At The End of the Day & Into the Night
God is Love
Sydney Barnwell at UUFNB on 3/13/2011

All historic figures such as Buddha, Jesus, and Jeremiah have attempted to define an ethic that reached beyond our basic animal instincts to something more profound within. The struggle to reach that something within -whatever name it is given - is then effectively the purpose that most of us come to church, especially this church every Sunday. Most religions tell us that what is called God or Brahma, Nirvana or Tao is ineffable, that nobody has that last word, that we are all stumbling in our attempts to experience it. In my 80+ years of stumbling, I have discovered that that something within, even though it is inexpressible, reflects a central ethos which can be captured by the words: kindness, forgiveness, compassion, hope, and joy. Also, words like humility, patience, courtesy, gentleness, and consideration have a place. Coincidentally these elements of expression, ie kindness, forgiveness, compassion, are the elements we associate with love.

What is love? "The word is so loaded that I hardly like to use it. Everybody talks of love - every magazine, every missionary. I love my country, I love some book, I love my gun, I love pleasure, I love my girlfriend or boyfriend, and I love God. When you say that you love God, what does it mean?

My Aunt Amy was my father's half sister. Her father was Portuguese. She was brought up as a Catholic in British Guiana, which had a minority Portuguese population, early in the 20^th century. She came to live with us in New Bern from Boston in 1970. She told us the story of Josey who apparently had a near death experience but revived to tell the story. Josey stated that he went to heaven and came back. When pressed about what heaven was like, Josey described the chandeliers and opulent surroundings with splendidly dressed white English people being served and waited on in a lavish style by light-skinned colored servants. When Josey was asked whether he saw dark-skinned Negroes, he said, "Well, I did not go into the kitchen".

This is a summary of Aunt Amy's culture, her entire past and future dreams, her culture's credulity, hopes, and fears that can be referred to as her ego ideal. It means that you love a projection of your imagination, your culture, a projection of yourself clothed in certain forms of respectability according to what you and your society think are noble, holy, and secure. And when some people worship God, they are worshipping a projection of themselves. We have ideas about love based upon codes developed by the culture in which we live.

So to go into the question of what love is, we must first free ourselves from the encrustations of centuries, put away all ideas and ideologies of what it should or should not be. I have to reject the church, what society/ what my parents and friends, what every person and every book have said about it, because I want to find out for myself what it is. In order to understand it, I must also free myself from my own inclinations and prejudices, and perhaps I may be able to discover what love is through what it is not. So to find out, there must be freedom, not only from the other person but from myself.

It seems to me that one thing is absolutely necessary for me to acquire and maintain, and that is a passion for discovery: a passion without motive, a passion without an object, a passion without thought, and without time and place. I must get to the point of total self abandonment to permit the understanding of love to come into being on its own.

To find this extraordinary thing that man has sought endlessly through sacrifice and war, through worship, through relationships, through sex, through every form of pleasure and pain, is only possible when thought, that is a creature of time and place, comes to an end. Then perhaps love which has no opposite, then love which has no conflict may come to me.

Using conventional wisdom, I cannot leave this land of time and place with its anger, distress and sorrow. Trapped in conventional mindset I cannot communicate with the Unknown. I can desire it, hope for it, and pray for it. And yet, my true freedom from self has to be achieved by me working on myself. I have to begin near to go far. What can I do to make this possible?

Over the years I have come up with the acronym 1AM. I stands for intention. My intention is to get to zero. I must recognize sincerely that I am lost in space and time. I must slowly divest myself of all my selfishness and anger. I must be penitent and surrender to zero without motive, without object, without thought and time. And when one gets to the realization that zero is the center, I believe that one's radius becomes unlimited.

The A in 1AM stands for alignment. In my day to day affairs, I must practice alignment. By this I mean that I am that person who is before me. All the flaws that I see in my enemy and in my friends are my flaws: their anxieties, jealousies, suspicions and fears, their possessiveness and domination are mine also. In other words there is no other, for the other is I (me). This is a moment to moment effort and my hope is that it would lead to attenuation and denudation of this hydra-headed monster which I inherited from my reptilian ancestors, to borrow Karen Armstrong's words. From time to time I see evidence of mutation or metamorphosis and that is where the M from 1AM comes in.

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The mutation has lead me to the following. It requires real discipline to live in this world of time and space. The disciplines required are trust and gratitude. For trust I have to have a strong belief. I have to have a deep conviction that universal Love exists somewhere in another dimension beyond time, and place, and space. Love wants to come to me. Love is kind, forgiving and compassionate and Love is hopeful and joyous. I have to have a deep conviction that my life is a pure gift from Love and this gift is to be celebrated with joy. The discipline of trust attempts to overcome the negative entrapment of the self.

But I have to tell you that trust is most fragile. I have to be persistent and consistent and to think, speak, and act with conviction. I have to take small baby steps in trying to eliminate the self, and this is a lifelong proposition.

The other discipline is gratitude. For gratitude I have to have a similar strong belief concerning universal Love. Love wants to come to me and Love is kind, forgiving, compassionate, hopeful and joyous. My life is a pure gift from Love. The discipline of gratitude attempts to overcome the negative of doubt and despair associated with the self. Doubt and despair block the perception and experience of life as a gift from Love and you lose hope. When you lose hope, it will tear you up inside and you may revert to violence. I choose to be grateful when my feelings are steeped in doubt and cynicism. I choose to be grateful when life appears ugly, empty and lonely. I choose to be grateful when I hear voices of criticism, hatred and revenge. I choose to listen to the voice of Love that is kind, forgiving, compassionate, hopeful and joyous.

The choice of trust and gratitude rarely comes without some real effort and discipline. You have to take what I refer to as risks, and when you do, Love will protect you from fear of failure, and Love will decrease the perception of risk and cost. You should take small steps, and each time you do, you build up grace and confidence. But at times you have to make a leap of faith and leave all up to Love. Here are some examples: speaking a word of healing to someone who would not do the same for you or making a call of hope to someone who is your enemy. It means giving without wanting to receive, inviting without hoping to be invited, visiting the sick and disadvantaged without wanting to be helped in return, and embracing lovingly without expecting to be embraced in return.

At times I take a leap of faith and catch a glimpse of eternal Love that runs out to me and invites me into its joy. When that happens, your passion has to be without motive, without object, and without thought.

The joy of Love is almost always sudden and quick. You experience unspeakable joy sometimes with just being alive. You may see joy in the blue sky and the green grass. You may experience joy in a rose with the perfume that comes to you as well as goes to the aphids and the crawling insects on the rose petals. The

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