A Letter to My Enemies

I believe I must love you because my life depends upon it. Not only the life of my body but the life of my soul. Until I learn to love you I am likely to remain in the squalor of my own self righteous judgments, protecting my own point of view, condemning and cutting off some who may be the very strangers sent to give me a chance to offer the cup of cold water. I need to remember that the needy come clad in everything from rags to turbans to mini-skirts to Armani suits. In need to remember that need sometimes looks like evil and that it is perilous to judge too quickly which is which…


I believe that I must love you because I am like you. Every year I live teaches me the truth that nothing human is alien to me. When I look at and despise your hypocrisy, your brutality, your greed, your self serving propaganda, your abuse of power, your betrayal of innocence, I must open my mind and heart to that in me which is reflected in the mirror you provide…your sin and my sin, your darkness and my darkness, merit the same condemnation and have been covered by the same amazing grace…


And so I believe I must love you because you have been loved lavishly, incomprehensibly, by the One who loved me and who has put us into each other's hands to care for one another…


Whatever evil you do not only affects me, but finds some of its source in me, bound as we are in systems that perpetuate evil and in which we participate together. Your welfare is also mine, your shame is also mine, your struggle is also mine….


I love you by learning to inhabit gray areas, by forfeiting the satisfactions of easy judgment and finding ways to sit down with you and find out what it is like to be you. I love you by studying your credo or your Koran or your party platform, your economic theories, your ideas of duty. And I love you by praying for the words and the wisdom to enter into the conversation that might redirect our energies into a path of mutual understanding….


I love you by turning the other cheek, and in doing that hard thing, learning also to discern the difference between self destructive capitulation to evil and willingness to bear its cost for the sake of love. I love you best when I can follow Jesus' example in not returning evil for evil. Every time I resist the temptation to retaliate, I help prepare for the Kingdom in which I must hope that you are included, and that we will all be transformed.

    Marilyn Chandler McEntyre