“Love your enemies.”

There’s a famous story, shared in The Third Harmony, about our friend David Hartsough’s experience during the Civil Rights movement. He said that while sitting at the lunch counter, waiting for the violent response of those who were not prepared to integrate eating establishments, he was “meditating on ‘loving your enemies.’”

Can we love enemies if we make them enemies in the first place?

I recently decided to try to do this. I sat quietly and allowed myself to pause, question, and reflect on what Jesus could mean by this. (I was especially inspired by Rev. John Dear, whom we recently interviewed for Nonviolence Radio about the nonviolent teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.) One question that always arises for me, and that I wanted to think about in this more meditative way, was why we should think of people as enemies in the first place. Isn’t that a violent way to classify other human beings to begin with?

This question has been explored by many nonviolent leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., who preached about this in a 1957 sermon (full text here):

this is what Jesus means, I think, in this very passage when he says, ‘Love your enemy.’ And it’s significant that he does not say, ‘Like your enemy.”’Like is a sentimental something, an affectionate something. There are a lot of people that I find it difficult to like. I don’t like what they do to me. I don’t like what they say about me and other people. I don’t like their attitudes. I don’t like some of the things they’re doing. I don’t like them. But Jesus says love them. And love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul. And here you come to the point that you love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Love your enemy." This is the way to do it. When the opportunity presents itself when you can defeat your enemy, you must not do it.

This short exercise of reflecting deeply on Jesus’ teaching and what it means in my own life was truly enlightening. It reminded me of Jill Bolte Taylor’s work on the brain. She talks about how one part of our mind focuses on separations—dividing the world into categories like ‘me’ and ‘them’—while another part experiences connection and wholeness. Maybe loving our enemies isn’t just about an emotional shift, but about shifting our awareness to a deeper, more connected way of seeing reality.

I realized that a strategy for loving someone who has done me harm is by shifting my attention from that person (or people) and instead practicing identifying my deeper self with something greater than my small self, and knowing that my deeper self is more real and important to me than any of my feelings toward someone else. By recognizing our deeper selves as connected to something greater, and keeping our focus on that relationship, we dissolve the illusion of enemies altogether because it doesn’t exist in that relationship at all. This opens the door to creative, nonviolent action against injustice.

Have you spent time reflecting and meditating on this teaching? How has it transformed your outlook?

Have you considered it a tool for when you are trying to be courageous, as David Hartsough did?