“Bless those who curse you”

Loving Our Enemies
 

How is this possible?

Christ does not ask us to bless those who curse us, or to love our enemies.

In strikingly clear terms, he commands us to:
 

This is not an option for a Christian, it is the Lord's expressed will and desire that we should do so. But how ...?

There are, of course, people that we do not feel drawn to — people, in fact, whom we do not like at all, and some whom we even dislike intensely. It is, in fact, the case that there are people whom we utterly abhor (not hate ... which is something quite different, and which has, with no equivocation whatever, no place in the heart of a Christian). Some people simply are insufferable, intolerable. And yes ... some people are even virtually consumed with evil ...  but Christ still bids us to love them!

“What”, you ask, “is this madness? How can I love whom I do not even like, and may even abhor?”

That, really, is the question at hand. How is it possible for us to love not only those we do not like, but even those who curse us, vitriolically hate us and wish us ... and if they could, would do us great evil?

How profoundly we misunderstand love ... Indeed, many never come to understand the true nature of love at all. How many marriages end in divorce because “the flame of love” has apparently been extinguished? How many “beautiful romances” have ended in disillusionment, ennui? When tragedy mars our beauty or encroaching age robs us of our youth, how often the “love” that had once accompanied it simply ceases.       

This terrible misunderstanding takes a toll on us that few of us recognize. We have invested our entire concept of love in merely one aspect of love alone: what is immediate and sensory. Love is reduced to, and then totally invested in, our emotions. Period. If the “feeling” is gone, then the “love” has gone with it. If our senses, our emotional experiences, are no longer stimulated by the other, we speak of the love “withering”. We can no longer “feel” it. It no longer “excites” us. We then reason that the love has ceased.  And in a sense, it has. It has ceased to be sensuous. One facet of that multifaceted gem has been occluded.

The problem, however, is that it is precisely this facet of the jewel, and this facet alone, into which we have peered, and the surface light that dazzled us — and in which we found our own reflection — is no longer refracted off the stone. We have looked at the stone ... but not into it! We have seen, as it were been blinded by, fixated upon, the surface light ... without ever pressing the lens of our own love to the other facets that reveal another and entirely different world within, a world of extraordinary complexity and breath-taking beauty! It is, in short, the difference between holding a diamond at arm's length and admiring its beauty... and placing ones eye to the diamond, where in crystalline light we stand in awe of the deep beauty within that surpasses in every measure the superficial beauty we see from afar. It is the difference between peering at the beauty of another— and peering into into the beauty of another.

To carry this analogy a bit further, we may say that the bringing of the diamond to the eye is an act of the will ... not an instinctive response to some emotion. We approach it with purpose, rather than colliding with it serendipitously. It is a conscious attempt to penetrate, rather than to reflect upon, the deep mystery sequestered within it; to go beyond the appearances, however magnificent, to deeper and vastly more expansive realities ... realities that ultimately touch upon the very image of God.

This is the most apposite metaphor for the true nature of love.
 

What is Love ... after all?

To begin with, it is crucial to understand that love is not simply a feeling ... but is preeminently an act of the will.

In essence, to love is to have the other person's total welfare at heart: it is to will them good in all things, and evil in none.

Pause for a moment and think of someone you genuinely love.

There is affection in that love, yes? But how does your love for that person express itself, manifest itself, apart from the affection that is uniquely experienced toward that individual? When we think upon it, we soon find that affective expressions of love, expressions simply involving our emotions, are only one part of our expression of our love for them. If our love is our affection only ... if it is solely a matter of feelings and emotions ... then we can be said to love another even as we mistreat them, abuse them, curse them, and wish every manner of evil upon them. We can be rude, discourteous, selfish, inconsiderate, manipulative and even physically violent toward them — and at the same time, because we feel an emotion within us that is inexplicably contrary to virtually everything we say or do to that person — can we still be understood to love them? Not only is there no correspondence between this emotion and our expressions of it, but complete contradiction! If such exists — and sadly, I believe that behavior of this sort, still construing itself as love, does exist — it can only be understood in terms of a pathology. It is not what we understand when we entertain the notion of love.

The point is that Christ does not command us to have an emotion or a feeling toward a person. He cannot. Love of this sort cannot be commanded. It is simply the case, and for too many reasons to enumerate, that we dislike some individuals and find others intolerable. If we look at the matter carefully, we find that while we can constrain our emotions, we cannot compel them. We can constrain our anger, but we cannot spontaneously invoke it. We can no sooner be commanded to anger than to affective love. However, everything else apart from what is affective, that is to say, apart from what pertains to feelings or emotions, can in fact be commanded ... and is ... by Christ Himself!

Once we remove the affective element of love that is an emotional bond unique between two individuals, everything else that pertains to loving another person is, in fact, subject to our will. We can will to do good to others, even while we cannot will to experience affection for them. It is within our power to say and to do everything which the expression of genuine love entails — everything by which we coherently understand one person as loving another — even if we do not have an emotional investment in that person!

Yes, we can love those who vex us terribly and who would even bring us to injury. Yes, we can love whom we dislike! The love of which Christ speaks, the love He commands, has nothing whatever to do with sensory gratification or emotional fulfillment. This unique affective dimension of love spontaneously arises between two people in addition to their obligation to love one another in ways that are not affective — which is to say, in all the ways not pertaining to, or expressive of, emotional attachment.

Understood in these terms, it is not the case of one love being superior to another. It is that affective love possess a spontaneous dimension beyond the same obligations of love incumbent upon all of us. It fulfils the precepts within this one individual — and then exceeds them in the way of superabundance through an emotional investment that spontaneously emerges between two individuals in a way that does not characterize, but also does not diminish, their love for all others.

Once we understand this, we realize that we are not called, still less compelled, to intimacy with others at large.

Much of the touching and feeling that occurs with disturbing frequency at Mass is very likely the result of a confusion between love and intimacy. We tend to equate the one with the other, and when, with good reason, we feel uncomfortable with the intimate gestures of others with whom we are not on intimate terms, more often than not we wrongly reproach ourselves, rather than this mistaken conflation of love and intimacy being forced upon us. It is essentially the difference between love as charity and love as intimacy. God does not command us to be intimate with our neighbors. Right?

To bless others, genuinely asking God — ex corde — to bestow on them favor, mercy, and goodness, is an act of reciprocal beneficence, for in blessing our enemies: those who hate us, do us harm, and wish us evil, we bring upon ourselves an unspeakable blessing also:

Bless friend and enemy alike; it is no more than our duty. For the very One Who commanded us to love our enemies bids us in so doing to know ourselves — which to know, is to arrive at humility:

                                                                         
A Poor Clare Colettine Nun
for the Boston Catholic Journal

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