Today is the eighth day of Holly Days. This seems to be one of the handful years when I have separated out this trinity into separate posts. The ramping down of the spirit that always comes when xmas has passed tends to weaken the impetus for these posts.
I am expecting a new grandbaby any day now. Nini’s big as a house, Rey is revving up big sister mode, and I know I will fall as deeply and desperately in love with it as I have with its big sister. But it’s oh so easy to fall in love with babies. Their need, their innocence, their wonder. We can hardly wait, poor ninth-month Nini most of all.
Just like we need no law compelling us to breathe or eat, we need to make no effort to find this sort of love for our helpless children. But the love we need most of all, the true higher love, the true love supreme, is the love of our enemies. I’ve gone to Matthew 5:44 before on this day, in fact I go there often. “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.” This may be the most revolutionary and counter-intuitive scripture ever written. I don’t hold this as true because I think it is the word of god, or because I was taught it by a cleric. In fact I take the paradox of it as part of its proof, as I have tested it over and over again, and always find that the most powerful weapon against hate is love. It is so disarming to the rageful to face love in the eyes of those they burn too destroy. It is no invincible shield, but of course neither is returning hate and rage. Love is a long game, chipping away at the fear and anger that most often leads us to evil.
In fact careful study after careful study have borne some of this out. So much social progress was made in such a short time under the aegis of the love that was central to the work of both MLK and Gandhi. We all yearn for it, we all revere it, our hearts cannot help but melt in its presence.
Our darker hearts lust for vengeance, and indeed, the evolution of our social instincts built that lust to hold free riders accountable and impose costs on the selfish and greedy among us. But on the scale of collective organization and interconnection in our modern world, like so many other of our apely instincts, this lust becomes more destructive than productive. Our laws and doctrines all know this, and establish sanctions against these worst instincts, but they are all extrinsic. Love on the other hand, is intrinsic, and evolved, just as vengefulness did, to move us toward the collective support we all rely on. In love we reach out with helping hands without being asked, we lift and carry with no regret.
The planet has become much too small for love to be limited to one’s ingroup and damn the other. The other no longer moves to the other side of the mountain, and worse, we can no longer abide their utter destruction, even if that may have made sense to our selfish genes. I suppose that carpenter/rebbe must have seen the turmoil of colliding cultures and reasoned the same as me and these modern prophets about the great power of love, what foresight! If you are a christian believer, any hate you feel should shame you, if you are a humanist, you should be able to see the reason in this scripture and rise to the challenge, if you are a nihilist or an anarchist or just angry and afraid, don’t worry, some of us still love you. If you find it hard to muster love for some hateful other who wishes you harm, try to imagine them as they started out in this world, as a baby. Imagine them whimpering with tiny trembling lips, a sad, lonely, and helpless little baby on the verge of tears who needs and deserves nothing but a warm hug and a loving kiss to make it all better. What’s so funny bout peace love and understanding?
Happy LOVE
HOLLY DAYS 