The physical health benefits of love have been affirmed by science — reduced depression, lower blood pressure, less anxiety, and even improved sleep. In this moment of political division in the United States, theologians say Americans must now look to the spiritual benefits of love, and seek to reconnect with those who hold differing political viewpoints.
It was this message that Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of Washington, sought to convey when she spoke from the pulpit to President Donald Trump and the nation last week.
In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the importance of love, she and others explain why love matters and how the teachings of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. can serve to guide the nation.
Credit: AJC
Credit: AJC
Budde exhorted not just the president, but the entire nation, to pause for a moment and reflect on religious teachings. She said Americans have a responsibility to one another to recenter around love as a tool that can stitch families and the larger society back together.
Budde’s message to the president to show mercy and compassion toward immigrants was met with mixed reactions with some saying the prayer service was not the appropriate time or place for it.
“It’s not easy,” Budde told the AJC. “I have family members who are not comfortable being in my presence. I have had times in my life when I couldn’t be comfortably in the presence of some of my family. I know this is hard. But it’s worth working at, particularly in the way Dr. King was describing, if we are going to have softer hearts, and create and sustain a society in which a vast diversity of people can actually live together.”
Polling data by the Carnegie Endowment for Peace has shown that American voters are actually less ideologically polarized than they think they are, but that misperception is greatest for the most politically engaged people.
Budde said it’s possible that love for those with whom you disagree can feel naive, but it isn’t. “What’s so empowering about love is that it isn’t measured — it’s a different kind of currency, a different kind of power. It’s often expressed in sacrifice and in putting somebody else first,” she said.
It’s a subject that Susannah Heschel, professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, knows well.
Credit: Self
Credit: Self
Her father, Abraham Joshua Heschel, was a Jewish theologian and philosopher who fled Nazi Germany. He vocally and visibly supported the Civil Rights Movement led by his friend,King, who considered Heschel “a great prophet.”
As in her own work, Heschel says the message of love is so central, and that Rev. Budde’s exhortation to the nation to honor love’s power was “the right sermon for this moment.”
“It’s also a universal sermon,” Heschel told the AJC. “There’s no one in the world who doesn’t need to hear this lesson.”
Heschel said it is right and just for religious leaders in the United States to ask political leaders to consider the question: “Why inflict suffering on other human beings? What does that accomplish?”
Heschel continued: “My father said the opposite of evil isn’t good, it’s indifference. Rev. Budde was trying to break through a hard heart. And that’s what Dr. King was trying to do — break through hardened hearts in this country.”
To that end, love doesn’t have to be quiet, and in its purest essence, it’s fierce, said Rev. Jacqui Lewis, senior minister of the Middle Collegiate Church in Manhattan.
Credit: DAVID PEXTON
Credit: DAVID PEXTON
“To save my own soul, I need the love,” Lewis told the AJC. “Love is why white people walked with Black people during the Civil Rights Movement, why Jewish Americans are standing up for Palestinians. Love makes us choose to take risks on behalf of another soul. It makes us fiercely committed to the truth. Love has a dangerous expectation for justice and it won’t back down.”
Lewis said the current moment in the U.S. demonstrates “a dangerous resurgence of white supremacy that has never gone away, an ideology as old as our nation.”
But the way to counter the scourge of hatred and bigotry is with love, she said.
“The response could be ‘you hate us, we will hate you back,’” Lewis explained. “But in the truest place of my soul, I really believe Dr. King’s call that the only thing that can dismantle hate is love. Hate can’t dismantle hate.”
She adds: “The love isn’t ‘I can’t wait to go on a picnic with you’ — it’s an unconditional regard.”
There’s more data to support the idea that religion promotes compassion over violence, said Whitney Bauman, a professor of religious studies at Florida International University.
“To me, the capacity for compassion, the ability to understand the suffering of others, and to care enough to do something about it, requires love,” Bauman said.
He continued: “Most religious traditions start from a place of revolution, from a place of noticing injustice and trying to right that wrong. Jesus being against the Roman Empire is an example: ‘There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ In Buddhism, the criticism was ‘too much wealth is bad, as is too much poverty, and everyone should have the chance for enlightenment.’”
Lewis said love is the only way forward, because the alternative will only lead to violence and despair.
“Violence and trauma are almost a natural human response,” Lewis said. “But our spiritual gift is that we can ask ourselves ‘what is the nonviolent way to resist’ — that is what Dr. King, Archbishop Tutu, and others teach us.”
Budde says her intention is to stay in a place of love.
“Even if right now is not a time when we may see the fruits of love, it may be a seed-planting time,” she said. “It may be a time where examples of courage and love will be few and far between. We sometimes don’t get to pick how things are going to turn out.”
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