Compassion--Loving Enemies as Self

Love your enemies

Do good to those who hate you

Bless those who curse you

Pray for those who abuse you

(Luke 6:27)

If loving your neighbor as yourself seems radical, loving your enemy seems downright fringe—perhaps mentally unstable in the sense of wholesale abandonment of self, even nihilistic in the sense of complete destruction of ego and identification with that which seeks to destroy you. So what gives? Why would Jesus ask us to do this?

In my last post I spoke of the passage “love your neighbor as yourself,” and quoted Cynthia Bourgeault who explains that passage as one that requires viewing your neighbor as an extension of self. I said,

Until we realize that we are all in this together, we will not realize that love of others is love of self and, perhaps more importantly, harm to others is harm to self. Understood in this way, Jesus’s admonition to “love your enemies” is easier to understand and live out—enemies are an extension of self just as neighbors are. We—self, other, neighbor, enemy—are all one, reflections of the same light.

The same light is this: all of us, every living being, seeks happiness and avoids suffering. And that’s true of our enemies too. Sure, some of us pursue happiness through very misguided means, but attainment of happiness and avoidance of suffering is what we are all striving for. I believe I have a right to be happy, and if it’s worthwhile for me to be happy, then it’s worthwhile for my enemy to be happy too. If I can view my enemy that way—as an extension of me, seeking happiness and avoiding suffering—I can connect with my enemy on a human level and, as Jesus instructs, perhaps even love, pray for, bless, and do and wish good for my enemy. If enemies, like neighbors, are an extension of self, then wishing (or worse, doing) ill to enemies harms self, and extending good to enemies is extending good to self.

Jeffrey Hopkins provides a Buddhist perspective on this. A professor of Tibetan studies and one-time interpreter for the Dalai Lama, Hopkins writes:

If your own best friend went mad and came at you with a knife to kill you, what would you do? You would seek to disarm your friend, but then you would not proceed to beat the person, would you? You would disarm the attacker in whatever way you could—you might even have to hit the person in order to disarm him, but once you have managed to disarm him, you would not go on to hurt him. Why? Because he is close to you.

If you felt that everyone in the whole universe was in the same relationship to you as your very best friend, and if you saw anyone who attacked you as your best friend gone mad, you would not respond with hatred. You would respond with behavior that was appropriate, but you would not be seeking to retaliate and harm the person out of hatred. He would be too dear to you.

You can read the entire article, Everyone as a Friend, by clicking here.

The real life version of this is the Christmas Truce of 1914. Many perhaps have heard the story of the break in fighting during World War I along the British/German front on Christmas Eve in Ypres, Belgium. Cold and shivering in the trenches, having experienced unimagined bloodshed and slaughter, each side fighting against an unseen enemy that propagandists had labeled a monster, the spirit of Christmas, of common humanity, took hold. The German side began singing Silent Night, and the English side responded across the trenches with carols. Soon, they were meeting in the No Man’s Land between the trenches, exchanging cigarettes and brandy, playing a soccer game, and sharing pictures of families back home. Within a day or so, however, each side’s commanders overruled the ad hoc truce, and fighting and bloodshed resumed.

So what would cause warring enemies to suddenly become chummy for a day? Well, simply, they each saw the other’s humanity and saw an extension of self. These were men just like them: cold, hungry, with wives and children at home, who sang the same hymns at Christmas. The enemy was no longer unseen. The enemy’s mask had been removed and, frighteningly, the enemy was me.

Tear off your enemy’s mask and you’ll find yourself—that’s when you realize that harm to others is harm to self.

So, when someone hurts you, resist the initial urge to lash out. If you can, catch yourself before reacting and take a deep breath. Remind yourself that the person’s actions really aren’t about you—they’re about them: they’re just trying to find happiness and avoid suffering, just like you are. And, true, they’ve hurt you, but it's probably just as true that you have hurt someone else who extended you the kindness of not lashing out at you. So acknowledge the favor and pay if forward.

Compassion--Loving Others as Self

Love your neighbor as yourself

Cynthia Bourgeault has a wonderful book called The Wisdom Jesus. She devotes a portion of a chapter to this “great commandment” (Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 22:39; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27). I want to quote extensively what she says because I think it gets to the heart of compassion—that when we see clearly we have no choice but to love others as self because self is other and other is self. Until we realize that we are all in this together, we will not realize that love of others is love of self and, perhaps more importantly, harm to others is harm to self. Understood in this way, Jesus’s admonition to “love your enemies” is easier to understand and live out—enemies are an extension of self just as neighbors are. We—self, other, neighbor, enemy—are all one, reflections of the same light.

Here’s how Bourgeault says it. Beginning with the recognition that there is no separation between human and divine (as Jesus says “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you”), she continues:

No separation between human and human is an equally powerful notion—and equally challenging. One of the most familiar of Jesus’s teachings is “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But we almost always hear that wrong. We hear “love your neighbor as much as yourself.” (And of course, the next logical question then becomes, “But I have to love me first, don’t I, before I can love my neighbor?”) If you listen closely to Jesus’s teaching, however, there is no “as much as” in there. It’s just “Love your neighbor as yourself”—as a continuation of your very own being. It’s a complete seeing that your neighbor is you. There are not two individuals out there, one seeking to better herself at the price of the other, or to extend charity to the other; there are simply two cells of one great Life. Each of them is equally precious and necessary. And as these two cells flow into one another, experiencing that one Life from the inside, they discover that “laying down one’s life for another” is not a loss of one’s self but a vast expansion of it—because the indivisible reality of love is the only True Self.

These are the key points of a very radical teaching—not only light years ahead of its time but way ahead of our own as well. . . .

In a similar spirit, the Buddha in the Metta Sutta (Discourse on Loving-Kindness), says:

Even as a mother protects with her life

Her child, her only child,

So with a boundless heart

Should one cultivate limitless love for all living beings.

The mother-child imagery here is critical because the child is, literally-physically, an extension of self—part of mother, same as mother, is mother. Buddha and Jesus both say that we must love others because they are we, you are I, I am you. To do otherwise only harms self.

The 20th century Jewish theologian-philosopher Martin Buber conveyed a similar message in his seminal work I and Thou. Buber says that are two ways for self to relate to other: I-Thou and I-it. With I-it, the self relates to other as subject-object, but with I-Thou the self relates to other as subject-subject. I-Thou is a relationship rooted in unity of being, while I-it is rooted in separateness, detachment, and division.

I-Thou is how The Divine relates to The Human. And if we, as self, can relate to other as I-Thou, then we can touch the Divine—The Kingdom of Heaven will indeed reside within us.