Saturday, February 16, 2008
From AscensionNYC
Saturday in the First Week of Lent
by Nicholas Laccetti
Psalm 119:1-8
Deuteronomy 26:16-19
Matthew 5:43-48
"You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven" (Matthew 5:43-45).
Often, the phrase "love your enemies" becomes a mere platitude, something we profess to accept but rarely enact in reality. At best, we discreetly exchange the word "love" for "respect," or "tolerate." But love is something more radical than these, something we instinctually reserve for spouses, partners, or family members. All of us know how to love. We do it all the time. The question becomes, why should we love our enemies? This difficulty causes us to push the true meaning of Christ's injunction out of our minds, to let it be a platitude.
One of my professors, a medievalist, often drills a certain concept from Dante's Divine Comedy into his students, regardless of the particular class he is teaching at the time. The exchange always goes like this:
"Class, for Dante, what keeps the stars in the sky?"
"Love."
"What keeps the spheres in their orbit?"
"Love."
"What holds the universe together?"
"Looove."
Love holds the universe together. Love brings together opposites, brings us into a collision course with the other. Chris Hedges, a war correspondent and writer, was once questioned in an interview on why he actively sought out the company of couples while covering wars. He responded, "In every conflict I've been in, the only antidote is people who find their fulfillment, their sense of being, in love. In the Balkans, these were often couples who had mixed marriages, and therefore, they were immune from the rhetoric; to paint all Serbs as evil, or all Muslims as evil, or all Croats as evil was to denigrate the spouse, to dehumanize the spouse — which they couldn't do."
Certainly in war, but also in our day-to-day existence, the pressure to reduce your enemy to a non-human, to a binary evil, is often overwhelming. But love is able to prevent this sort of dehumanizing, to reveal those you love as what they truly are: as humans made in the image of God. It renders us immune to the dangerous rhetoric of conflict.
Like a magnetic force, love brings us toward those who seem impossibly distant, who seem absolutely alien. And love is simple: all it does is show us that our enemies are not and were never distant or alien; that through our shared ability to love we are all human and all children of our Father in heaven.
Psalm 119:1-8
Deuteronomy 26:16-19
Matthew 5:43-48
"You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven" (Matthew 5:43-45).
Often, the phrase "love your enemies" becomes a mere platitude, something we profess to accept but rarely enact in reality. At best, we discreetly exchange the word "love" for "respect," or "tolerate." But love is something more radical than these, something we instinctually reserve for spouses, partners, or family members. All of us know how to love. We do it all the time. The question becomes, why should we love our enemies? This difficulty causes us to push the true meaning of Christ's injunction out of our minds, to let it be a platitude.
One of my professors, a medievalist, often drills a certain concept from Dante's Divine Comedy into his students, regardless of the particular class he is teaching at the time. The exchange always goes like this:
"Class, for Dante, what keeps the stars in the sky?"
"Love."
"What keeps the spheres in their orbit?"
"Love."
"What holds the universe together?"
"Looove."
Love holds the universe together. Love brings together opposites, brings us into a collision course with the other. Chris Hedges, a war correspondent and writer, was once questioned in an interview on why he actively sought out the company of couples while covering wars. He responded, "In every conflict I've been in, the only antidote is people who find their fulfillment, their sense of being, in love. In the Balkans, these were often couples who had mixed marriages, and therefore, they were immune from the rhetoric; to paint all Serbs as evil, or all Muslims as evil, or all Croats as evil was to denigrate the spouse, to dehumanize the spouse — which they couldn't do."
Certainly in war, but also in our day-to-day existence, the pressure to reduce your enemy to a non-human, to a binary evil, is often overwhelming. But love is able to prevent this sort of dehumanizing, to reveal those you love as what they truly are: as humans made in the image of God. It renders us immune to the dangerous rhetoric of conflict.
Like a magnetic force, love brings us toward those who seem impossibly distant, who seem absolutely alien. And love is simple: all it does is show us that our enemies are not and were never distant or alien; that through our shared ability to love we are all human and all children of our Father in heaven.
