"Whoever you love" - it's grammatically incorrect, isn't it? Strictly speaking, since "whoever" is the object of love, the love object, I should have said "whomever you love"! That would have been correct, and a couple of people asked me whether I'd made a mistake and might like to correct it. But as some of you who know my rather formal style of speaking might suspect, I knew when I chose the title that it was colloquial rather than formal - that it reflected more the way we really speak than what the text-books say. Is there anyone who actually uses the word "whomever" when they're talking? I wanted to talk about reality, not text-books - about the way we are, rather than what anyone prescribes for us. So I'm sticking with "whoever you love".

This may be a good time, too, to point out this vase of flowers which I brought from my garden. As you can see, it's a very informal and diverse bouquet, made up of wild and cultivated flowers, some a little past their prime, some still in bud. There's a wide range of colours, sizes, quietness and flamboyance, even health or sickness (some of them haven't done too well this year, while others have thrived) - and there's variety, too, in the extent to which individual plants appeal to each one of us.

Whichever flower you love most, it can't be contradicted by anyone as wrong, and the whole bouquet is even more beautiful than any one of these flowers alone. I hope the bouquet, together with our circular seating arrangement, can be a visual image for our reflections this morning, complementing the auditory image of the range of voices in the choir, the Choirfest which results from the coming together of so many different gifts.

Last week, I touched on the way in which our deep-down happiness with ourselves, or unhappiness, affects our attitude to other people. Today, I want to carry that reflection a little further, and to explore some dangerous but wonderful territory - the territory of our love lives! I want to suggest that if we're happy with our own relationships, as well as with ourselves, we're much more apt to accept, welcome and even celebrate, the diverse relationships of others.

As usual, my thoughts about this come from my observations of myself and other people, rather than from some theory or from anyone else's teaching. I have seen it to be true that acceptance and celebration and love multiply themselves, whereas anxiety and lack of fulfilment make it very hard for us to reach out to anyone who's different. If we're having trouble celebrating even who we are, we probably won't be able to rejoice in who anyone else is.

One of the important, though painful, learning experiences of my life came at a time when my marriage had broken down and I was in another, very distressing relationship. One day when I was at the office where I worked at the time, I had a sharp moment of insight and saw myself being bitterly critical of the people around me for unimportant reasons - for who they were, really. It was a shock, but I was lucky enough to realize that it was because I was unhappy. I'm not suggesting that everyone shares my experience, but I think it's widespread enough to be worth considering: the more you're at peace with yourself and content with what you're making of your life, the more acceptance you'll have for a diversity of other people.

Looking for truth through our own experience is consistent with our Unitarian Universalist tradition. The UU approach to spirituality is fundamentally different from religion based on the idea of "creed" or a static "revelation." We don't say that life's ultimate truth has been revealed in some scripture. We say that together we must seek to understand the meaning of our lives. We have the accumulated wisdom of humankind, reason, intuition, the arts and sciences-and our own life experience, whoever we are -- and that includes whether we're bisexual, gay, lesbian, heterosexual, or transgender.

Because we aren't accountable to some central ecclesiastical authority, or to an ancient body of dogma, we Unitarian Universalists think our own thoughts, always valuing the critical questions as much as the available answers. That questioning and that listening to the voice of our own experience has led to Unitarian Universalists being unusually accepting of diverse ways of being and of loving. This acceptance is reflected in our history of supporting the rights of minorities, and in our demographics, particularly in leadership roles. Of major religious bodies, we have among our professional ministers by far the highest percentage of women-and of openly bisexual, gay, lesbian, and transgender ministers.

Whenever Unitarian Universalists are called on to take a position on bisexual, gay, lesbian, and transgender issues, the sentiment is always overwhelmingly in favour of this affirmation: the human family is one, and human loving is no less sacred and good when shared between members of the same sex. It is good to love, whoever you love. The affirmation of bisexual, gay, lesbian, and transgender experience flows naturally from our tradition of freedom, of creativity, of respect for intuition and reason and life experience, as well as from the wisdom of the past.

I'm indebted for some of the ideas I'm presenting today to a woman called Sarah Ivy Gibb and a talk of hers which I found on the UUA website. Gibb in turn quotes a writer called Margaret Kornfeld who's described the role of congregations in caring for the people within it as analogous to gardening. Some of you may not be surprised that I tend to like this analogy - but Kornfeld points out that there are some red flags in this comparison. A gardener's twofold task is to tend the ground (that is, the community) and to tend the plants in the ground (that is, the people).

Applied to a congregation of people who care for one another, the image of positive and nurturing gardening fits to an extent. But gardeners, in general, are only nurturing to the plants they think are supposed to grow in their garden. Gardeners weed. They weed out and cut down. In the past, and still today in many denominations, religious leaders have tended to weed out gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people from their congregational gardens - if they ever had the vitality and persistence to show themselves there in the first place!

Bear with me, please, if I persist with Kornfeld's garden analogy for a while. She points out that GLBT people are not mentioned in the conventional religious gardening books - the Bible and so on - and, imagined as plants, they don't fit in with the usual rows of pink and blue petunias. Most congregational gardeners don't know what to do with them. There is a kind of gardener, though (or a kind of congregation) which recognizes that sexual orientation and gender identity are born, not made

These gardeners cultivate the ground, the community, to help every plant in their garden thrive. And if the soil doesn't have the right composition for a particular plant, the gardener tries to add the necessary ingredients. This gardener appreciates the uniqueness and integrity of each plant, valuing the abundance of life above some pre-ordained vision of garden design.

Even this model, says Kornfeld, has drawbacks. The more accepting, nurturing gardener model provides holistic, attentive care that honors the dignity of the individual. It also involves work with the community to help the individual thrive within it. But a limitation is that the congregation, while respecting the person, may come to regard this person as an exotic novelty, tending to objectify them -- to see them as objects, rather than living, breathing, individual people. A final limitation of the gardener model is that it doesn't acknowledge the immense growth that a congregation can experience by working with and learning from gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. We need one another.

Donald Chinula, a student of the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr., suggests a model for the caring that can take place within congregations in such a way as to counter the "objectifying" effect I've just mentioned. He identifies four tasks for congregations based on King's constructive thought: reclamation, conciliation, transformation, and transcendence. The goal of reclamation is the healing of the diminished self-esteem and the fractured concept of the self, which are both direct results of the kind of oppression that almost all GLBT have had to endure in our society. By beginning the coming out process, or even by taking the step of seeking out a congregational home, a person is already on the path to healing their self-concept and self-esteem.

A caring congregation can simply help make the path to loving oneself a little less rocky. It's also important for there to be other GBLT people in the congregation. The experience of meeting other people with similar orientation or identity can be deeply affirming. A feeling of isolation can be transformed into a feeling of inclusion. When "being different" comes into another focus as being part of diversity, it can be a healing experience.

The second task Chinula identifies is "conciliation." Conciliation aims to reach out to the opponent and secure a friendship. It goes beyond patching up a broken relationship; it involves transcending anger, however justified, to reach out in love. Martin Luther King, like Mahatma Gandhi, exemplified conciliation in his persistent, loving, non-violent activism. For GBLT people, conciliation is usually very difficult, as it is with all oppressed groups. If the opponents are those who denied your humanity, your integrity, your reality, then you have to reach out in conciliation to nearly every cultural institution: the government, religion, the media, schools, the English language, as well as those who have, however unwittingly, caused or enabled your suffering: family, friends, abusers, harassers, perfect strangers.

Perhaps the opponent is even more a philosophy, or a dogma, that drives the oppression, and causes people to act as they do, a way of seeing the world such as sexism or heterosexism. Being able to see one's opponent as a philosophy can open up doors for conciliation. It's not that people are all bad and oppressive, it's that we've all been inculcated with a poisonous philosophy which can be unlearned. It IS possible for any of us to reach out in conciliation, not for the benefit of the other person, but for our own benefit. Conciliation doesn't end the struggle for recognition, respect, and rights; it counteracts despair, fuels hope, and empowers the work that can be done for justice. Conciliation comes from a position of love.

Conciliation leads to the next step, "transformation," which involves both transformation of the self and transformation of society. This is the journey from feeling objectified, depersonalized, to feeling fully human. The choice to enter the coming-out process is also a choice to affirm one's place as a person, not an object, and it also leads to understanding the struggles of other marginalized people, one of the first steps to transforming society.

This brings us to the fourth step, "transcendence." One of a congregation's roles is to nurture in each member and friend the power to transcend oppressive categories and stereotypes. Personhood, being human, transcends categories, but my goodness, the categories are powerful! I was driving along recently listening to an audiotape about "Enlightenment." My attention was distracted from what was being said by a nagging question at the back of my mind: Is this a man or a woman talking? (It was one of those voices which could be either.) Now, I don't know what possible difference it would make to the way I listened to the tape, or what I got from it, if I knew the answer to that question. What does it matter whether it's a man or a woman? But the habit and wish to put people into categories is very strong in me. I needed consciously to decide to put it aside, and to try to hear the voice as simply a human voice.

The Spirit of Life within us, the human spirit, transcends categories. It can help us rise above oppression. Being part of a loving congregation can call us into transcendence not only in our spiritual lives, but in our whole lives. The path of reclamation, conciliation, transformation and transcendence can lead the way from brokenness to wholeness, from being nobody to being somebody. Let me go back to what I said at the beginning: it's my strong conviction that the more we're at peace with ourselves, happy with ourselves and loving ourselves, the more we'll be ready and able to reach out in love to others, whoever they are and whoever they love.

And this also I believe: the loving support of a congregational community can help nurture that inner peace and self-caring in all of us, no matter who we are, whatever our orientation or background or other particulars of our humanity. The work we're called on to do in this commuity is not a choice between nurturing individuals or changing society; it's about seeing each one of us as a precious piece of the interdependent web. Whatever changes in us affects the world; whatever we can make better in the world will also have its impact on us. If the change is towards a more loving way of living, we shall that much closer to embodying the vision which so many of us share, the vision of beloved community.

Yesterday was Pride Day in this Region, with celebrations in Victoria Park, marked for the second year by the cordoning off of a "hate-free zone" with rainbow-coloured rope. The image of an area from which hate is excluded is a powerful one. At last night's wonderful Choirfest, in the major piece of the evening, called Bandari, there was an equally powerful image which almost inverts the idea of excluding hate. Bandari is about the construction of a meeting house where disputes can be aired and conflicts settled by "singing them out". "Bring your hatred inside these walls," goes one of the lines. "Anger fades during singing." Combining these images, I visualize a congregation enabled to create hate-free zones, not by excluding the negative feelings but by inviting them in. "Bring your anger inside these walls," we might say. "Prejudice fades during singing."

I want to end with two sayings, the first of which is often attributed to Nelson Mandela, but when he used it he was actually quoting Marianne Williamson. She says,

" . . . as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same; as we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

And Jack Kornfield says that the last great question we ask ourselves as we die might well be "Did I love well?" Might be good to get a head start on it. Love your neighbour as you love yourself. Whatever your life situation -- single or coupled, sociable or lonely, there are people wanting and needing your care and affection. May you feel free and ready to give it. Whoever you love, love fully and joyfully. So may it be. Hallelujah!