On Loving our Enemies

Lord, I remember being taught to love my enemies. In grade school it seemed noble to love the bully, to forgive the taunt. But when I hear about men or women walking into airports or metro stations and blowing themselves up in your name I do not feel love.

I feel hate.

Surely, no one wakes up and decides to blow themselves up without a long chain of despair, discrimination, pain, suffering, loss and grieving. My leftist brain tries to make sense of the violence through a regress of causes linked back to US foreign policy, to colonialism, to imperial Christian crusade…

In the back of my mind I can hear the warmongers oozing ‘I told you so!’ I am tempted to a rage of retaliation. To pick up arms myself.

What a sorry soldier I would make.

But there is no first cause in the world of violence, no bitter fruit to blame. There is only us. Black, White, Christian, Muslim…

I admit, it is hard to keep track of the hundreds of terrorist attacks that have happened even since Paris. But Brussels, like Paris feels so close to home.

We will never be able to love our enemies if we cannot even love the innocent others who are also victims of our mutual enemies. Ankara, Istanbul….

Lord, I do not believe that you cause suffering, but sometimes I wonder why you allow so damn much of it.

Lord, help me then to love myself, to love my neighbor, to love the other, and to love my enemies because the world is breaking apart from hate.