Loving Your Enemies, part 1

Mark Kutolowski & Robin Junker-Boyce

You can listen to the audio version of this blog on our podcast page.

Robin: Greetings, friends. This is Robin Junker Boyce here again with Mark Kutolowski of Metanoia of Vermont eager to engage in a conversation with Mark around the topic of loving your enemies. I'm delighted to have this conversation, Mark. Today is November 30th, 2022 and here at Metanoia we have the rain coming down outside. It's about 35 degrees out there. And you might hear the pitter pattern, I'm not sure, but Mark, I'm really excited that we get to do this again.

Mark: Yes, great to have you here, Robin. Great to be with you. 

Robin: So we'll begin with reading the text and then defining our terms. What is enemy? What do we mean when we say enemy? And then what is love? 

Mark: So would you like to go ahead or should I?

Robin: I'd love for you to.

Mark: Okay. So I'll read the passage here that we're working with. This is from the gospel of Matthew chapter five, and it's verses 43 to 48 from the Sermon on the Mount. “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,  so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Robin: Thanks be to God. Grant this for our understanding. 

So we'll dive in. We might need to define perfection here.

Mark: This is one of the pieces there that makes the text seem almost impossible, but that word ‘perfect’, if you really dig into  its roots, is perhaps better translated as undivided or without division just as your heavenly Father is without division. I think that gives us a window into the type of love that Jesus is talking about because it's that love which is unconditional. And that phrase ‘be without division’, hearkens back to the image of God, showering love and mercy and compassion down with no differentiation upon the recipients just as the rain falls as it is on a day like today, or the sun shines on a beautiful clear day. It's a great image of that unconditional love. 

Robin: Yes, right, it's like unitive love.

Mark: Yes. It’s a love that is not polarized. It doesn't take sides. It doesn't even see the sides. It's at a level that doesn't even know those distinctions that we tend to make in our more subjective experience of life. 

Robin: So defining the term enemy, what do we mean by enemy? What do we understand the Matthews text to mean by enemy? 

Mark: Well, I think if we take the text as a whole, we go back to what I was just talking about. Jesus is talking about this love that can fall upon all without any difference. And so I would suggest that practically our enemy is any person whom we find it difficult to show love and compassion and goodness towards. So if there's a person that you just feel like you can't stand or a person that you'd rather not be around or a person that you feel like the world would be better off if they just weren't there - that’s your enemy. 

And it doesn't count to say, well, bless their heart, maybe someday Trump will see the light. And actually if you can't wish Donald Trump well from the depths of your heart and wish that he knows happiness and peace and true security and resting in God, there's your enemy. And I picked one that is a trigger point for many people in the more liberal world. We could just as easily say Joe Biden for people that are in the conservative world where it can become a point of identity to oppose this public figure. 

Robin: What arises for me is oftentimes people will come to me with the response that, “Well, Robin, when it comes to loving my enemy, I don't really have any enemies” or “When I think of enemies, I think of it as someone who wants to inflict harm on me. And I don't really have any of those people in my life or I don't want to inflict harm on anyone else. So this term really doesn't apply to me.” I want to dig a little bit deeper. 

Mark: I think part of what we need to understand in Jesus' teaching is he's trying to bring each one of his listeners into this field of unified love that is God's love for each and every human being. So the teaching to love your enemy is precisely about zeroing in on where our heart is blocked. And so where is your heart blocked in relation to any human being? There's your key that's keeping you from entering into the kingdom of God, which is that unified love of the Father. So it's precisely where we find our heart stops, where we just feel agitated and irritated even thinking about another person. That's the place where we no longer can remain in the kingdom of love if that's our response to consciously being aware of another person. 

Robin: Right. It’s easy to go with the Trump theme and so I say, let's do it because it seems to be accessible for people. I hear people say, “Well, how do I love that?” That person that is inflicting so much harm or what they perceive as so much harm on others and is creating evil. What's interesting is many people don't prefer the word enemy, but they will use evil when they're talking about Donald Trump. So how can we love, how can we be called to love someone who is inflicting pain and spewing evil out into the world. 

Mark: And it's important, because we have people listening from many different stances to realize, when you say Trump, we're talking about a placeholder. 

Robin: Yes. 

Mark: So again, yes, we could say Trump or  Putin or  Biden or Fauci.

Robin: I want to be respectful of that. Yes. 

Mark: But that's precisely the point. Who you feel the need to name as evil would be another way of defining who's your enemy. And Jesus says it right in this passage, not only to love your enemies, but to pray for those who persecute you. And persecution could be you privately or it could be who you identify with. So if you’re talking about Trump, for example, or Putin and they're inflicting all this evil on these other people and you feel the pain of it inside of you, you're identifying with the people that you're seeing as persecuted. So that goes directly back to the teaching. Pray for those who persecute you. He's really coming right into the heart of this division, this very deep division within our hearts to want to see some people as worthy of God's love and other people as unworthy of God's love. And that's the dualism that can hide underneath our sense of being right and righteous and just and wanting to cleanse the world of evil. The evil always ends up landing in the identity of this person or this group. It's a very old story and we've been playing it out generation to generation, thinking the world would be better if only that person or that group didn't exist.

Robin: Or if these sorts of practices didn't exist, like racism.

Mark: But it never stays there. We might begin with thinking it would be better if racism didn't exist, but very quickly it jumps to thinking we'd be better off if the racists didn't exist. And that's the jump out of the realm of love and into a realm of demonizing the other and cutting ourselves off from divine love. It’s fine to oppose the concept of racism, but it never stays there or it rarely stays there in our heart if we're not very diligent about praying for and loving the people who are perpetuating evil. 

Robin: Because we quickly move into the shoes of the oppressor in our demonization. We're dehumanizing. 

Mark: Yes. This plays out in every idealistic revolution that we've seen, for example the French Revolution and the ideal of reason or the Communist revolution and the ideal of liberating the oppressed workers. Every revolution that begins with a great ideal but does not have the spiritual grounding of loving one’s enemies ends up with a campaign of mass extermination, to put it bluntly. A remarkable, rare historical exception is the end of apartheid in South Africa. And it was led by people like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu who focused directly on forgiveness and loving their enemies and the practice of truth and reconciliation and seeing the humanity of the people that had been in the role of oppressor in an unjust circumstance. A rare and beautiful example that counters the historical norm of demonizing, excluding, and the oppressed becoming the oppressor.

Robin: Right. I know at one point we had touched upon the culture of nonviolence within my progressive tribe. We tend not to be as adamant about nonviolence as the Quakers or the Mennonites. But can you talk to the shadow side of the belief that I'm a non-violent person? Can you speak to that?

Mark: Sure. The ideal of nonviolence is certainly something that Jesus teaches. And I think holding to that is a beautiful, good and true Christian teaching and Christian practice. But if we still are in what I might call the dualistic mind or the divided mind, then we're going to identify an ‘us’ and ‘them’. So when we say I'm a non-violent person, unlike those people over there who are violent, there's a level of violence within our heart of who we see as being part of the ingroup and who we see as part of being part of the outgroup. So a low level practice of nonviolence can be to shun and condemn those who are different, not with swords and guns, but with closing our heart to those people and simply setting ourselves apart from them which is what the Pharisees did to the Romans in biblical times. Their response to the oppression of the Roman occupiers was to set themselves apart and have very strict adherence to their traditions. So we can get stuck that way too. 

Robin: Right. And we get stuck in a delusion that our compassion is some sort of moral high ground.

Mark: And then our private identity that keeps ourselves small and keeps ourselves from letting our love shine down upon the good and the bad, the just and the unjust can be to see ourselves as separate and better than. So it's a more subtle level of violence, but it's easy for us to get caught in that too. Hence the necessity of not just being non-violent but of actively praying for and loving our enemies. So Jesus doesn't just say be non-violent, he also says love and pray for those whom you see as in opposition to what you believe to be most true and good. 

Robin: So how can you offer a prayer? How might you pray for your enemy? And just on a practical level, what might that prayer sound like in words?

Mark: Yes. Well, I think first we have to acknowledge that to do this requires a confidence and a love that's greater than our own. That doing it from self will only take us so far because our kind of lower, egotistical, self-centered, fleshy consciousness will not like this one bit. We want to build our identity around an ingroup and an outgroup and an us versus them. And so this is going to ask a lot of us. So we have to acknowledge that first. And I think the only way to do it is to really lean into and seek to open to the God of unconditional love first. I think the practice, once we seek to open to that love, can be to simply wish well to this person. 

It may be a blessing. Maybe instead of praying, we can say blessing. So, bless those who persecute you. It's another thing that Jesus teaches. So you think about Vladimir Putin and say in your heart, “May you be blessed. May you be loved. May you be free. May the radiance of God's love shower down upon you. May you feel safe. May you be filled with every happiness and goodness. May you be successful in your endeavors.” That one's hard to say because I then think “What's his endeavor? It's to go to war!” But when you're saying this, it's an unconditional offering of human blessing and support within our heart. And what will tend to happen when we do this work is we'll hit a certain point and then we'll feel our heart slam shut and say, “Oh no, I can't do that.” 

And then the next step is to turn back to the love of God, maybe with another prayer, another time honored Christian prayer, “Lord be merciful on me” or “Have mercy on me, a sinner.” “I acknowledge this division within my own heart.” And maybe we stay with that for a time until we actually feel bathed in God's mercy. And then we turn back to the oppositional figure, and again, wish them well and blessing until we feel our hearts slam shut. And then we turn back to praying to be held in God's mercy and love and acknowledging our own brokenness. That alternation can be a very powerful practice. 

Robin: So blessing the perceived enemy until you hit a wall, and then you go back into praying for yourself to be bathed in that unconditional love of God. Yes. So you're orienting yourself back to God and then maybe back to that enemy again. 

Mark: Kind of dancing back and forth. 

Robin: Yeah, I really like that. There was a beautiful image shared by a woman in my church not too long ago. She's concerned about the polarization that we see in our world today and also her own desire to be right. And how she participates in the polarization. She remembered the mystical poet Rumi's poem that I had shared not too long before– “There's a field out beyond and wrong. I'll meet you there.” And the image that came up for her was her lying down in this field out beyond and wrong next to her enemy, next to the politician or whoever it was that really gets her goat, that she just can't stand, and imagining herself lying there. And I think translating that into this Christian text, the field is that unconditional love of God that you're talking about. So we can pray in images and words, which is very hopeful and helpful. 

Mark: Yes. And I think that the virtue that guards all of this practice is that supreme Christian virtue of humility because when we know our own weakness and brokenness it becomes much more difficult to hate another or even to be infuriated by another. When we know our own woundedness and insecurities and even our own capacity for evil, we no longer judge the other because we haven't externalized it. This is a gift of contemplative prayer. It's a common experience for people as they spend more and more time in silent loving relationship with God to experience not only the greatness of God's love, but also to experience more profoundly their own woundedness and incompleteness as finite beings. So this is another layer we should touch on here. 

Robin: Yes. Yes. Keep going.

Mark: So the other part about the enemy is what is that part within ourselves, within our own psyche, that we have deemed unacceptable? When we build up an identity as whatever good thing we imagine to be, we begin to exclude within ourselves whatever aspect of the human condition doesn't fit within our own self image. To use a personal example, at a stage of my childhood, I was highly identified with masculine strength and with sports stars and heroes and building muscle and strength and courage. And later in life I would find when I was around a man who was very artistic or sensitive, I would have an initial reaction of hostility and even frustration or maybe even anger arise just at their presence. And what that was, looking back, was that I had not accepted that aspect of being human or being male in my own being. That was something I had rejected and disavowed. A psychologist would say it was my shadow. And so for me, learning to love and to bless and to pray for not only a man who embodied those aspects of personality, but that aspect that was more vulnerable and wounded and soft and sensitive within myself is also a work of prayer and of healing and of reducing divisions. So we were talking about Trump as an example. Trump is a massive embodiment of the shadow of the late 20th century liberal ideal of what it means to be progressive and caring and on the right side of history. And it's just thrown right in front of the faces of liberal folks saying, “What are you going to do with me now? I'm right here in front of your face”. 

So it is valuable to go within and find the parts of ourselves that are the things we want to reject. It doesn't mean we have to agree with them, but we find space for them within and find the ability to love those parts of ourselves that may be aggressive or that might be confident and swaggering. To actually be able to own these energies within takes out the charge of seeing it externalized where we want to fight it, resist it, get rid of it, push it away, spit on it, all these things. When somebody feels that charge around another person, that’s a sign to me that they haven't dealt with that aspect of the human experience within themselves.

Robin: And I think what can happen is that people can excuse themselves from having to do that inner work by saying, “Well, I’m called to love your enemy, but what about protecting the vulnerable? Jesus also calls us to protect the vulnerable.” It’s as if we're conflating two tenants and using one to excuse the need to do the other. I'm protecting the vulnerable, so I don't really need to practice loving that person that I want to just despise because they're hurting the vulnerable. But there is, I think, an ability to do both at the same time. 

Mark: And in fact, I would say that the ability to be effective in protecting the vulnerable requires the ability to love all the people involved, the oppressed, the oppressor, and the bystanders. And when you can be in that state of unitive love, then you can act without compulsion and come up with creative solutions which often need to include both the oppressed and the oppressor to be a lasting solution. There’s a strong metaphor for this. I practice Systema, a traditional Russian martial art, and the highest level of skill in the practice is the ability to disable an opponent's ability to cause harm without harming them. So to move with enough softness and gentleness that you neutralize a threat without actually physically harming the body of the other person, that's the ideal. That's what you try to work towards in the practice. I would say protecting the vulnerable is the same thing. The ability to do no harm. And to do that you have to be free and not afraid within your own body. So your own body can move soft and fluidly in response to the other person's aggression. If you meet their aggression with aggression, you can't do it. It's just too subtle a maneuver. 

Robin: And I think that we need to talk about non-identification on the spiritual path. Breaking down the identities that we're clinging to because I think those are obstacles to loving our enemy too. Because in order to have that fluid movement, you really can't be clinging to some identity that you are good. What I find is that I will often think that in order to get what I need, I really have to be good. There’s an identity that developed, and it may be because of my religious upbringing of wanting to be good in the eyes of God or even Santa Claus, but that I have to be good in order to earn God's love. And to dismantle that programming is very difficult. It's a big one. It's a deep one. And I think it's not just in the religious folk, it's in many of the people that I'm around most of the time, which is the liberal progressive folks. But I don't know what it's like on the other team, but probably the same.

Mark: It comes out everywhere in some way. In a more religious era the term scrupulosity was used to describe people wanting to do exactly the right thing, in ritual or religious observance, as if that was a way to make themselves safe. In a largely post-religious culture like we have in Vermont and in many places in Europe there's been a fascinating rise in obsession with food purity. I'm going to only eat the most organic, the most pure clean thing. I'm going to do X number of days of water fasting a week, all in the name of health and hygiene. So that's the exact same psychological principle. It just switches over to food as the locus of identity. Or if it wasn't food, it would be something else. So sometimes some of the good virtues of facing issues of racism and sexism and exclusion can become an aspect of purity. We're going to root out anyone who has said something that violates one of these principles anywhere and get rid of them and this can continue ad infinitum once it becomes about purity rather than about wholeness. It can happen in many, many places and ways. It's an inbred aspect of the human psyche. 

Robin: Yes. And one that I think is so important for all of us to talk about and to acknowledge it and not be ashamed of it. Because I think that our own salvation projects, as Thomas Merton spoke of, those really get in the way of our ability to act without compulsion, like you were saying, by loving our enemies and protecting the vulnerable simultaneously in the most unified way possible. I think that is a place where many of us get tripped up in our desire to be good. And holding onto that idol of moral rightness, superiority, and also that idol of safety that there's some way I can escape my fear of death. 

Mark: This is interesting. We can have a sense of being morally right and feeling secure in that role of protector or of making things right. I think one of the things that those serve as a protection from is from experiencing within our own being the sorrow of the human condition. 

And so when we drop those identities, what often arises is tears and sadness and weeping and held with love, that can be very healing and softening. It t can soften our hearts, it can soften our minds, help us to drop into compassion and solidarity because we become broken along with the rest of broken humanity and we can weep and cry and embrace one another together. So that ability to weep and to mourn to me is a sign of freedom from some of these conditions. And that angry, agitated kind of mind spinning, that I'm going to come up with the idea or the concept that's going to fix everything, that's often a sign of hiding from that experience of sorrow and weeping and mourning. 

Robin: I have a not-so-pretty image that's coming to my mind as you're saying this. While I was imagining the tears, I was also seeing the blood on our hands. It's on everyone. It is the human condition. To understand the human condition, I guess, is to come to that place where you realize you can't fix it, you can't make it pure, you can't separate the light from the dark, death from life, pain from joy. You can't separate those things. And where I think we get confused is that we're afraid that if we come to that and accept the truth of the human condition, that somehow we'll give up working to do what we can to protect the vulnerable or to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God. 

There are very few people that I've actually met, I think you're one of them, that has come to that place where they have embraced the human condition and continue to walk and do the next thing that they can to bring healing in the place that they find themselves. It's very difficult. 

Mark: And there's something I'd like to say about that too. And it's where I think our materialism and our culture gets in the way of the Christian path is that even as Christians, we often buy into the materialist idea that to really change the world, I gotta be out there doing something. I have to be the one who's chained to the gate, standing in front of the bulldozer that's coming towards the old growth forest, to use an environmental example. Or I need to be on the front line fighting the good fight. And there may be times and places for that, but the deeper truth of the tradition is that the primary battle is spiritual. That is the act of loving our enemies in prayer has a profound impact on the state of the world apart from just what you then do after you leave your prayer to do it in action. It's not that action isn't valuable, but the prayer itself affects the violence that's in the world. When we come to a place of reconciliation and love in our hearts, for those whom we had previously deemed unlovable, healing has already taken place. And that is where each one of us is very powerful and has the potential to be powerful in our prayer and in our love. It's not bound to some new strategy for saving the world out there. 

Robin: I see. Yes. The answer has been given to us time and time again. And I wonder about this topic and if we could talk about our nation's response to the war, to the Ukrainian-Russian War. Can we talk about that through the lens of loving your enemy? What do you think about our response to this war? 

Mark: Well, I think it highlights the very problem that we're talking about. And in the early days after the invasion, there were talks of Russian musicians that were already here in the United States and their concerts would be canceled. People couldn't go to a concert of Tchaikovsky, even if it was an American orchestra, because we were going to cancel Russia in order to somehow help the people in Ukraine. This desire to ostracize, to separate ourself from the other, which granted the United States has had some practice in earlier generations of otherising Russia and the Russians and we can pick it up again. 

Robin: In our desire to protect or to position ourselves and to say, we are with you Ukrainians. We are so sorry this happened to you. There was a sense in which what we call overprotection in parenting can be actually detrimental to a child. It's almost as if in canceling all things Russian I think there was this element of overprotecting the vulnerable to such a degree that our clarity was off. We clouded this loving the enemy and protecting the vulnerable

Mark: It goes back to this idea that I can only identify with the weak and we will rise up and we will battle off the strong. I also couldn't help but notice in the media almost this, it was subtle, but there was almost a little bit of a giddiness of, oh, we get to get out of this complex mess we're in at home and finally we get to be the good guys again. Just like it was in the Cold War. We get to be team America. 

Robin: I'm telling you, I really like to be seen as good, Mark. I think it's a common problem. And in all fairness, what do they call us? The bleeding heart liberals. But there's something that I think doesn't go far enough with our compassion.

Mark: It's trying to be as compassionate as you can be while staying in the finite self without being cast into the love of God. And it can only go so far. And then we just end up giving the dualistic thing a more convoluted, more complex form. But ultimately we can only go so far with our human capacity to be compassionate. And then it goes sideways. 

Robin: Wow. This is so great because you're really pushing us into that place where the love of God falls on the just and the unjust.

Mark: If Putin and the Russians are unjust to you, then you have to pray for those darn people. For whom would the sun and the rain of God shines down upon the just and the unjust. 

Robin: Yeah. It would be so cool if my Ukrainian flag also had under it a prayer for Putin or the Russians alongside it. It seems like it would be loving your enemies and protecting the vulnerable together. 

Mark: It can be both. We can see both

Robin: And that prayer has really been absent. 

Mark: And another piece I'd say too is that no  human being is totally good or totally bad. 

Robin: Come on Mark. Them’s fightin words, Mark!

Mark: So it might be greatly misguided, but what is the fear that is driving Putin in this war or other Russians? And if you actually listen to the what's coming out from the Russian channels, you could hear a very clear fear. Not getting into all of it, but there’s the feeling that the culture in the West is taking over the whole world and we're about to be steamrolled by it and we're going to stand up and fight it. So they're doing the same thing. They're seeing an injustice and in their mind it's this monolith of the west, the fear that it's creeping ever further into former Soviet territory, both culturally and politically and economically. And they're in a fight for their survival. So they're just as much seeing themselves as the persecuted underdog as people in the west are seeing Ukraine. So it's the same thing flipped on the other side. So listening, it can both help us to have compassion for the other and to see those patterns in ourselves because we're always, playing out both sides on some level. And same thing with Democrat, Republican. Both groups are terrified of something. Listen, listen to the other. Listen. Make them human again. 

Robin: One of the other things that I think might be one of the reasons why it was more difficult for good, well-intentioned people to pray for Putin or to offer loving kindness to the enemy was because if you did, there's a lot of pressure and propaganda to not do it. Because you would be called a Putin sympathizer. And even today you are called that. If you offer any sort of counter argument or even try to hold nuance and open up some history here and say there's a big picture here that many people don't understand. Yes, it is wrong that Putin perpetrated violence, but there's a lot of talk that we can have here. As soon as someone does that, they're called a Putin sympathizer. And that is actually not true for most people. They're not condoning the action. They're trying to engage in a well thought out conversation. 

Mark: And that is the trick of the razor's edge of trying to not collapse into either side of a conflict or a dualism. And it's not even about finding the middle ground, it's about finding the place of universal compassion. But anyone who's entrenched in their thought on either side will see the world as either you're for me or against me. And so if you take that neutral stance as Jesus says in the Gospels, you will be hated by all because of my name. He even predicts that. In Jesus’ day it was the Romans, if you sympathize with the Romans or if you don't, you'll be hated by all because of your refusal to collapse and to team A or team B. 

Robin: Right. Right. 

Mark: That's the real sacrifice. And that's part of the invitation to be persecuted for the sake of what is right, which is in the Beatitudes. To refuse to take the comfortable path of aligning with one side or the other psychically. It's more comfortable for, we might say our lower self, but to stand in the universal mercy and compassion of God. It may mean we have nowhere to lay our head. We have no camp to fall into that we can just relax into

Robin: Although… 

Mark: Other than the mercy of God. 

Robin: Right. Exactly. Exactly. 

Mark: Which is there. And that is actually the place of lasting rest 

Robin: Where you do rest, like Augustine said. How about we make that movement now to the inward landscape of loving the enemy within. We've sort of touched on that. I know that Tich Nact Han, the Buddhist monk, does a beautiful job speaking to this by saying that we can get rid of every bomb and every weapon in the world, but it's not until we actually heal the war that lies within us, that we will stop making more bombs and more weapons. So I just wanted to hear your thoughts on that, even though you may have touched on it.

Mark: Well, we've touched upon the idea of the shadow and that which we find most hateful out in the world. Typically there's an aspect of that which we carry within ourselves that we've rejected. And so practicing universal compassion has this dynamic interplay between being compassion for the other out there and being compassionate for that which we have rejected within ourselves. And I think the two go back and forth with one another. The more we do one, the more we're invited into the other. 

Robin: Right. Something that we haven't touched on is the negative sort of stance that people take toward their own self.  Like the enemy, for many people, it can be that they actually dislike or hate their own self.

Mark: And I would say that the more self aggrandized somebody is in their outward self, typically the more self-hatred there is hidden underneath that. The shadow is the self hatred. And again, I would say there's, there's a psychological level response in the response of therapy, of trying to bolster the self to learn to love oneself. And I think that's good as far as it goes. And for many people that may be very valuable work. But the full arc of the Christian tradition, I believe actually points towards not finding our sense of security in the self at all, but finding the security in God. And so from that perspective, what I've come to believe is that some of us end up together enough to be neurotic in our adult psyche. And some of us struggle to the point where we might be psychotic or struggling to keep a secure sense of self together. 

I don't think any of us ever become fully whole on that level of the psyche. But when we begin to enter into a deeper intimacy with God, with a continued discipline of prayer and opening of the heart to God, we come to be held in a love that is greater than ourself. And then the need to feel good within ourself, or the problem of feeling bad within ourself, all begins to relativize as we begin to encounter this divine love which holds us. And that I think is the full Christian solution, if we might say, to self-hatred is not self love or self aggrandizement, it's actually self forgetfulness in this love of God or the experience of being loved by God, which heals that wound within ourself. So it doesn't come from ourselves, doesn't come from another person, though those can help in the beginning. But ultimately we know that we are loved by the big love of God that sustains us.

Robin: The higher love.

Mark: And that is what frees us from self preoccupation of any form, including self-hatred, which is a different form of self-centeredness.

Robin: Yes. Just before we close, I want to challenge that notion that we don't really have enemies. And do you think that partly it might be that people have become so separate from their own anger or violent nature? Because it wouldn't take much to ignite that. I mean, I could think of really a lot of ways to get it going. Just try to say, okay, well we're going to have section eight housing in our town and we're actually going to put it in your backyard. Do you know what I mean? Well, there's a quick way to get somebody really fired up and all of a sudden wanting to punch the lights out of whoever in the town is proposing this policy.

Mark: Well, I can speak a little bit to that question of being out of touch with our anger, particularly in my work with men. And I just because this is an area where I'm not really privy to working with women in the same way. But working with men in the martial arts there are often men that find it extremely difficult to hit another person even in an exercise. They experience huge amounts of opposition. And what's interesting is when we do the exercise, and you're not trying to hurt the person, you're just doing the sparring together, once somebody starts to, oftentimes there's a flood of raw energy –it's hatred, it's anger, it's fear, it's resistance, it's heat, it's shaking, it's trembling. These things come surging forward. And after it happens, I find the man often seems much more alive, much more grounded. Their voice often deepens because they're not holding the tension of repressed anger. 

And so there's this kind of releasing of this vital energy that comes from having to do a sparring exercise cause we're tapping into that aspect of the human experience. Not going out and actually hurting another person, but just tapping into that element releases that energy. And so I think there's a tremendous amount of that aspect of life which has been told is bad and then gets compacted inwardly. And it ends up with this kind of inability to really feel deeply in an effort to be nonviolent as opposed to Jesus' model of nonviolence, which I think is actually having access to all of one's power and choosing to forego using it. That's an actual more literal translation of the blessed are the meek for they will inherit the land is blessed are those who have power and choose not to use it to harm others.

Robin: To conclude, my prayer is that we might find the courage to love our enemies, to protect the vulnerable to act without compulsion because we're lying in that field of the unconditional love and mercy of God. And my prayer is that we might sit with this complexity, the complexity that life brings us, and shed the tears that might need to be shed in order to wait and just be touched by the grace that does fall upon us when we're willing to let go into that awareness that we can't fix everything. And that there is this conundrum, this imperfect life that we live in. I don't know if you have any last words, Mark. 

Mark: Well, I pray, too, that we  have the courage to allow it all in– all people, all paths, those it's easy for us to love, those who it's difficult for us to love and that we may allow all to be held in that mercy of God that falls down even like the rains that we're hearing today upon us all. That we may grow to love as God loves in God's mercy. And that's my prayer for each one of us this day. 

Robin: Thank you to all the listeners. We pray this prayer for you too. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mark. 

Mark: Thank you Robin.