“Unitarian Universalism: Our Central Value is Love”

Sara Phinney Kelley (she/her), Director of Religious Growth and Learning, UUCSV – First written for the Sunbury Daily Item October 2025

Thank you to Bill Bowman for his inspiration for this column. It was indeed the sign at
my church that caught his eye recently, with a slide that reads “Unitarian Universalism:
Our Central Value is Love”. It is not up all the time; we rotate the messages to
accompany the Sunday services and what’s going on in the community and the world.
But this one is up more than any of our others. It’s both a protective umbrella for us, but
also a challenge.

I am the religious educator at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the
Susquehanna Valley (UUCSV) in Northumberland. Unitarian Universalism (UU) is a
faith that demands no creed of belief but recognizes that we are all on different spiritual
journeys, which are supported by multiple sources of learning and wisdom.
UUs changed our denomination bylaws just last year to reframe the definition of what
our association of congregations stands for. It is a set of Values that we agree to live by:
Equity, Generosity, Interdependence, Justice, Pluralism, and Transformation. These
concepts were chosen after years of interviews and conversations with UUs all over the
continent, and we’re still wrestling with each of them and how we live them in our lives.
Those ideas will be for future columns. The value that appeared over and over in the
discussions was Love. We couldn’t have any of the other values without it.

Unsurprisingly most religions have Love as a central teaching in their scriptural texts.
UUs find sources of wisdom in many places, including in the writings of other religions.
In Leviticus 19:34 we hear that “The strangers who reside with you shall be to you as
your citizens; you shall love each one as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of
Egypt”, and John 13:34-35 says “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I
have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are
my disciples, if you love one another.” Islamic teachings talk about human love for the
divine and for all creation but also love for good deeds and for each other. The great
Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn wrote that four elements make up love in the Buddha’s
teaching: lovingkindness, compassion, joy, and inclusiveness. Closer to our religious
home, Universalist theology teaches that God loves all of us, no question.

So what does it really mean to center Love?
When you look into the eyes of someone close to you, you recognize love. What about
looking into the eyes of someone you don’t know? If we center love, we recognize that the stranger is a human, with full humanity and dignity and inherent worthiness. We may
not agree with them, but they are still fully human just like us.
Even harder in our American culture is to focus on the “we”, not just the “I’ – the
communal more than the individual.

How about thinking about groups we don’t know or have been told are “other” or
“them”? We can center love by remembering that they, too, are human beings and
individuals with all the same daily struggles we have. Centering love in this way is
definitely not easy, but it can help us envision a community and a world where we don’t
fight, we meet and talk and learn. We recognize our common humanity and common
issues first, before we notice any differences.

Then those differences don’t seem so important. They might even seem interesting!
They might turn out to have been holding us back from learning more about the humans
in our world. What is important to them? Who is their family? What do they like about
where they live? What makes them smile, or laugh, or cry? How do they live out their
faith in their own daily lives?

My congregation’s overall theme this month is Cultivating Compassion. Compassion
asks us to do more. Not just feel but do. Do something for others. That, to me, is what it
means to center Love. Community, common humanity, and compassion lived out every
day in every decision, every interaction, every action. It is a challenge, yes, but one that
we can all accept.