Browsing tag: enemies

  • Love Your Enemies

    Love your enemies (Matthew 5:43-48; Luke 6: 27-35)

    (Rule of Saint Benedict 4. 31)

    Loving your enemies sounds like a nice idea until you actually have enemies yourself.

    When someone asked Jesus, “who is my neighbor?” he responded with the parable of the Good Samaritan, which turns the question on its head. We are to be neighbors even to inveterate cultural enemies. But no one ever asked Jesus, “who is my enemy?” This, it seems, we are left to figure out.

    An enemy is not merely someone with whom you disagree. You can disagree passionately with friends on all sorts of topics, as long as you have something more important in common.

    Nor is an enemy an opponent in a game. An opponent recognizes the same boundaries you do and does not harm you in real life.

    An enemy is not even necessarily someone with whom you are in conflict. Sometimes the angry person turns out not to be a beast. If you give the benefit of the doubt, engage, and communicate what’s going on from your perspective, sometimes you find that the enemy is a neighbor after all.

    An enemy, in brief, is someone who acts deliberately on the intent to harm you. After you’ve attempted to resolve a conflict peacefully, the person who stabs you in the back can fairly be called an enemy.

    And this is the person we’re called to love.

    A Christian concept of love is essentially voluntary. We know that God is love. But we also know that God is not our slave. So, neither are we enslaved to those we love. Love ends where coercion begins.

    Therefore, if you are going to love anyone, first you must be free. More to the point: you must be free from the enemy in question. If your enemy is more powerful than you are, escape is the first order of business. Extricate yourself, and then work on making new friends, because even evil people tend to avoid attacking someone who has relationships with others.

    If you are, then, free to love, the question becomes, what is love?

    We know that “the Lord disciplines those he loves” (Hebrews 12:6; Proverbs 3: 12). Therefore a Christian concept of love includes setting boundaries and enforcing standards. Love sets aside the self-interest of the moment for the good of the other person. But the good of the other person is not always what that person demands. When someone wants something that is not good, you say no, for love’s sake.

    The most terrible enemies are the ones you always loved, and who, you thought, also loved you. Those are the ones who break your heart. There’s nothing quite like the distress of loving the antagonist who once was dear. The world roils with enemies who are exes.

    Whether the situation is tragic or merely wearisome, loving any sort of enemy requires a combination of efforts. First, you must finesse your way out of range of whatever harm your enemy might inflict. Further, you must refrain from inflicting whatever revenge is within reach. Ultimately, you must make the extra effort to be the sort of person your enemy is not.

    Your enemy is enraged, but you must be respectful. Your enemy is vindictive, but you must be peacable. Your enemy is selfish, but you must be generous. Your enemy is false, but you must be true.

    Nothing anyone can say will ever make this easy, but the Holy Spirit can make it possible.

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  • Bless Those Who Blast You

    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 isn’t 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.”

    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 describes anger as the devil’s foothold Ephesians 4:26-27 (also translated “place,” “room,” “opportunity.”)  Anger serves as the devil’s foothold because it’s not in itself wrong.  All the other vices are absolutes.  Only anger has this ambiguous quality of being at the same time justified and harmful.  St. Paul tells us, “Be angry but do not sin.”  This means that anger itself is not the sin.  The sin is what the devil tempts you to do when you’re angry.

    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.

    When the thirst for revenge sets in, it’s like a bacterial infection that develops in a contaminated wound. If it isn’t addressed immediately, it can become chronic, like vengeful feelings that persist for years after an offense.  The infection can invade your entire body and ruin your health.  Vengeful feelings can obsess you even after the perpetrator is dead.

    It’s true that revenge can attain to the level of tragedy.  There are wrongs that no mere mortal can bear alone.  But usually the vindictive person is shallow and selfish.  It’s the conceited person who punishes someone for an honest remark.  It’s the spiteful person who exacts retribution for a petty grievance.  You don’t want to become that person.

    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.  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 weeks. Daily for months. Weekly for years.

    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.  When you bless those who’ve mistreated you, you’re asking God to intervene in their lives.  You may have detailed ideas for how exactly God could proceed. He will consider your suggestions fairly.  But at the end of the day, you surrender judgment to Christ.

    Who is the person who does inspire 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 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. Outmaneuver your opponents. Leave them in the dust, and leave revenge in the hands of God. “‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.‘”

     

     

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