![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/162\/2012\/05\/Picture-5.png\" "\\"Picture")
<\/a>Another presidential campaign season is upon us, with all its ugly divisiveness and demonizing of politicians who don\u2019t share one\u2019s own views. How is a Christian to live out Jesus\u2019 command to love one another (John 13:34) in such times?<\/p>\nIn the early 1980s, as a newly baptized Catholic, I plunged into a study of the spirituality of nonviolence. What pushed me was a pastoral letter issued by the U.S. Catholic Bishops in May, 1983: The Challenge of Peace: God\u2019s Promise and Our Response<\/em>, written in the context of the Cold War\u2019s nuclear arms race. As a baby Catholic, I soaked in every word of the first official church document I\u2019d read. What especially struck me, and with revelatory force, was the bishops\u2019 assertion that nonviolence \u201cbest reflects the call of Jesus both to love and to justice.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019d heard of nonviolence, of course (Gandhi and Martin Luther King), but before my baptism I lived in such a self-enclosed world that I didn\u2019t even read the newspaper. The bishops\u2019 assertion moved me to learn about nonviolence. So I joined a group in my parish that was studying both Thomas Merton and Gandhi. I was immediately hooked.<\/p>\n Merton\u2019s analysis of how we cling to self-protective fears to keep from obeying Christ\u2019s command to truly love our enemies brought me to my knees in penitence; I knew guiltily how far I was from nonjudgmental love of my neighbors and friends, let alone my enemies.<\/p>\n And Gandhi\u2019s notion of Satyagraha\u2014that the strongest force in the universe is the force of love, which will conquer all hatred and injustice if we let its power rule in our own hearts\u2014held a condemning mirror to all my petty hatreds and angers. Recognizing how little peace there was within myself, I felt my complicity in the violence of the world.<\/p>\n The bishops\u2019 document persuaded me that the U.S. strategy of nuclear deterrence was an evil, so I joined my city\u2019s nuclear freeze network. It was exciting to be, for the first time in my life, politically engaged. But, before long my studies of nonviolence posed a challenge.<\/p>\n For nuclear deterrence supporters, the threatening enemy was the Soviet Union, for those in the freeze movement, the threatening enemy was our own government and all who supported its nuclear arms build-up policy. My prayerful studies of nonviolence had been training me to raise a red flag in my heart whenever it cast an other as enemy, training me not to scorn the enemy but to try to enter his or her own heart non-judgmentally.<\/p>\n So I decided it was time to practice spiritual nonviolence in a concrete way. There was a man\u2014I\u2019ll call him Tom\u2014who used to come to all our nuclear freeze public events deliberately to argue the opposing view: to hassle us, we\u2019d say with an irritated sigh among ourselves. I decided to try to get to know him\u2014as a human being just like me, rather than as The Hassler.<\/p>\n When I introduced myself to Tom at one of these events and said I wanted to understand his view better, he invited me to his home. It was in a neighborhood not unlike mine, but (symbolically) on the other side of the city. After introducing me to his wife and son, he took me into his study and gave me copies of magazine articles supporting his view.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t argue back. I listened with a heart aching to love him as I knew God did, a heart seeking to enter his own heart and become its very core. While disagreeing totally with his nuclear deterrence support, I sought to relinquish the image of him as enemy, to be able to accept in my soul that\u2014despite our mutual fear of each other\u2019s positions\u2014he and I were one.<\/p>\n Only God knows how far I succeeded. I left Tom\u2019s house with a splitting headache. This was the cost, for me, of trying to open my heart and mind: feeling my own fragile self split open with hammer and wedge to let in the feared other.<\/p>\n Did it take this much out of Whitman, I wonder now, to become each of the people he tenderly names in the famous \u201cSong of Myself\u201d?<\/p>\n The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,<\/em> And these one and all tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,<\/em> Ever since college, when I first encountered the wildly self-transcending vision of \u201cSong of Myself,\u201d I\u2019ve returned to it. I long to share Whitman\u2019s deep identification with all people in their precious individuality\u2014Tom then, politicians who terrify me now.<\/p>\n I\u2019m driven, like Greg Wolfe, writing in his editorial <\/a>in the current issue of Image<\/em><\/a> (72), \u201ctoward an inclusive vision that reconciles divided peoples and riven hearts.\u201d<\/p>\n During our current agonizingly long and inherently divisive campaign season, can I watch TV news without mumbling scornfully at politicians I disagree with? Can I get through the elections with nonviolent love in my heart?<\/p>\n Let all tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them.<\/p>\n Peggy Rosenthal<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0is director of\u00a0Poetry Retreats<\/a>\u00a0and writes widely on poetry as a spiritual resource. Her books include\u00a0Praying through Poetry: Hope for Violent Times<\/em>(Franciscan Media), and\u00a0The Poets\u2019 Jesus\u00a0<\/em>(Oxford). SeeAmazon<\/a>\u00a0for full list. She also teaches an online\u00a0course<\/a>, \u201cPoetry as a Spiritual Practice,\u201d through\u00a0Image<\/em>\u2019s Glen Online program.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Another presidential campaign season is upon us, with all its ugly divisiveness and demonizing of politicians who don\u2019t share one\u2019s own views. How is a Christian to live out Jesus\u2019 command to love one another (John 13:34) in such times? In the early 1980s, as a newly baptized Catholic, I plunged into a study of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1050,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,15,50],"tags":[58,311,70,407],"class_list":["post-456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith-topical-categories","category-peggy-rosenthal","category-relationships","tag-brokenness","tag-catholicism","tag-love","tag-non-violence"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nThe farmer stoops by the bars of a Sunday and looks at the oats and rye,<\/em>
\nThe lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirmed case\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n
\nand such as it is to be of these more or less I am.<\/em><\/p>\n