Manatee UU Fellowship NEWS

I was talking with some colleagues about the use of the phrase ‘Beloved Community’ and how it is accepted in our congregations. But in the conversation another phrase came up that is becoming more frequent in our Unitarian Universalist lexicon. And that is the usage of the term ‘Beloved.’

Many Unitarian Universalists understand the phrase of Beloved Community as it was a term that was popularized by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And it has been used to describe the community of believers in Christian terms. The word is synonymous with the phrases ‘Kingdom of Heaven,’ ‘Realm of God,’ and ‘Heaven on Earth.’

For Unitarian Universalists, it is the community where our values of justice, equity, transformation, pluralism, interdependence, generosity centered in love are manifested in their ideal state. In many ways it is an aspirational community, one that we strive to create. I think most of us get that concept, the aspirational state of where we all live in harmony with one another. I often think of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” where Captain Riker tells someone that in the federation all of society’s problems —poverty, food insecurity, healthcare access, racism, all of the isms — have been removed from humanity’s experience.

I don’t experience anyone bristling with the use of the phrase ‘Beloved Community.’ But using the phrase ‘Beloved’, which is a natural extension of the Beloved Community, has often been met with resistance. I’ve often wondered why.

Some folks consider it too intimate. Others consider it as hokey or trite or simply downright false and therefore insincere. And I get that, I really do. But is there another reason why we might bristle when we hear our UUA President or another person address us as ‘Beloveds.’

We have been enculturated in a society where trauma and abuse from others is a daily occurrence. Love is experienced more as a conditional transaction than as an unconditional expression of being. ‘What have you done for me lately’ is an attitude that expresses this conditionality and this abuse. Love is withheld until another person has pleased us and then we bestow affection. Love as a transaction is a method of having control or power over someone else. Unconditional love is not about control or power over anyone or anything.

So many of our faith traditions have also reduced what is called god’s love into a transactional event. IF you accept this doctrine of belief THEN you will know love from this community of believers and if you do not then, not only will you be rejected by this community of believers, but you will be punished in the fires of hell for all eternity is the transactional message given. It is a form of emotional abuse and trauma.

This even translates into how we offer services to the indigent, the immigrant, and the infirmed. We decide who is worthy of such services, place sometimes impossible barriers to receive services and then find new ways to disqualify people from services all in the name of saving money. People’s lives are monetized into what their value is to the whole of society. We hear this every day, and it is emotional abuse and exerts power over others.

Our lives are filled with examples of emotionally abusive and transactional love that we become jaded in our perception of ourselves. We might have rejected the notion of original sin, but it is central to our society and how it measures out love and concern.

Unitarian Universalists recognize that the Beloved Community is in so many ways aspirational. But the good news is it’s an aspiration that can be seen in glimmers. If we knew in the center of our hearts that we were loved, unconditionally by our faith, imagine how that would transform us and the world.

I spoke a few weeks ago about the early Christian church as described in the Christian text of Acts of the Apostles. They were of one heart. If there was any need, it was filled by other’s resources. They knew they were beloved. They knew there was a love greater than themselves that was holding them. They were able to rest in that love, and their lives were made richer for it. May we come to know ourselves as beloved and experience love as unconditional in our beloved community now and in the days to come.

Blessed Be.