If people curse you, do not curse them back but bless them instead. (Rule of St. Benedict 4. 32)
Sadly, the right to retaliate is not an inalienable right. It may be necessary to fight your enemies and to defeat them, for the sake of the common good. But the Christian must not inflict harm merely for the satisfaction of revenge. Yes, it’s hard. And unfortunately, this is not just St. Benedict’s idea. This is Jesus himself Luke 6:28.
Can we give them the light-activated puzzle map of the United States? If they fail to replace Montana, Alabama and Arizona, they’ll be learning about Helena, Montgomery and Phoenix every time the headlights of a passing car flicker through a chink in the curtains. If they bury it under blankets in the closet, in the middle of the night a strangled voice will say, “New Jersey: Trenton.”
No: not only are we not allowed to give their children motion-sensitive, musical toys with no OFF button: God requires us to pray for them as well.
When we suffer an insult from another person, we have a reaction, anger, which is as natural as the body’s inflammatory response to injury. If you didn’t feel anger at being wronged, it would be an emotional failure, just as it would be sick for your body not to react to a wound. But just as your inflammatory response can itself become a problem if it doesn’t subside, so anger can become destructive to the person who feels it.
St. Paul tells us, “Be angry but do not sin” Ephesians 4:26-27. This means that the anger itself is not necessarily a sin. The sin is what the devil tempts you to do when you’re angry. St. Paul describes anger as the devil’s foothold (also translated “place,” “room,” “opportunity.”) Anger serves as the devil’s foothold because it has this ambiguous quality of being at the same time justified and harmful.
Your anger is just. The wrong is real. To dismiss the offense would flaunt the law of God. But because the anger is justified, the devil can easily slip in temptations to vengeful acts which are against God’s law too. So, anger functions as the gateway through which righteous people can be tempted to do things which normally would repel them.
This is why God prescribes such a horse-pill. Praying a blessing on the person who has wronged you is like swallowing one of those enormous pills. The prayer operates like an antibiotic within the soul to combat vengeance. You don’t have to be enthusiastic about it, not anymore than you have to like those pills. It may take you more than one try to get it down. Your natural gag reflex might seem at first insurmountable. But even a nauseated blessing through clenched teeth will begin to alter your interior state.
Sometimes the mode in which we go through life, fulfilling responsibilities and working efficiently, also makes it difficult to let slide someone else’s failure or misbehavior. Sometimes we need to disinhibit the part of ourselves that is both willing to take a break and willing to give someone else a break. In practice, it’s simply easier to forgive when you’re relaxed and enjoying life than when you’re stressed and exhausted.
Pour yourself a glass of wine and say: “God bless the bitch” [or epithet of choice]. Then say it again, but insert the person’s name. Repeat as necessary. Enjoy the wine. Give thanks for it. After a while you might slip up and give thanks for whoever it was. Jesus said to be merciful. He didn’t specify a state of consciousness.
No, I’m not suggesting that you should drink more alcohol in order to cope with bitterness. On the contrary, if you feel yourself sliding in that direction, you should seek more expert help. But if you know very well that the drugs you’re taking are a response to metaphysical injuries, try this: whenever you have vengeful feelings, say, “God bless [so-and-so].” That’s all you have to do, but you may have to do it many times: every three hours for days, every three days for months, every three months for years.
When you bless those who’ve harmed you, you’re not requesting on their behalf a life of luxury, flippant and carefree. Still less are you asking for evildoers to continue to do harm with impunity. What you’re asking is for God to intervene in their lives. Consider how terrible it would be for so-and-so to be blessed with that greatest of Christian virtues: humility. You might suffer an agonized, hysterical spasm at the mere thought of “humility” attributed to so-and-so. But once you’ve scraped yourself up off the floor, you’ll start to see that it’s not so difficult after all to bless that person. All you have to do is to start considering the virtue most conspicuously absent.
Who is the person who inspires respect? It’s the one who can laugh off an insult and make a joke of it. The one who sticks to principle in the face of harassment is inspiring, not the one who lashes out in retaliatory fury. The one who gets back up after being knocked down and keeps right on running toward the goal: that’s who you want to be.
