Forgiveness defeats enmity
This year started with a bang. Dead and injured in Arizona, over political opinions. Anniversaries of two assassinated Nobel Peace Prize winners - Gandhi and King. Beliefs never justify violence; yet an incarcerated, former Aryan Nations leader asked us for forgiveness on Martin Luther King's birthday.
Dr. King's response is clear. From King's "Love your enemies," written while he was incarcerated for civil disobedience and delivered by proxy to an Alabama church Christmas day, 1957:
"First, we must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. It is impossible even to begin the act of loving one's enemies without the prior acceptance of the necessity, over and over again, of forgiving those who inflict evil and injury upon us ...
"Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act ... It is the lifting of a burden or the canceling of a debt ... Certainly one can never forget, if that means erasing it totally from his mind. But when we forgive, we forget in the sense that the evil deed is no longer a mental block impeding a new relationship. Likewise, we can never say, 'I will forgive you, but I won't have anything further to do with you.' Forgiveness means reconciliation, a coming together again.
"Without this, no man can love his enemies. The degree to which we are able to forgive determines the degree to which we are able to love our enemies.
"Second, we must recognize that the evil deed of the enemy-neighbor, the thing that hurts, never quite expresses all that he is. An element of goodness may be found even in our worst enemy. Each of us has something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against ourselves. Something within us causes us to lament with Ovid, the Latin poet, 'I see and approve the better things, but follow worse' ...
"This simply means that there is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies ... We recognize that his hate grows out of fear, pride, ignorance, prejudice, and misunderstanding, but in spite of this, we know God's image is ineffably etched in being. Then we love our enemies by realizing that they are not totally bad and that they are not beyond the reach of God's redemptive love.
"Third, we must not seek to defeat or humiliate the enemy but to win his friendship and understanding ... Every word and deed must contribute to an understanding with the enemy and release those vast reservoirs of goodwill which have been blocked by impenetrable walls of hate.
"Why should we love our enemies?
"Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate multiplies hate ... in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says 'Love your enemies,' he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition.
"Hate scars the soul and distorts the personality. Mindful that hate is an evil and dangerous force, we too often think of what it does to the person hated ...
"Hate is just as injurious to the person who hates. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true ...
"We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate; we get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity."
Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network who still has hope. E-mail sholehjo@hotmail.com.