Who are your enemies? Love them.
January 16, 2010
“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
We all have different enemies. Some for good reason. Others for no good reason. Regardless, we are called to love them.
The question is how?
We might begin by praying for the desire to desire to love them—truly love them. To want to want to love our enemies.
Then, we (myself first and foremost) must wrestle with how that desire is to be lived.
A life of true love is a life-long challenge.
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Is it even possible to truly love the other, if the other is still perceived to be an enemy?
In other words, should I pray that I stop seeing them as the enemy?
Surely the call to love your enemies is not a call to feel warmly toward them, is it? And God may love everyone, but doesn’t he require repentance before he forgives?
Is the command to love your enemies a command to feel a certain way, or to act a certain way?
This reminds me of Josef Pieper’s definition of love, the affirmation of the goodness of a being’s existence. In other words, “how good it is that you exist!”. One affirm another’s existence, not his essence.
To put it less philosophically, you love your enemies, not the enemy-ness of them. Jesus tells us to love our enemies, to pray for those who persecute you. That’s not loving the fact that they persecute you, and definitely not loving persecution (although there’s a place for being persecuted for His name).
It’s loving those, loving the people.
I think the first step is to think of them as people, not as enemies.
Sam, My enemy is the past represented in the voices and faces of those in the present who I have internalized as the source of my suffering and others. My enemy is first within me and it is within that history of helplessness and self-loathing that I began 40 plus years ago to project that hate onto others.
The enemy became me and God has shown me how to love the enemy within and begin to project that outward. This is the most difficult thing to do for me. That rage does want its pound of flesh. Fortunately, flesh is not the answer.
God Bless you Sam.
I almost never read this blog, but today I saw it on the sidebar of a blog that I edit and clicked in. I might add that my heart is heavy, not with enemies, but with not one, but two, online disagreement/comment/discussions.
Your words about wanting to want to love really struck me. It is hard to do that with someone I love sometimes, harder with those I do not.
This post is a reminder of what is basic and essential, but so elusive.
Knowing how difficult it is, at times, to love even one’s friends and family, this is a powerful and humbling — perhaps even humiliating — command. Surely that’s why we’re called together as church, since no one could hope to do this alone. Yet the lessons don’t stop there. Jesus’ command makes clear we have enemies — not a notion that appeals to the shallow “tolerance” of our age. And, we are to love enemies anyway, rather than cultivating fashionably righteous anger and dismissive irony. Finally, we are given no promise that loving our enemies will make our current situation any better. Loving enemies, like the practice of peace in general, is a way of living out of control, of not guaranteeing, based on our efforts, that things come out right in the end.
At a boutique nearby, where rich white girls buy their Buddhist tchotchkes, there is a sticker that reads, “Love your enemies and you won’t have any.” I suspect there was a time that I, too, believed my thoughts could change people, but I’ve long since abandoned that illusion. I don’t know if such nonsense accurately renders Buddhist tradition; I can only hope not.
Is the command to love your enemies a command to feel a certain way, or to act a certain way?
I don’t think feelings have anything to do with it. Love is not an emotion, it is an act of the will made manifest in the concrete world of action.
I do not mean to make this into a debate over the true nature of Love, but I do think this: While it is a mistake to equate love and loving with nothing but emotions and feelings, it would be a very grave mistake to imagine love as NOT deeply invested and manifest in our sentiments and desires.
Thanks to all who have shared their thoughts on this imposing task of loving enemies.
Sam, I’d like to thank you for posting this. I’d never really tried meditating on these lines before. I have to admit that I didn’t like your approach, and so I wondered why. I have no real objection to what you say, but something in my gut just took me in a different direction, and I don’t know if I’m right in where my thoughts led me, but here they are.
I ended up finding these words of Jesus to be a bit like a koan. “Have enemies” seems to be part of the command, or “admit to yourself that you have them.” And then we are told to do towards our enemies exactly what none of us would think logical: love them. Enemies harm us, and love (whatever it is to mean) is certainly not harm.
Then I thought, perhaps we can put the rabbi’s words into a Jewish context, and read it like the Babylonian Talmud (Sabbat 89a) reads the corollary of the giving of the Law, via Moses, to (and thus confirming the divine election of) the Jewish people: “on Mt. Sinai, hate came down to the peoples of the world,” and the people of Israel took on this hatred as just part of their election. The nations (the Gentiles) are the enemies, because chosen means its corollary is to be hated by the unchosen.
In other words, are enemies just something we are to expect because we are a part of a particular group? The right group? That seems (as the Talmud seems to me) a very self-righteous way of reading: I am a victim, or we are victims.
And then the command to love comes in and confirms this for me. The riddle of loving the enemy, of trying to hold both verb and object up and keep them both in existence, (for me at least) leads me down this path of questions:
To what extent is my enemy what makes me? What really is the enemy to me, that which is external and making me feel myself a victim, or the me that is brought into focus by that which I construe as my enemy?
To me, love, in this text, is the act of unbinding the self from rivalrous identities, from a rivalrous way of being which will only continue to involve me in a fight for scarce allocations of goods (especially the social construction of my righteousness by such things as “election” or good deeds). That’s how I’ve come to understand it. I don’t see it as a matter of having to desire to love, as if I were forcing something. It’s a clear action of bringing myself to see how I am allowing a particular sense of self, a rivalrous and self-righteous one, be threatened by something that I see as capable of taking my me away from what I have defined as MY god (little g), which takes me from the true God, as if the latter could ever have a rival (sorry, I subscribe to Origenism, and not the soft Balthasarian kind either).
By doing this (meaning, by following this line of thinking), I see better my particularity, where my heart it, what things I don’t want to let go of, etc., and I have to own up to being a large part of the manufacture of my enemies and of a grasping and rivalrous self.
Last of all, I ended up asking: is there loving that doesn’t make enemies? How is it possible to love (as a limited human being) in a completely secure and non-self-protecting way?
This is where I stopped because I just don’t have an answer to how this can be.
Love is not love without a feeling. The “feeling” of love must be explored without any preconceived beliefs. If we hold reason above love by stating that love is not a feeling then that reasoning is mistaken. Reason cannot get to the heart of the faith and without love reason becomes mechanical and without the passion that God gave us. Does it mean that those who state that love is not a feeling are really afraid of the passion of feeling?
ES, I love your reflection.