Love is the Hard Thing: A smallest meditation on a poem by Wendell Berry

Then another friend offered the whole poem.

To my granddaughters who visited the Holocaust Museum
on the day of the burial of Yitzak Rabin, November 6th 1995.

Now you know the worst
we humans have to know
about ourselves, and I am sorry,

for I know you will be afraid.
To those of our bodies given
without pity to be burned, I know

there is no answer
but loving one another
even our enemies, and this is hard.

But remember:
when a man of war becomes a man of peace,
he gives a light, divine

though it is also human.
When a man of peace is killed
by a man of war, he gives a light.

You do not have to walk in darkness.
If you have the courage for love,
you may walk in light. It will be

the light of those who have suffered
for peace. It will be
your light.

I treasure the whole thing.

And I’m taken with the shorter excerpt, as well.

What follows in the fuller poem is a sort of coda, a blessing.

The shorter version is more abrupt, almost brutal. And feels like a calling from the deep, at least to me. A calling that doesn’t necessarily come with a blessing. Or, the blessing is darker. Or, might be.

This not turning from disaster, from actual evil. It is hard. It calls for responses, sometimes the most distasteful of responses. Which might be read into the shorter version of the poem. But I don’t think so.

You. Me. And, whatever else, including all else, we have certain duties to one another. Sometimes even unto death. But. That said, Berry touches the most difficult of all things.

If I cannot find love for every corner of the world, even for my enemy, and I don’t need to pretend there are no enemies, there are; those actions I am called to will not merely be distasteful, they become a conspiracy of evils…

Love is the hard thing. It is also, among and in the middle of all that we must do, the only answer.

The dark blessing of walking through shadow valley…