A Little Homily from Rev. M.A.

Ishmael Beah, author of A Long Way Gone, tells of being a child soldier. The violence he committed between the ages 13-16 is horrifying. Becoming a soldier was basically an alternative to death for him. He was brainwashed, drugged, and encouraged to avenge the deaths of other family members. When he was rescued from life as a soldier by UNICEF, he and other child soldiers had to be rehabilitated. They were uncivilized with fighting their main method of communication.

One of the social workers who helped rehabilitate Beah was a woman he calls Esther. One day he shared with her a particularly violent dream. Here’s how he describes the conversation:

At first she just listened to me and then gradually she started asking questions to make me talk about the lives I had lived before and during the war. “None of these things are your fault,” she would always say sternly at the end of every conversation. Even though I had heard that phrase from every staff member—and frankly I had always hated it—I began that day to believe it. It was the genuine tone in Esther’s voice that made the phrase finally begin to sink into my mind and heart.

It was a touching reminder that the things we dislike in other people, often, are not their fault. Often, the things we hate in ourselves are not our fault either. That is a good insight to let sink into our minds and hearts.

Extreme Love

Jack Kornfield writes this story in The Wise Heart(42-43). It’s a serious tale of the old “make-me-one-with-everything joke.

Perhaps we can better understand this through a story of a Palestinian named Salam, one of my good friends….In the late 1960s and 1970s Salam had lived in Jerusalem as an activist and a journalist. Because he was writing about creating a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem and the establishment of a Palestinian state, he was regularly arrested. He spent nearly six years in Israeli prisons. He was frequently interrogated and periodically beaten and tortured. This happens on every side in war.

One afternoon after he had been badly beaten, his body was lying on the floor of the prison and he was being kicked by a particularly cruel guard. Blood poured out of his mouth and as the police report later stated, the authorities believed he had died.

He remembers the pain of being beaten. Then, as is often reported by accident and torture victims, he felt his consciousness leave his body and float up to the ceiling. At first it was peaceful and still, like in a silent movie, as he watched his own body lying below being kicked. It was so peaceful he didn’t know what all the fuss was about. And then Salam described how, in a remarkable way, his consciousness expanded further. He knew it was his body lying below, but now he felt he was also the boot kicking the body. He was also the peeling green paint on the prison walls, the goat whose bleat could be heard outside, the dirt under the guard’s fingernails—he was life, all of it and the eternal consciousness of it all, with no separation. Being everything, he could never die. All his fears vanished. He realized that death was an illusion. A well-being and joy beyond description opened to him. And then a spontaneous compassion arose for the astonishing folly of humans, believing we are separate, clinging to nations and making war.

Two days later, as Salam describes it, he came back to consciousness in a bruised and beaten body on the floor of a cell, without fear or remorse, just amazement. His experience changed his whole sense of life and death. He refused to continue to participate in any form of conflict. When he was released, he married a Jewish woman and had Palestinian-Jewish children. That, he said, was his answer to the misguided madness of the world.

Got Empathy?

In the P. K. Dick’s science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the world is populated with human beings and androids. The androids are so lifelike, there is only one way to distinguish them from humans—give them an empathy test. The testers believed that only humans had empathy. Hate requires that we extinguish our empathy. Sometimes that’s unbelievably easy to do. I hate that, or as the old joke goes, I hate hate.

Let It Begin with Me (Love and Hate Reflections)

Seems like I’ve heard a lot of versions of love and peace that say you have to begin with yourself. Ghandi said, “You have to be the change you wish to see in the world.” I think it is Confucius who says that peace in the heart begets peace in the family, peace in the family begets peace in the city, peace in the city begets peace in the nation, and that peace in the nation begets peace in the world. There is the song that says “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.

That all sounds so mysterious—so abstract, so impossible. If I get peaceful, the world will get peaceful? If I get more loving, the world will get more loving? However, I see how hard it is to be loving and peaceful as soon as some minor annoyance pushes one of my buttons. I don’t respond exactly with hate, but it isn’t love either—mini-hate maybe? Or just everyday, mundane, lack of love? So I try to be more loving while trying to love myself when I fail. I can’t say that I’m terrifically successful. It’s a crazy theory.

If I were “perfectly” loving, I’d probably be a self-righteous, obnoxious bitch. Do our mini-struggles with love and hate, teach us about the larger struggles of love and hate in the world? I think so, but the lesson is a difficult one to understand.

Reflections on Love and Hate

In the last few weeks I have seen the movie Milk and finished the book A Long Time Gone.

Milk is the story of gay activist Harvey Milk in the sixties and seventies, and it shows the emotional response to gay activism and success. Laws would be passed to allow gay people equal rights and anti-gay groups would move into the area to get those laws repealed. The anti-gay movement seemed—and still seems to me—filled with hate.

In A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah describes his life during the civil war in Sierra Leone. This includes the period after he loses his parents (at age twelve) and wanders the country at night with other children, looking for his family and avoiding danger. He also describes his time as a child soldier, a time during which he was indoctrinated in hate and committed terrible acts of violence. He was rescued by UNICEF and had to be “rehabilitated” and de-programmed.

Both of these works have me thinking of love and hate. It’s interesting that soon after these two stories, my yoga teacher, Jamie, read these passages from Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Hatred paralyses life; love releases it.Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it.Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.""I have decided to stick with love.Hate is too great a burden to bear."

I have been trying to live with these words and see how they shed light on both hate and love.