Is It Possible to Love Your Enemies?

 

Is It Possible to Love Your Enemies?


One of the more difficult of Jesus's admonitions is the one about loving your enemies. He said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, 'Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you'”.

In one sense it is impossible. If this enemy is a person with whom I am in active opposition, if I feel that I must fight back in order to protect my body against his attacks or to protect my reputation against his defamatory remarks, then the fear that gives rise to my defense prevents me from loving him, because I cannot simultaneously fear him and love him.

However, we should first look on the problem from the psychological point of view. We have already learned that all our thoughts of anger, revenge, hatred, fear hurt ourselves, because they have a negative impact on our minds, emotions, and bodies; and therefore, when we yield to those feelings, we are attacking ourselves. On the other hand, the one who has chosen to attack me has already yielded to those feelings, and so he has entered on the path to unhappiness and self-destruction. If we can accept this line of reasoning, we will react to an attack with an attack. In fact, we should not even have to repress the desire to respond in kind.

Not responding negatively to an attack is a significant accomplishment, but it is still a far cry from being able to love the attacker. However, that goal can be attained provided that we can accept certain spiritual concepts. The first of these concepts is the truth of our spiritual nature. It is the divine spirit that dwells in every human, as the Higher Self. This spiritual part of each of us is literally a child of God as explained in the previous post, and in the post on “Trinity: The Son”.

The next concept that we need to accept is that this Higher Self, this eternal Light, that dwells in each of us is really our true self, as created by the Father. The body is merely a temporary device temporary device whose purpose is to permit us to interact with this physical world. The other aspects of our psychological make up - the Ego, the Persona, etc. - are temporary distractions that obstruct our experience of that quiet, peaceful, loving part of ourselves.

Now if, for a few moments, I can identify with that Higher Self, and think of both me and this enemy as nothing but children of God, and therefore brothers in Christ, without any consideration at all for the "natural man" part, then I can have that experience of a loving bond between us - at least briefly. That part of the enemy that attacked me was something that had no true reality in an eternal sense. I am not expected to love that part, because that would be like loving some character in a dream.

God doesn't recognize that part, as explained in the post “The Mystery of Sin”. Here is a quote from that post: “The man who harbors brutality in his heart and commits murder is loved by God just as much He loves the kindest of us, because God doesn't recognize that part of him. He only recognizes the original creation.”

We are not quite finished with this 2nd commandment, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”. We are admonished not only to love our enemies, but to pray for them. Why? Because everyone's ultimate destiny is to identify with that divine Higher Self. That includes this person that we see as an enemy. It is necessary to pray that this enemy may come to believe in himself as a divine son of God, because we cannot fully realize our heavenly destiny until every one unites in that desire.

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