Choosing Love . . . Over and Over Again
Rev. Dr. DeWayne L. Davis
This Week at Plymouth, October 11, 2024
“Love is more than a feeling. Love is a form of sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving—a choice we make over and over again” —Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger.
Last week, Plymouth Church was a stop on activist and filmmaker Valarie Kaur’s Revolutionary Love Project Bus Tour. Using stories, music, and wisdom from the Sikh tradition in which she was born and raised, Kaur takes the audience on a journey through the origin stories of her faith, inviting us to see the humanity, courage, and path of love of her ancestors and discover within our own stories similar experiences and resonances. Surrounded by her family and colleagues, Kaur paints vivid pictures of ordinary people and their heroic acts of compassion and liberation, holding the audience in rapt attention and breaking open our hearts with narratives of revolutionary love.
What surprised me most about the experience was how those stories about the sages of the Sikh tradition mirrored the stories that my family told about Black people’s struggle for freedom in the American South. Faced with the uncompromising refusal of powerful forces to recognize the humanity of those they oppressed, vulnerable people responded with love and faith, refusing to give into hate and despair and sacrificing their lives and bodies to create their world anew. It took work to love, to refuse to see your opponent as an unredeemable stranger, to tend to the wound of rage, and to reimagine how to resist and subvert injustice in all its forms. The power of their love inspired others to join in the work. Kaur refers to this love as a choice to act: “If love is sweet labor, love can be taught, modeled, and practiced.” Behold the power of those who choose to love over and over again.
Before attending the Revolutionary Love Project event, I underestimated the adjective “revolutionary” as a qualifier of love. How can love be revolutionary? Perhaps we often underestimate what is possible when we choose to love because within the human condition lies the instinct to return hate and violence with hate and violence. Some part of us fear that love is neither strong enough nor big enough to counter the worst instincts and behaviors of humanity against humanity. I hope we do not labor under the misguided notion that love is just a feeling. What if we operated with the understanding that “revolutionary love is the choice to labor for others, our opponents, and ourselves?” Our times of polarization and radicalization call for something different from us than doubling down on seeing our opponents as enemies to be utterly destroyed. So many people we admire and follow—King, Baldwin, the Apostle Paul, and Jesus come to mind—prophesied about the power of love to transform us and the world. I pray we heed their witness and choose love over and over again. May it be so.