Love And Oxytocin

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I was shocked and appalled recently when a friend of mine told me that if it weren’t for oxytocin, he wouldn’t love his kids. Oxytocin is the hormone in our bodies that scientists say is linked with nurturing, friendship, and team bonding. If you give a mother rat oxytocin, she becomes a rat supermom. She grooms her baby rats more, she makes more milk for them, she cuddles them, and she’s mysteriously seized by an urge to knit sweaters for them. Oxytocin crops up everywhere you find relationships. Men have it, women have it. People who have trouble connecting with others, like autistic people, have less of it. New parents have more of it. Some people call oxytocin the “love hormone.”

 

So, it’s important, sure. But to say you wouldn’t love your kids at all if you didn’t have it? I don’t know… This is a really hot topic in neuroscience right now. It gets to the heart of the big question of whether our spirituality and emotions are reducible to something material – whether our essence as human beings can really be explained by a bunch of chemicals running around our bodies. There’s a lot of evidence that it might very well be. And yet, I don’t think I’m the only one who is shocked and appalled by the idea.

 

Because it seems like if Dad’s feeling of love for his kids is entirely produced by oxytocin, which is entirely produced by evolution, then Dad and his feelings are nothing more than a vehicle for making sure his kids survive. Dad, the person we know as the one actually doing the loving — doesn’t really exist. Many of us want to believe that Dad and his love are somehow realer, deeper – something that would outlive his body and the chemicals in it. Is love meaningless if it’s (quote unquote) “just” chemical? Does the discovery of oxytocin ruin love as we know it?

 

Maybe. Or maybe we can turn it on its head and say instead that love ruins oxytocin as we know it. Instead of love getting demoted, oxytocin gets promoted from a lowly chemical into something sublime: the physical manifestation of love in this world. For my friend to say that if he didn’t have oxytocin he wouldn’t love his kids is just another way of saying that it’s only because he has the capacity to love that he can love his kids. Love may exist in other worlds, in other dimensions, in other ways, it may continue after we die, but oxytocin is how love shows up here. How beautiful, then, how holy are the chemicals that mediate between spirit and matter! What do you think? Do you buy that?

 

Once upon a time, a mother in London gave birth to four sets of twins, one set per year for four years, and then one final, ninth child. She must have been swimming in oxytocin. The ninth child was George deBenneville who became one of the earliest Universalists. This was back in the 1700’s when, if you got sick, they would put leaches on you to suck out the “bad blood.” George got sick a lot. He also got beaten up and thrown in jail a lot because he was going around preaching something that the church didn’t like: He was preaching about love: that God loves us all and we will all end up in Heaven, even the Devil himself. He preached that the universe is an “ocean of love.”

 

He came to this through mystical visions – mystical meaning direct experience of God. Here’s the story he tells about one of these visions he had while he was very sick:

 

I felt myself die by degrees, and exactly at midnight I was separated from my body and saw the people occupied in washing it according to the custom of the country. …I was drawn up as in a cloud and beheld great wonders… I quickly came to a place … so extensive that my sight was not able to reach its limits, filled with all sorts of delightful fruit trees… which sent forth such fragrant odors that all the air was filled as with incense. In this place I found that I had two guardians, …exceeding beautiful beyond expression, whose boundless friendship and love seemed to penetrate through all my inward parts. They had wings and resembled angels, having shining bodies and white garments. …Their actions and manners were animated with brightness, filled with light as with the rays of the sun. It was the fire of heavenly love… [One] said, “My dear soul and my dear brother, take courage. …Be comforted with an everlasting and universal consolation… [God] will restore all creatures without exception to… their eternal salvation.

 

Just sit with that for a minute. Try to let it in. Close your eyes and imagine yourself in his vision with the fruit trees, the air smelling of incense, just bathing, basking in this ocean of love. You feel safe, you feel warm, you feel relaxed and your heart is open. All your everyday fears and problems can just gently fall away. In this place, none of it matters. Your body and everything around you is radiant with that love. Just breathe like you’re inhaling and exhaling pure light.

 

Whoa there, Reverend Ana, aren’t we getting a little New Agey for this place? Maybe so. But this kind of vision is exactly what gave birth to Universalism; this is a significant part of our religious heritage. You can draw a direct line from George deBenneville to us. And put his visions side by side with modern day New Age literature and you can’t tell the two apart. It turns out that Universalism is not just an abstract theological quibble about heaven and hell; it’s the radical and very personal claim that we are loved. The nature of God and the nature of the universe itself is love!

 

The problem is that a lot of us don’t feel very loved by the universe. I’m guessing a lot of people in the Philippines don’t feel very loved right now. Life is hard, it hurts, we feel alone, we get sick, there’s unbearable loss. This weekend we’re remembering those who’ve died in the tragedy of war. Where’s the love? We kind of assume that if God or the spirit of life loved us so damn much, they might actually lift a finger to help us out once in a while.

 

But our Universalist tradition doesn’t really assume this kind of God. We don’t expect God to change things for us here. And often those with the most miserable lives, like deBenneville getting sick and beaten and jailed all the time, are the ones who say they feel the love the most. Feeling the love of the universe doesn’t really seem to have much to do with how much we suffer. Because we sense that, just like parental love, cosmic love doesn’t necessarily keep the loved one safe. We wish desperately that it did, that it could. We don’t understand why it doesn’t. But clearly, if you read the news this morning, it doesn’t. This cosmic love can sustain you through your suffering if you let it, but it doesn’t directly reach into our physical world and stop suffering from happening. Then how do you know it exists at all?

 

First of all by the testimonials of our own tradition – Universalists and other teachers who experience it directly. Mystics from every spiritual tradition have described something like deBenneville’s vision. They teach that this ocean of love is available to be known and experienced by all of us. Christianity teaches it, Judaism teaches it. When a modern-day neurosurgeon named Dr. Eben Alexander found himself in a coma with no brain activity whatsoever, he experienced something exactly like deBenneville’s vision. And he came back to normal consciousness with this message: “You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.” He’s written a fascinating book about it called Proof of Heaven.

 

We also can know this cosmic love is real through gratitude for the blessings of our own lives. Each one of us is only here today because when we were babies, a mothering presence made great sacrifices to keep us warm, feed us, hold us, and keep us from falling on our heads too many times. Not necessarily a biological mother, but someone did this for us or we wouldn’t be here. Each of us is only here today because of the hard work of thousands of people we will never know who transport our water and build our roads and make our clothes and invent the medicines that help us when we’re sick. Each of us is only here today because of the sunlight that beams onto our crops and the rainfall that waters the plants that become our food.

 

You could say well all that’s not love – that’s just nature and evolution doing its thing. And you could say the same about oxytocin. It’s just physical, it’s just matter – that’s not love.

 

Or, you could turn it on its head and say, like we said about oxytocin, actually that is love. The rainfall and the warmth of the sunshine in the spring that faithfully returns to us each year, that is love. The bread on our tables and the water we drink that becomes our bodies, that is love. That mysterious strength we find inside that allows us to sustain others and even find joy after tragedy, that is love. And all the thousands of people we depend on for our survival and happiness, they are all love too. All of these and more are the manifestations of cosmic love in this world. Love may exist in other worlds, in other dimensions, in other ways, we don’t know. But the blessings of this life, within us and around us, are how love shows up here. This is Universalism: we are loved by an unending love.

 

We’re going to close with a song, kind of a chant, that expresses this idea of cosmic love. You have the lyrics printed in your order of service. Andrew will sing the verses and all of us will join on the refrains. It’s a little New Agey and I love it. Just let yourself go with it. And we’ll be doing shots of wheatgrass and oxytocin up in my office after the service. Everyone’s invited.