There is a strong element of mystery in love. And in hate. Hate may be easier to explain, especially when we feel it toward someone who has threatened, humiliated, or violated us. But it is more difficult to understand why we simply dislike someone; why we have that dark desire to demean, ignore, hurt, or suppress them when we could treat them with equity and respect.
Why do we become angry with people when their trespass does not deserve the intensity of the wrath we feel?
We may do this when, for example, someone cuts in front of us as we're driving down a busy road or standing in a supermarket line. Our anger balloons into proportions far beyond the dimensions of their misdemeanor. It is all too easy for me to reduce someone whom I hardly know to the status of an inferior on the basis of one infraction. I may label them as "an angry person" simply because I have witnessed one display of irritation on their part.
Perhaps our most mystifying feelings of dislike are for classes, nations, races, and tribes of people other than our own. In many cases there is little reason for these feelings and they may be socially and culturally ingrained by years of inherited antipathy, based on very little that's substantive when it comes to our own personal experience with these people.
The truth is that the "suffering" most difficult if not impossible to forgive is that which we have exaggerated or imagined. The most obstinate negatives that we harbor against others, the emotions that lodge with the greatest stubbornness in our souls, are those we virtually pretend into existence. These are the ones we artificially magnify beyond their actual proportions.
They are the offenses that we have embroidered into a large patchwork quilt that at suitable moments we deftly gather around ourselves in an aggrieved flourish of offendedness. We do this (largely out of habit) to demonstrate our displeasure against someone or some group. It is this quilt that is most difficult to drop, largely because we have so laboriously fabricated it and because there is so much fantasized fear behind that fabrication.
Over time we may subtly amass these overstated offenses until we feel we have an airtight case against the persons or groups we have come to dis like. Again, it is the exaggeration itself that makes our dislikes difficult to eradicate. A person can come to grips with something real, but not so easily with something imagined.
This tendency to embellish is particularly common among the more privileged peoples of our world, as they judge those who, in their eyes, lack giftedness or proper development. The inadequate behaviors that are fancied to grow out of the "lack" in their racial, cultural, or national counterparts, is exaggerated into violations large enough to justify devaluing, rejecting, and demeaning them, even if they are fellow Christians.
The superiority of the "privileged" is perceived to be much greater than it is in reality, and the offenses of those "lacking" far more egregious than they are in fact.
So, where do we go?
In this issue of Ministry John Fowler has exposed a vitally important approach to this hugely relevant issue (see the cover article, "1+1=1: The impossible possibility"). John's article is a truly Christian, magnificently biblical reflection on these things. It is so much more than the run-of-the-mill political reactionism all too common on all sides these days, even in the church. This article transcends these approaches and touches both our heads and our hearts.
The challenge, especially for today's pastor, is to actually use the divine principles exposed in this article. It is to translate them, by the Holy Spirit, into daily acts of worship, repentance, and ongoing renewal as we face the shadows of anger, hatred, and prejudice that we find within our own souls. The full extent of the challenge is to truly love and actually do something tangible in ourselves and our congregations to turn the tide where we are.
