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Love Your Enemies!!
Sydney Harris, USA
Most people look upon the biblical injunction "Love your enemies" either as impossibly utopian or as impossibly sentimental. This is because they have not grasped the meaning of "agape," or "love," as Jesus meant it.
To love your enemies does not mean that you have to like them. It does not mean that they are no longer your enemies. Nobody can command us to like what we do not like, for emotions cannot be directed by moral laws.
And enemies remain enemies if their ultimate goals conflict with ours, no matter whether we love them or not. So "love your enemies" does not order us to do something either utopian or sentimental.
What it means, properly understood, is that no matter what we "feel" about another person, or how we oppose his beliefs, there must be an acknowledgement that what binds us together is greater than what divides us.
It is the "personhood" of the other that unites us in something that is above, and greater than, both of us; and our respect for this common ground of our being must take precedence over our likes and our beliefs. This is the hardest lesson for any people (and any religion) to learn.
We mistakenly imagine that if we could love our enemies, then we might become friends or allies; but this is not necessary, nor even possible, in many cases. We would still be enemies--but we would treat our enmity as athletes do in a contest, not as soldiers in a war.
It may sound odd but true athletes "love" their adversaries. That is, they respect them as other persons striving towards an opposite goal. And they oppose them only within rules that both obey, so that the winner wins on merit, not on fouls.
This is the kind of spirit Jesus was urging upon us, not a sticky sentimentality that tries to blink away human conflict or pretend that people can like each other better than they do. He was saying it doesn't matter if you like someone or not, it doesn't matter if you agree or not--the only thing that matters is treating the other fairly and cleanly as athletes do in a championship game.
This is a union that goes beyond sympathy or friendship, for there is no merit in behaving nicely toward the people we like; the only merit is in behaving decently toward people we don't like or disagree with--for this kind of love is an act of the will, not an emotion or an intellectual conviction.
What a tragedy that we honor it only in our games, which we take so seriously, but not in our
lives, which we play away with such perilous flippancy.
["Love, unselfishness, must undergo a constant and living readaptative interpretation of relationships in accordance with the leading of the Spirit of Truth. Love must thereby grasp the ever-changing and enlarging concepts of the highest cosmic good of the individual who is loved. And then love goes on to strike this same attitude concerning all other individuals who could possibly be influenced by the growing and living relationship of one spirit-led mortal's love for other citizens of the universe. And this entire living adaptation of love must be effected in the light of both the environment of present evil and the eternal goal of the perfection of divine destiny." (1950)]
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