By Rev. Don Dewey and Rev. Susan Gonzales Dewey, Co-Regional Ministers
“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”
- 1 Corinthians 13:1-8
Perhaps the month of February could boast of having the fourth or fifth most recognized holiday of the year; giving way to Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Halloween and Mother’s Day! Valentines Day, celebrated on February 14th is noted for its focus on LOVE.
This holiday, named after St. Valentine who was beheaded for secretly helping couples wed, celebrates that universal experience. Like most holidays, Hallmark, candy companies and floral companies garner a huge business with endless ways to say, “I love you” to someone we care about.
While love is a universal experience for all humanity, it is also at the very heart of our Christian experience. St. Paul perhaps has captured it best in that famous 13TH chapter in 1 Corinthians. A passage that is often read at weddings and other such occasions where loves ideal is lifted up.
In the late 1980s, Lieserl Einstein, the daughter of the famous genius, donated 1,400 letters, written by Einstein, to the Hebrew University, with orders not to publish their contents until two decades after his death. This is one of them that he had written to her on The Universal Force of Love.
“When I proposed the theory of relativity, very few understood me, and what I will reveal now to transmit to mankind will also collide with the misunderstanding and prejudice in the world.
I ask you to guard the letters as long as necessary, years, decades, until society is advanced enough to accept what I will explain below.
There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us. This universal force is LOVE.
When scientists looked for a unified theory of the universe they forgot the most powerful unseen force. Love is Light, that enlightens those who give and receive it. Love is gravity, because it makes some people feel attracted to others. Love is power, because it multiplies the best we have, and allows humanity not to be extinguished in their blind selfishness. Love unfolds and reveals. For love we live and die. Love is God and God is Love.
This force explains everything and gives meaning to life. This is the variable that we have ignored for too long, maybe because we are afraid of love because it is the only energy in the universe that man has not learned to drive at will.
To give visibility to love, I made a simple substitution in my most famous equation. If instead of E = mc2, we accept that the energy to heal the world can be obtained through love multiplied by the speed of light squared, we arrive at the conclusion that love is the most powerful force there is, because it has no limits.
After the failure of humanity in the use and control of the other forces of the universe that have turned against us, it is urgent that we nourish ourselves with another kind of energy… If we want our species to survive, if we are to find meaning in life, if we want to save the world and every sentient being that inhabits it, love is the one and only answer.
Perhaps we are not yet ready to make a bomb of love, a device powerful enough to entirely destroy the hate, selfishness and greed that devastate the planet.
However, each individual carries within them a small but powerful generator of love whose energy is waiting to be released.
When we learn to give and receive this universal energy, dear Lieserl, we will have affirmed that love conquers all, is able to transcend everything and anything, because love is the quintessence of life.
I deeply regret not having been able to express what is in my heart, which has quietly beaten for you all my life. Maybe it’s too late to apologize, but as time is relative, I need to tell you that I love you and thanks to you I have reached the ultimate answer!”
- Your father, Albert Einstein
Sometimes today it can feel like hate, bigotry, fear, greed and all kinds of destructive behavior and attitudes are “winning.” However, it is important to remember that no matter how dim the light nor how deep the darkness, the light of love is in the world and no amount of darkness can extinguish it. Each human being carries within them this universal spark of divine love and our task is to fan its flame.
Einstein wrote, “If we want our species to survive, if we are to find meaning in life, if we want to save the world and every sentient being that inhabits it, love is the one and only answer.” St. Paul reminds us that “Love never ends.” I pray that we begin with ourselves to tap into the energy of that Universal Force of Love, which we know to be our God, and trust is redemptive and transformative power to change us and our world.
Together on the journey,
Don and Susan