By Deacon Eric Gurash
In the twenty-four hours or so since delivering the homily at Mass on Sunday, I have received several requests to make its message available in a public format. It would appear that these reflections on Christ’s unequivocal call to love our enemies have touched a certain chord in the hearts of those who are only too aware of the rampant divisions and polarizations that we experience daily in our current cultural milieu.
It is with this in mind that I share the following rumination on this past weekend’s readings; Leviticus 19.1-2, 17-18, 1 Corinthians 3.16-23, and Matthew 5.38-48.
These passages echo with what may be the single-most challenging aspect of our Christian faith.
“You shall be holy,” Leviticus exhorts. “Be perfect,” our Lord and God states boldly and plainly from the pages of the Gospel, “as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
And we who receive these words today rightly ask, perhaps in awe, perhaps with a bit of despair, “How in the word am I supposed to do that?”
In answer, the bar is raised to an even more uncomfortable height; by not holding hate in my heart, not taking vengeance, not bearing a grudge, by loving my neighbour.
By loving my enemy.
Jesus isn’t being merely esoteric here. This should make us deeply uncomfortable as we imagine perhaps right here and now, a particular, concrete person in our own lives, a family member, a co-worker, a former friend, a former spouse.
This path of love, particularly towards those for whom I do not often feel love, is one of our biggest challenges. It invites us beyond the enlightened self-interest Jesus describes; loving those who love us back, being kind to our family members and friends who return our kindness.
The truest practice of love – what St. Thomas Aquinas defines as willing the good of the other for their own sake – is one of the most difficult hills of the Gospel to climb.
Nowhere is the challenge more explicit than within the realm of social media and online news outlets and forums. These spaces reveal comment boxes awash in snippy and scathing dialogues that do not seek to draw people together, but seek rather to win the fight, to defeat the enemy, to shame, and to ridicule.
This rampant culture of radical polarization infects nearly every aspect of our lives from the moral to the political, the economic to the ecclesial – the culture within our own church. It feeds on anger, fear, and anxiety creating divisions between individuals and each other, between families, friends and strangers, and between faithful Catholics and their bishops, their priests, and even our Pope.
Anger, fear, division, gossiping — check out Galatians chapter 5 and you’ll see Paul in no uncertain terms identify these types of actions and behaviors as works that are directly opposed to the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control that are the sure and certain fruits of the Holy Spirit himself.
What then is the antidote to this pervasive problem of polarization that seeks to set us against our Lord’s pleading exhortation to love our enemies and pray for those who hate us?
One pathway towards this radical love of the Gospel can be found in the Jesuit practice of “Assuming Positive Intent”. This basic principle counsels us to critically examine our own motivations, and admit to our own ignorance in questioning the motivations of another.
As part of her process called “The Work,” Byron Katie, an advocate of this basic principle proposes four key questions when we find ourselves faced with potential conflict, whether on line or face-to-face in our homes, workplaces and schools:
1. Is what I believe about the other and their motivations true?
- Can I know beyond any doubt that it’s true?
- How do I find myself reacting or behaving as I believe this negative thing about the other and their motivations? Here we look for those fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Or their opposites: fear, anger, moved to gossip, to shame, to demean, to diminish the other.
- Who would I be without these thoughts? If I find myself reacting in fear, anxiety, anger, – leading me to gossip, shame, demean or diminish the other – would dropping those help me to more closely resemble a person created in the image and likeness of love?
In many ways we can feel as though we are lone rafts being haphazardly tossed around on the seas of powers and principalities beyond our vision and certainly beyond our control. Our readings today remind us to be wary of any place, any power which does not contain God’s word of peace, and mercy; that does not encourage God’s holy and sacred people to love our enemy, to pray for those who seem to hate us, to be Holy temples of God.
And when we find those temptations – both within our own hearts and souls, or within the broader culture which so easily forgets the divine image in which it has been made – to tear down rather than build up we must always, always, always return to the feet of our Lord and Master whose wisdom, born not of the world, but of our Heavenly Father’s own heart, will forever lead us to his peace.
