Why Relationship is at the Core of Unitarian Universalism

I am blessed to live out in the woods, where the neighbors I see most often are oaks and hemlocks, deer and bears, lichens and mosses.

I wave at my human neighbors when I see them, but (Internet aside) the community that I am most related to while at home is the non-human natural world. From my study window, I see interconnection after interconnection: lichens on the trunks of the oaks, deer nibbling on green shoots, mosses taking back the yard from the grass that does not really belong here. The interplay of sun and soil and water shape the presence of the plants and animals that are my nearest neighbors. Every day, this place teaches me about community and connection; on rare and wonderful days, this place shows me something that changes how I understand the world.

One Sunday, I arrived at church twenty minutes later than I usually do because I just could not tear myself away from the miracle in my front yard any sooner. A family of five black bears—an adult female, two second-year cubs, and two new cubs—were playing king of the mountain on a massive mulch pile waiting to be spread over the garden. The cubs would climb to the top, wrestle, tumble down, and climb right back up again. At one point, the mama bear grabbed one of her cubs, pulled it in close for a hug, and then let it go to play with its siblings. There was no way I was going to leave my house until this was over, not because there were bears in my yard and it was scary, but because there were bears in my yard and it was sacred.

Like many of us, I find inspiration, comfort, and profound connection in the life that is beyond my own, in the whole of this amazing existence. Watching a family of bears playing together in my yard on a Sunday morning was worship outside of the sanctuary and it prepared me for worship within the sanctuary as well. My Unitarian Universalism is equally informed by two ways of approaching the world. I am a Universalist: I believe in a love so powerful, so complete, that everything and everyone is held in its all-inclusive embrace. I am also an ecotheologian: I believe that the nature of existence is revealed in our universe and the world of which we are a part.

There is a complexity here, though. I fully believe that love is foundational to reality. I also believe that the human understanding of love—the feelings, the longings, the actions that we name as love—is not something we can presume the rest of life experiences just as we do. I do not know what the bears felt that day, but I saw something that made my heart swell in recognition. So what can the natural world tell us about love? Where is love in our broader ecological existence? How can ecotheology reveal the love at the center of our being?

Trained as a scientist and as a minister, I am guided by the interconnections of life and meaning, biology and religion, ecology and theology. Ecology, like theology, is a study of interconnectedness. Religion is a practice of interconnectedness, a means through which we humans acknowledge, develop, and value our relatedness with each other and that which is larger than ourselves. I have come to understand through science, experience, and religion that there is nothing which exists alone. All things exist in interdependence, interconnection. Even that which appears to be self-contained (a distant star, for example) is embedded in an entanglement of links and bonds that may not easily be individually known, but exist just the same. Relationship is the basis of being.

Many other people have thought about this before me. I have found theological kin in process and relational theologies, even though their language and mine are not the same. C. Robert Mesle explains Bernard Loomer’s idea of relational power. Relational power is the ability to affect and be affected. The relational nature of existence, then, is a reflection of the Divine. Mesle writes,

God loves perfectly. So God must be the supremely related One, who shares fully in the experience of every creature, who is at once fully steadfast and fully responsive.

Carter Heyward goes even further to describe God’s relational power:

. . . as in any relation, God is affected by humanity and creation, just as we are affected by God. With us, by us, through us, God lives, God becomes, God changes, God speaks, God acts, God suffers, and God dies in the world.

“Love,” writes Heyward, “is the active realization of relation. God is love. Love is God. To god is to love.”

Love, in relational and process theologies, is not the warm and mushy feelings of pop music and romantic comedies. Love is what allows the world to exist. It is what holds all things together and makes existence coherent. Love is relationship at its best, a way of being that requires relational power, a power that values and respects that which it connects. This kind of love—relational and divine—is also practical and observable in our world. The profound relatedness of fungal mycelium and tree roots, of intestinal flora and animals, provide mutual benefit and thriving for each. The presence of apex predators can improve the landscape by limiting how prey consume plants, so more plants slow erosion, and therefore more water is retained in the soil. This is nothing if not relational.

Ecological balance reveals the value of each interconnected part: the water, the air, the ground; the plants, the animals, the fungi, the microbes. At our best, we participate in these ecologies in a balanced way, too. We give and receive as needed. We use water and food, and ideally, what we return to the earth nourishes it. Our breath sustains the plants, and their “breath” sustains us. Love is the active realization of relation. This is what the living world reveals to us, and this is what we can use to guide our human activities and meaning-making, too.

My understanding of religious community is centered in a love that must be shared to exist and grow, is powerful through relatedness, and sustains individuals while drawing them into community. I imagine an ecology of love rooted and growing within our congregations and communities, a vast interconnectedness of our own forests and oceans, plains and deserts. The world itself tells us that a system can have space to include a vast diversity of people and ideas that engender life and growth in a myriad of forms. Ecologies tell us that, when healthy, a system can act to preserve its own dynamic balance. They tell us that we who are the ecosystem can identify those things that are damaging or dangerous and either lead them into health or release them to their own fate.

Unitarian Universalism, I believe, can bring such community into being. By organizing through covenants, we affirm that relationship is at the core of our faith, that love is at the center. I have found a religious home here because we are a people of covenant, of relationship. When we are living our faith, we use our relational power to grow in a love that values and respects everything it connects.

Here is another complexity: Love is one of those words that holds so much and yet we use it as though we all know exactly what we each mean. There are as many ways to think about the concept of love as there are people. Some of us think about it as a virtue or an ethic, others as the nature of the Sacred or the core of human relationship, and yet others as an emotion, practice, or choice. We cannot say that trees or bears or other species love as we do. We also cannot guarantee that other humans know love exactly as each of us does, either.

What if we understood emotion as one of our senses, like balance or touch or taste, something that helps us to gather information? Then emotion becomes a way we experience and recognize love—how we perceive relationship—rather than the emotion being love itself. Whether the bears or the trees feel love as we do does not matter: lots of beings have different perceptions. Some animals don’t see at all, dogs don’t see red, bees see in the ultraviolet range, and mantis shrimp have eyes that see twelve different colors plus differences in polarized light. We do not all need to perceive the same way for something to be real.

What if what we perceive as love is also nurture and mutuality and sustainability and balance embedded in networks of relationship? We can observe how things live. We can find in them altruism, mutual benefit and thriving, the nurture of young, and the support of mates. We observe in other forms of life things that we humans do, too. We call these things love when we do them. Though we do not know how other species understand these behaviors and feelings and motivations, because we observe them in others and ourselves, we can tell that we are not so very different from the rest of life. We are not unique in our drives to nurture, to seek mutuality, and to thrive. I do not know what the bears understood to be happening among them, but I recognized in their actions something akin to how I act, how I live. In the family of bears playing, I saw the nurture of young as relation actively realized, and I felt it, perceived it, as love.

Perhaps this is what the natural world can tell us about love: not that other beings feel love as we do, but that we can recognize love as something more than our own feelings. If love is the very best version of relatedness, then love is at the center of Life itself and networked throughout our entire existence.