Six Tips for Loving Your Enemies

LOVE YOUR ENEMIES

Incidentally, it helps to have enemies. While love is a beautiful emotion, far more empires have been built, books written, wrongs righted, fights won, and ambitions realized out of vengeful desire to prove some critic wrong, or existential dread of some perceived enemy, than all the love in the world. Love is grand, but hate and fear last longer.

When we hate our enemies, we are giving them power over us: power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our health, and our happiness. Our enemies would dance with joy if only they knew how they were worrying us, lacerating us, and getting even with us! Our hate is not hurting them at all, but our hate is turning our own days and night

I do not owe my opponents my affection, warmth or regard. But I do owe myself a chance to live in this world without the burden of hate. “I shall permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.” Said Booker T. Washington. It reminds me of a line from Toni Morrison’s novel Love: “Hate does that

LOVE YOUR ENEMIES

So the road to genuine forgiveness is often paved with hatred. But go to the heart of hate and you won’t find hate but rather great heart-wrenching grief, a broken-open depth of being that is both agonizingly and exquisitely painful, soberingly spacious, and eventually liberating.