Open Writing

Love my enemy! Why, the fellow is evil. Love evil. That is a contradiction in terms if ever I heard one.

Yet this admonition is straight from the lips of Christ. There must be something behind it.

There is a wonderful story, which came from a concentration camp at the end of WW2. Among the inmates who were like walking skeletons, there was a fully-fleshed man. It was assumed that he must have been in a recent intake. Not so! He had been there for years. He had seen his family and friends killed before his eyes and he had pleaded to be killed too. But he spoke German and the Nazis wanted him as a translator. He had been a lawyer and had seen what the destructive power of hate did to individuals who gave in to hate. He realised that he had an immediate decision to make—either to hate or to love. He decided on the latter and was a source of inspiration to many in the camp, often giving his rations to others and acting as a counsellor and a consoler.

Love thy enemy makes good psychological sense and certainly embraces the approach which maintains that spirituality is also practicality. For who is the main victim of hate? He or she who hates. Hate consumes the individual, embitters him and his whole approach to life, poisons his relationships and is the molehill which becomes the mountain.

Man is a gregarious creature. When an attitude such as hate starts to isolate the individual from his fellows, that isolation simply drags him down even further. And it becomes a vicious circle—the more the isolation, the greater the hate.

It is a commonality in child-rearing circles to espouse the approach of saying to a child “I love you but I do not love this or that action which you have just taken.” So too, it is important to separate the person from the act, the more so when the act has been especially hurtful.

Why does a person commit an act which can draw hate to him? Can such a person possibly be balanced? No. There are so many reasons why a person can behave in such a way. The imbalance may have its roots in health or in emotions or in finances or in frustration—or even, just as likely, in karma from his present life or from a past life. To his poisoned mind, his actions may well appear justified because of what others have done to him. The concept that he might have drawn to himself the adverse circumstances which he blames on others does not occur to him. Or, if it does, he rationalises that “they” are just as much to blame as he is.

What tremendous lessons there are in life for us all. The more we are jostled out of our comfort zones, the more we have the opportunity to learn. What is salutary for us—some may use the words “galling for us”—is the thought that we may have drawn the occasion to ourselves, either directly or indirectly. What is there in us which could have led to us needing to confront ourselves with the challenge of loving rather than hating? Is our spirituality reserved for the good times, for when God is smiling benignly on us, when everything is going well for us? Is it that we accept our own superiority and skills as the root cause of our successes and blame others—or even God—when matters do not work out well? Are we fair weather friends of God?

The circumstances which give rise to hatred are themselves part of a bigger picture— the matter, energy, space and time aspects of the material world in which we live and, hopefully, learn. It is so easy to attribute reality to the material aspects of our lives. But, deep down, we know that these seemingly permanent and solid and real aspects are not so real after all. We will not take any of them with us when we die. Even in this lifetime, matters which appeared to be so very important at the time can be seen, in retrospect, to have been minor rather than major.

As with every other aspect of our lives, the choice is ours. We can decide to love or to hate. And whichever we decide, it is we who will have to live with the consequences of our choice.

©Patrick Thomas