
The first bookend is “living in love,” and that’s something that most of us aspire to and likely make attempts at every day. The second bookend is “the practice of repair.” The implication is that practicing this repair is one of the ways that we live in love, and so, that feels good, too. The work of repair, of making whole or better or right something that was broken or wounded or wrong is a significant way of living love. Many religious traditions, as I understand them, affirm this kind of repair as essential to love and compassion. Indeed, in our own newly expressed Unitarian Universalist values, love is the center out of which we engage in works of justice, equity, transformation, pluralism, interdependence and generosity. Each of them can be an area of repair work.
Taoism calls us away from extremes which cause harm and destruction to a balanced and interpenetrating middle. We repair damage done by too much aggression by practicing generosity.
Judaism’s high holy days focus on Atonement, an expression of sorrow for harms done and a commitment to renew and repair those harms.
Buddhism offers the invitation to the Bodhisattva vow, a vow to live compassion (love) for the healing of brokenness in the world, and to keep returning to human incarnation for that purpose until all is healed.
Jesus’ lived example included feeding hungry people, visiting the lonely and imprisoned, caring for the wounded and sick, including the forgotten and marginalized. He told a famous story about a father who threw a great feast to celebrate the return of his prodigal son.
So, what is the troublesome center between these two beautiful bookends?
We have to be willing to look at our brokenness, the harms we have had a hand in creating, the hurt we have caused, intentionally and unintentionally, to ourselves and to others, individually and collectively. These are the things on which we do our work of repair–as an expression of living love.
~Bob Patrick
