Love of Fear Offered by Christine Salontay West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church Rocky River, OH

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1 Love of Fear Offered by Christine Salontay West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church Rocky River, OH #LoveWins is a trending hashtag on social media that was born out of the June 2015 decision on Marriage Equality And while my brain initially defaults to that 90 degree dry day at my first GA in portland OR when it was proclaimed, LOVE WINS. I struggle with the phrase #lovewins. In just the last month, how many horrifying deadly incidents has our world produced? Orlando, Nice, Dallas protest ambush, ISIS alone, in the last two years, has allegedly carried out more than 125 terrorist attacks in 27 countries. Wow This human pain is more than just what the media reports. We all have experienced pain at one time or another and to different degrees. Personally, I hear the phrase love wins and It helps me talk myself out of my own despair,unfairness, sadness, an explanation of why I didn t get what I thought I wanted. Perhaps I use love always wins as a crutch not to move forward, to work on myself, to face reality. We are a culture that is obsessed with love stories. Although the concept of love conquering all things isn t new, perhaps this phrase #LOVE WINS, is something I grew to trust. So what is this love word? it seems overused misunderstood, misused? or not understood at all. That somehow love can fix everything if you just believe in love. But my friends, Love is more than a belief. It is more than a feeling. It is more than action or is it? Here at West Shore each Sunday as we light our chalice (which is the symbol of our free faith), we speak of love. And as we do, we speak these words, just as we did this morning, LOVE is the spirit of this church, and service is its law. This is our great covenant. : to dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in LOVE and to help one another. Now this is actually a lot to digest if you break it down. And I am a definitions person. I am addicted to Google. So naturally, the next thing I did was locate my phone and Google the word love. (107 million results in.71 seconds)...1) a quality or feeling of strong or constant affection for and dedication to another 2) a warm attachment, enthusiasm, or devotion.

2 #LOVEWINS solely having a strong feeling of dedication to something, does not stop the violence towards others or own selves. This #LOVEWINS warm and fuzzy dedication to others attitude, I want to challenge, ALONE, love changes nothing. Often we go through life assuming, the power of love will just take care of itself. Love Winning alone does not erase fear or expose/challenge truth. Winning is associated with competition. Loss and failure. If LOVE WINS, what have we lost? Let s put this definition aside for a moment. The other place the word LOVE appears in our chalice lighting is at the end. TO SEEK THE TRUTH IN LOVE. But what is TRUTH? The definition of TRUE. 1) in accordance with fact or reality. All humans are biased. So, what is reality? Are the facts reality?. What is fact? Let's review for a moment, putting both the love and truth definitions together. Seek the TRUTH in LOVE...If we weave the 2 definitions I selected from a dictionary at random according to my own preference, we get. In accordance with our perception of the facts of reality, we seek out what we know to be truth with a feeling of dedication, devotion and enthusiasm. PHEW! Seeking out the TRUTH in LOVE. See how LOVE Wins, is not that simple at all. The dictionary exercise illustrated how complicated a word can be, let alone a phrase. LOVE WINS. It feels overused and under actioned!!! Because if you don t really think about the meaning behind your words, especially powerful words, they are just that. Words. Empty words. So naturally, you can believe anything if you don t stop and think. What. Am. I. Saying? This past church year here at WS, we took 10 months to explore Poet David Whyte s 10 questions that have no right to go away. In April we explored the question, How do I know what I am really saying? Rev Arnason invited us to consider how much of life is made up of improv. And how improv forces us to say what we know as our own truth. He suggested that by doing this we sometimes make mistakes. I saw the challenge presented to us through this sermon as not letting the risk of failure stop us. And it is only through risking making mistakes that we can actually build or discover anything, as our seventh principle calls us to do. A free and reasonable search for truth and meaning. Far too often, people with power determine what is truth. The news is the greatest offender of convincing the masses of their truth. Going back for a moment to the reading Martha offered earlier, Augustan Burroughs writes. Seeing the truth means looking at everything for the first time, every time. Blocking your view of what is true is what you think is true your

3 assumptions, ingrained beliefs, fears, and needs. There can be serious consequences a part of you is not ready to accept if you lift the curtain on what you believe, only to discover the opposite is true behind it. Think for a moment about something in your life you have dedicated as truth. It could be as simple as the route you take to work. Now 71 N will get you downtown. But so will 490 if you know the backroads. Will it be faster? Will you like it better? What if I get lost? You won t know however until you explore an alternate truth. When new information comes to light, we need to challenge ourselves to face this fear of the unknown. An emotional example is character assumptions. You want to believe someone can change. Perhaps you have significantly changed a behavior about yourself you didn t like over time and thought, hey if I can do it? Surely someone I care about can do the same. Maybe you have seen glimpses of the person you want a person to be. Whether it be a friend, relative, significant other, potential mate...but the truth of the matter is we cannot change other people. This is a truth behind a truth. We hide behind the fear of what we see. We don't want to take it at face value. This is avoidance. The guilt and fear of not wanting to explore something you believe are already true,that you always have believed is your truth. And once we start avoiding our fears, we now fear the action of change and the fear of staying the same. John Lennon said it best, There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create.. Lennon speaks of these two basic motivating forces. Fear and Love. Fear as the act of pulling back when filled with the emotion of fear and opening up to life when love is abundant. The Fear of Love ( pulling back from something good ) and the Love of FEAR ( the act of embracing something that enables one to observe from a distance ). The ugly truth is, LOVE does not always win. Our Love of FEAR is overshadowing our good intentions. And I don t mean just changing the world. We know the feeling of fear so well that we are comfortable with it. Fear is a paralyzing feeling. Sometimes we treat emotions as if they are facts about the world. The stronger the emotion, the stronger our belief that the emotion is based on absolute fact.

4 Emotions, such as fear, help us ignore the facts. In the second part of this sermon, i want to explore...what room fear has if we lean on hope? Sermon Part 2 As I was procrastinating over writing down what I wanted to share with you today I received simple advice from a dear friend. She said in my response to freaking out about not having a single word written for today s sermon, she assured me when you feel like you need to write it, you will write it I didn t believe that this could be true for me. I come from the video world. I tell most of my stories and inspire or inform people through visuals on top of music beds. Usually at the last minute when the idea magically comes to me as I have run out of time and have to sit down and edit! I myself.i had to get to the point where I no longer feared writing 8 double spaced pages in 12 point Times New Roman font. I had to get out of my own way and face my fear. In the reading we just heard, Jon Jorgenson states, I was Afraid that Who I was would continually dictate who I am My fear of writing had me trapped. I know myself as a one line comeback humor spewing soul of wit! Often times I need a filter for public speaking. hence this lovely script I have been following this morning :) All joking aside.this morning we have been exploring large scale actions of LOVE WINNING or NOT WINNING, TRUTH and now FEAR. Our focus has been geared mainly towards change in our world. A world that is turning upside down and spiraling further out of control every day. And it is so cliche to say (and I still cringe at this on the days' things are not going the way I want them to) but, you have to love yourself first. Once self LOVE is a source you can draw your personal strength, fear will win less and less in your decisions. Everything is always a work in progress. Interacting with this world in a different way than you did before you let go of your LOVE OF FEAR, makes a difference. Everything makes a difference. But, you must ask yourself and really dig deep. What are you afraid of? What is holding you back from taking action? From trying something new? From failing? We must explore our failures to find our truths. Take anything for granted. It all counts. Regardless of how insignificant you think an action or a word is. One of my favorite lines in this video reading is the very powerful

5 as if those setbacks were anything more than the laying down of stepping stones on the road to success This goes back to identifying your fears and participating in your world. We must not let fear paralyze us. The unknown is scary. Reliving the known is also scary. But trying is always better than wondering. It is simple. it is not easy. We don t have to be alone in our fear. But we must constantly seek out the paralyzing fears in our life and ask, what room does fear have? Another one of David Whyte s 10 questions that have no right to go away essay. Almost a year ago back in Sept 2015, our very first monthly sermon theme was, Do I know how to have a real conversation? We explored being present with each other, being real and going deeper. Now naturally we all don t know or want to know the details of each other's lives ( BTW, for breakfast this morning. ), but sometimes sharing your fear with someone else bring us all closer together and allows us to spread our truth as a community. As we begin to trust one another, we grow closer and we encourage a fight for truth and justice with LOVE as our weapon. The people sitting out here in front of me today. You. You have inspired me to face my fears. Behind me on the wall is a chalice necklace I will often wear. I will share with you, in the last 3 years, during some of my darkest nights of wrestling my inner demons, I have sat with my symbol of my free faith clinched in my fists, crying until I was out of tears, all the while reminding myself that even though I don t feel strong, that I am strong. I have a community that loves me unconditionally. This is a truth I can trust. West Shore is my source of hope. This place (you, all of you) help me discover strength, embrace courage, remember peace, choose joy and experience life! What room does fear have? The truth of the matter, fear can have whatever space we give it. We can allow fear to take up all of our room. Let it dictate our truth. Steal our hope, break our trust, suffocate our joy and declare war! We hurt what we fear and often times fear starts within. I recently read a column by New York Times Best Selling Author Glennon Doyle Melton entitled: A MOUNTAIN I AM WILLING TO DIE ON. This was a letter to her newborn son telling him whoever he is and whoever he grows up to be, that he is loved. It goes into great depth about the sad cruel state of the world today and how to not just tolerate people, but to love them. Melton writes, "Children are not cruel. Children are mirrors. They want to be grownup, so they act how grown ups act when we think they re not looking. They do not act how we tell them to act at school assemblies. They act how we really act. They

6 believe what we believe. They say what we say. And we have taught them that gay people are not okay. That overweight people are not okay. That Muslim people are not okay. That they are not equal. That they are to be feared. And people hurt the things they fear. We know that. What they are doing in the schools, what we are doing in the media it s all the same. The only difference is that children bully in the hallways and the cafeterias while we bully from behind pulpits and legislative benches and sitcom one liners" Our future s brightest hope is conquering fear. We as human are making decisions right now on the direction of peace we want to embark on. The children are our future. We must teach them compassion, that the world will not be fair, or kind or beautiful every day. But that doesn t mean we should let fear paralyze us. We must teach them to be the light in the dark even when fear is so bright their flame is mistaken for danger. But before we can change the future, we must commit to conquering our own fears. And this does not have to be done alone. Or perfect. Or a right way or in 123, ABC, XYZ fashion. There is no right or wrong way. Just effective and ineffective. What room does fear have when I find perfection in the one place I never thought to look, in weakness I will ask you one last time, what room does fear have when we make room for love? May it be so