It is not surprising that those of us in the Abrahamic religious traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have constructed an understanding of God that is both anthropocentric, that is, centered on humanity, and anthropomorphic, that is, shaped like a human. We understand the world through the lens of our experience of it, so it makes sense. We can’t think like a squirrel, because we are not squirrels, though our friends on the reincarnating wheel of samsara maybe have been a squirrel in some previous life.
We do the same thing with other creatures, projecting on to them human traits and feelings. We do it with our pets, like my Oscar, and with wild animals too, even squirrels. One story that touched the hearts of many a few years back, especially members of the LGBTQ community and their allies, was that of the “gay” penguin couple, Roy and Silo, who co-parented a chick at the Central Park Zoo at the end of the last century. One couldn’t help but see them as an expression of love and longing in another species, even if projecting the term “gay” onto penguins seems a bit absurd. The more we learn, the more we understand that we are not so unique when it comes to emotion, to grief and what looks like love, that there is a continuum of emotional depth across species, which can be both eye-opening and in some ways deeply disturbing.
Roy and Silo were not as unique as some thought at the time. Same-sex coupling has been recorded in more than 1500 animal species. This has been a stumbling block for biologists since it was first observed. The scientific framework articulated by Charles Darwin holds that every trait and adaptation is measured against the survival of the species, either provides a reproductive advantage or disappears. Darwin’s ideas are a fairly late expression of a world-view that reached an apex with the physics of Isaac Newton, the idea of an orderly and mechanistic universe, a universe with rules we could figure out, that made sense, that humans could dec-code. Scientific understanding of physics has changed radically since the time of Newton. Scientific understanding of evolution, of natural selection, while a bit more nuanced than it was in the mid-19th century, is still primarily mechanistic, reductionist, so every time same-sex behavior is observed in other species, researchers go to extraordinary lengths to explain it away.
The November 30th issue of The Economist reported on a recent paper in another journal, Nature Ecology and Evolution, which took a radically different approach to same-sex behavior in animal species. Instead of arguing that it was an energy wasting failure to reproduce, and therefore an aberration, the authors suggested that as animals evolved, genders were not always well differentiated, and sensory organs not particularly well developed, so attempts at mating were pretty haphazard, a bit chaotic, that same-sex behavior was not a weird development in some species. Evolution is, to indulge in a bit of anthropomorphism, inherently bisexual and non-binary.
This new research is pretty awesome in a way, but still sort of reductionist, mechanistic, still grounded in the world of reason and rules, and that just isn’t how the world really works. For example, human intellect and adaptation have given us amazingly efficient linguistic skills, languages a bit like a Lego kingdom, made up and built up of small little bits, combining in a way that makes them capable of expressing almost anything that comes into our heads. Yet that efficiency doesn’t explain a Shakespeare sonnet, despite the attempts of my undergraduate Shakespeare professor to lecture on the formula and meaning. Sure meter and form help make some poetry work, but many poems don’t use meter and form, and all poetry relies on the slipperiness of language. A good poem is an electric eel, charged and uncontrollable.
There is a magic in creation, an exuberance. Some of us may name that magic holiness, see it as the result of some first cause, whether we see that first cause as anthropomorphic and anthropocentric or see that first cause in newer and more ambiguous ways. My late teacher Gordon Kaufman understood God as serendipitous creativity. I understand that holy magic as love, think the ancient authors got closer than they realized when they described God as love. Some of you may not even be willing to go to the point of first cause, may not see themselves reflected in the slowly unfolding story of a Hebrew and Christian thought that is so grounded in radical love, but I hope that you can at least see that there is this magic, this force, this state of being toward and for the other, that is worthy of celebration, that is worth cultivating.
That doesn’t mean love is easy. Nothing could be further from reality. We are, each of us, an imperfect and glorious tangle of flesh and spirit, of fear and courage, of selfishness and sacrifice. It is sometimes hard to embrace our whole selves, the whole selves of others.
Love God, love your neighbor, love yourself, in that order. This is the greatest commandment in the Hebrew and Christian traditions, love, love, and love. The ancient texts we have received are a thousand year long love story between the Hebrew people and the power they named Yahweh, a love story with fights and near break-ups, with blessings and great joy. It isn’t two-dimensional, easy. But it is oh so very real, resonates with our own experience of relationship.
The very particular story we celebrate this season isn’t just Nativity and a babe in a manger, for our tradition says this part of the story is meaningless without the other half of the story. The story is not just that God’s love is with us, not just the acts of healing and teaching, but is also the story that reminds us that all of the worst we humans can muster, all of the worst pettiness, self-righteousness, and violence we could inflict on this human embodiment of love, could not defeat it.
Love is in Bethlehem, but love is also on Golgotha. Love appears suddenly in a locked room and says “It’s true, Thomas. Hate didn’t win.” The campfire on the beach came after the Via Delarosa, the way of sorrow and sacrifice, sunrise and fish for breakfast.
Love is sticking in there. It is forgiving. And it is worth it, for only in the triumph of love do we discover our true selves.
Almost every wedding I’ve officiated in a decade of ministry has included 1st Corinthians 13, Paul’s famous love passage, and though it is out of season it is worth repeating. It reminds us that:
“Love is patient; love is kind,” which is a great start, all warm and fluffy. But then it describes some traits that are harder to pull off. “Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.” And especially hard in this age of constant outrage, “It does not insist on its own way.”
Boy, in this day and time… let’s just say the world could do with a lot more love, a lot less insistence, and a whole mess less hubris. Jimi Hendrix nailed it when he said “When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.”
Two thousand years after Paul and a few decades after Jimi Hendrix and we still sing about love, write stories about the power of love, for the power of love is there if you are willing to see it. What saves Harry Potter? A magic greater than any magic that can be taught in a Hogwarts classroom. Harry is saved by the power of love. That is a magic I can choose. Harry is the boy who lived, and if we read the Nativity narrative in Matthew honestly, the same could be said of this babe we are preparing to celebrate.
Love is the magic found in the Buddhist call to compassion. It is the magic found in the Jewish call to radical hospitality and justice for those at the margins of society. It is the magic found in the Third Pillar of Islam, charity. It is the magic expressed in the words of Hindu faith we read as we lit our Advent candle, Rabindranath Tagore reminding us that “In love, loss and gain are harmonized. In its balance-sheet, credit and debit accounts are in the same column.”
Explain it away with science all you want. Reductionists can have at altruism as an evolutionary imperative, have art and music and poetry as some bizarre misfiring of neurons. I could be totally wrong. Maybe we are just an accident, random and impossible. Maybe that works for them. I don’t think I could live that way.
Love is my chosen magic, whether I’m projecting it onto some cold-climate birds in a zoo in Manhattan, hearing it in the cadences of poetry by Walt Whitman or Audre Lorde or some Elizabethan playwright, experiencing it in the hard and messy work of being in relationship, of not insisting on my own way. I choose to believe that a crocus will shoot up from the frozen ground, love made real in the power of life itself.
Paul tells us that faith, love, and hope abide, and the greatest of these is love. May it always be so.