The Holy Spirit is like water, which seeks its lowest place. He comes only to the broken and humble heart.

Let what the wide world values
leave my soul in peace.

Heaven constantly dwells with him
who in poverty can be rich.

But there is another interest, with a considerable tradition in American literature, that has received less attention, and which is at least equally important: that is an interest in the lives of the poor, not insofar as they are poor, but insofar as, being poor, they have made their lives, often with considerable success, outside the social pretenses and economic obsession of the mainstream of society. …

I have in mind two poems I want to quote to illustrate what I am saying. Neither one, I think, attempts to romanticize poverty—the facts remain as they are—but both come of an excited sense of the realness of reality, the poor reality, that lies beyond the tightly focused interests and the staid adornments of the consciously successful. In both there is, as if suddenly, an uprising of the old truth that it can be profoundly liberating to be free of the claims of money. [The Poor by William Carlos Williams and Salutation by Ezra Pound]

Many with whom I mourned the dead
Are dead, and mourn no more. Blesséd
Are they that mourn, for thus they have
The fullest magnitude of love
And learn of it, whereby the dead
Outlive their lives, and live instead
Eternally in present grace
Where death, ashamed, can find no place,
For love goes with them, out of time
Passing, and mercy welcomes them.
Lest in our grief we lose our way,
The dead lead back to light of day.
Not their absence from us we mourn,
But ours from them, and this we learn.

Conscious there of powers not broken down or crushed into servility, but of wills invigorated rather by submission, with what sense of inborn dignity and strength shall we sing—Thy gentleness hath made us great. All the littleness of our sin is now quite gone … greatest of all in our conscious affinity with God and the Lamb.

They had not chosen to live in “intentional community.”  Their survival demanded community.  Community was their life.  The gospel was their language.  No wonder Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God.”

… theoretical dispassion of the stoic Seneca (I have, but do not care) and the practical dispossession of the Cynic Demetrius (I do not have but do not care) …

In terms of possessions, Stoics sought to have as if they had not, Cynics to have not as if they had. (p. 74 f.)

Next is freedom. This comes from a physical poverty that renders one impervious both to desire and loss, but especially from a spiritual poverty that renders one oblivious both to attack and assault. (p. 79)

“Blessed are the destitute.”

Emmanuel, God-with-us, comes down to meet us in our despair, our exhaustion, our shame. God bears it all—shame, humiliation, persecution—because this holiness-and-wholeness project is worth it, because we’re worth it.

But as Jesus makes clear in the Sermon on the Mount, it comes at great cost to our control strategies, our ego games, and our holiness projects. (p. 98)

There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. … But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get. (p. 15)

A beautiful kite
Rose from
The beggar’s hovel.

But someone should bless the poor in school.
Everyone better not turn out bright.

Blessed are the poor in spirit
who realize that they have no more
than what is their own. They stand
tiptoe in the bright kingdom
of the moment like children looking
down from the bedroom window
waving hello goodbye.

After a while I got up, as from the dead—it was that
wonderful to be, at last, entirely poor, and happy.
I found some weeds I could eat. I found some whild washed
boards, could they not make a simple house?
…
Oh Jesus, poor boy, when was it you saw, clearly and
irrevocably, just where you were headed?

We are not poor. We are just without riches,

The person who feels the emptiness of hunger for God
is the opposite of the self-sufficient person
In this sense rich means the proud.
Rich means even the poor who have no property
but who think they need nothing, not even God.
This is the wealth that is abominable to God’s eyes
what the humble but forceful virgin speaks of
He sent away empty-handed the rich”—
those who thin they have everything“—
And filled with good things the hungry”
those who have need of God. (p. 126)

No one can celebrate a genuine Christmas
without being truly poor.
The self-sufficient,
the proud,
those who, because they have everything,
look down on others,
those who have no need even of God —
for them there will be no Christmas.
Only the poor,
the hungry,
those who need someone to come on their behalf,
will have that someone.
That someone is God,
Emmanuel,
God-with-us.
Without poverty of spirit
there can be no abundance of God. (p. 136)

… a true spirit of poverty which makes the rich feel they are close brothers and sisters of the poor and makes the poor feel they are equal givers and not inferior to the rich. (p. 171)

We may find the strength from God to discover our own wound and solitude, our cry of distress. Community can never comfort this distress; it is inherent in the human condition.

But only the light souls can be saved;
Only the ones whose weight
will not snap the angel’s wings.

Judy Cannato, “The Poverty of Provisionality,” p. 6-12
Kristen Johnson Ingram, “Poverty is Where the Blind Fish Live,” p. 13-18
Douglas Burton-Christie, “Into the Empty Places,” p. 19-28
Percy C. Ainsworth, “The Kingdom for the Poor,” p. 29-34
Richard H. Luecke, “Poverty and the Reign of God,” p. 35-43

It’s the anarchy of poverty
delights me, the old
yellow wooden house indented
among the new brick tenements

Or a cast iron balcony
with panels showing oak branches
in full leaf. It fits
the dress of the children

reflecting every stage and
custom of necessity—
chimneys, roofs, fences of
wood and metal in an unfenced

age and enclosing next to
nothing at all: the old man
in a sweater and soft black
hat who sweeps the sidewalk—

his own ten feet of it—
in a wind that fitfully
turning his corner has
overwhelmed the entire city

In her sorrow she renews life, in her grief
she prepares the return of joy

Many will go in blame against the world
Hating it for their pain and they will go
Alone across the dry bright lifeless days
And thus alone into the dark.
Others In grief and loss will see more certainly
What they have loved and will belong to it
And to each other as in happiness
They never did—hearing though the whole world
Go dry the hidden raincrow of their hope.

You know how heavy crying and pain are for me.
I withdraw prudently from trouble so as not to be rattled
Grant me Lord on the contrary to give myself over
to suffering and to tears.

why do we hide grief
from ourselves,

& each other, pretending
pleasure

The consolation of those that mourn—they know that God is somehow in their pain and darkness, that they do not walk alone. (p. 63)

This life of desperation soon must end. Thus we must learn to rejoice, to mourn.

That though she grieves her grief is secret:
Those friends know nothing of her grief to make it shameful.

That sorrow which can bee seen is the lightest form really, however apparently heavy. Then there is that which is not seen, secret sorrows which yet can be put into words and can be told to near friends as well as be poured out to God; but there are sorrows beyond these such as are never told and cannot be put into words and may only be wordlessly laid before God: these are the deepest. Now comes the supply for each: “I have seen” that which is patent and external; “I have heard their cry” which is the expression of this and of as much of the internal as is expressible; but this would not go deep enough, so God adds, “I know their sorrows” down to the very depths of all those which no eye sees or ear ever heard. (Exodus 3:7)

This is our failure that in all the world
Only the stricken have learned how to grieve.

Only in the realm of Praising should Lament walk …
Joy knows and Longing has accepted—
only Lament still learns; …

Those who shun suffering will remain alone.

What would I give for tears, not smiles but scalding tears,
To wash the black mark clean, and to thaw the frost of years,
To wash the stain ingrain and to make me clean again.

Finally the “Blessed Are Those Who Mourn” group came out—all women again—and arranged themselves around the woman who had volunteered to lie dead on the ground. A second woman sat down and cradled the first woman’s head in her lap. Two others knelt beside her and two others stood over them until they made a sort of cathedral over the dead woman’s body. Everyone was touching someone so that they were all linked together, but unlike the first group no one moved. The women just held that pose, so full of love and grief, until a sob rose right out of the midst of them.

Those of us watching did not know what to do. Was that the end? That sad, sad sound could have been planned, but it did not sound planned. What was going on? Was this still pretend or was this real? Those of us watching the tableau froze just like those who were in it. Then, when the whole room was as still as a grave, the body of the woman on the floor began to heave. As her soft sobbing grew louder, the other women bent over it. Then one of them began to weep, and another gave a small, strangled yelp until the whole tableau was heaving ever so gently over the body of the dead woman who had come back to life.

… I dreamt the past was never past redeeming:
But whether this was false or honest dreaming
I beg death’s pardon now. And mourn the dead. (p. 285)

A man who does not ask too much
becomes the promise of his land
…
This union makes him small
a part of what he would keep.

Without the economic pressures of ownership, often or even usually doing work which required a minimum of attention, his mind could be free. And it is only in such freedom that the mind becomes intimate with a place, filling itself and delighting in details. In this way the worker and the field he works in become one.

… the experience of being stripped of all one’s support systems has two profound effects. …the second is that it teaches one to understand as gift many things hitherto taken for granted. There is a very real sense in which the poor have the earth for their heritage for when one is stripped of freedom, health, good food, possessions, one rediscovers what a monk friend of mine calls “the essential giveness of things.”

I lost a world the other day
Has anybody found?
You’ll know it by the row of stars
Around it forehead bound.

A rich man might not notice it;
Yet to my frugal eye
Of more esteem than ducats.
Oh find it sir for me!

When a person arrives in the world as a baby, says one Midrash, “his hands are clenched as though to say, ‘Everything is mine. I will inherit it all.’ When he departs from the world, his hands are open, as though to say, ‘I have acquired nothing from the world.’”

Let those possess the land, and only those,
Who love it with a love so strong and stupid
That they may be abused and taken advantage of
And made fun of by business, law, and art;
They still hang on.

… he had inherited from his grandfather the classic worldview of the peasant. That worldview he identified with the presumption that he was in the line of those people who just always seem to be “there”—a people who though often battered yet endure, and through such endurance come to believe they “owned the earth.” Such people, [James] Rebanks observes, are “built out of stories” that are embedded in the everyday necessities of life. [Concerning A Shepherd’s Life]

… the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in … human consciousness, nothing will change for the better, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed … will be unavoidable.

When simple joys in daily life
are not seen as slight

Lanterns and pillars
smile their bright smile

Who understands this meaning
first clarified some thousand years ago?

To come to the possession you have not
you must go by a way in which you possess not.

Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you

Stalin had a deep understanding of the kulakis,
Their sense of marginalization and belief in the land.

I want to witness the meek inheriting the earth, because only then will our belonging be complete—when we are all at home.

… it is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain …

with almond oil, amber, and sandalwood.

Those were riches that made life
vast and voluptuous.
Now the days of riches are gone
and no one can call them back for us.

But we can let ourselves be poor again.

This living flowing land
is all there is forever.
We are it
it sings through us
we could live on this Earth
without clothes or tools!

If you judge me worthy Lord God I would show to those whose lives are dull and drab the limitless horizons opening out to humble and hidden efforts.

Her young employers, having got in late
From seeing friends in town
And scraped the right front fender on the gate,
Will not, the cook expects, be coming down.

She makes a quiet breakfast for herself.
The coffee-pot is bright,
The jelly where it should be on the shelf.
She breaks an egg into the morning light,

Then, with the bread-knife lifted, stands and hears
The sweet efficient sounds
Of thrush and catbird, and the snip of shears
Where, in the terraced backward of the grounds,

A gardener works before the heat of day,
He straightens for a view
Of the big house ascending stony-gray
Out of his beds mosaic with the dew.

His young employers having got in late,
He and cook alone
Receive the morning on their old estate,
Possessing what the owners can but own.

We bless you Father
for the thirst
you put in us
for the boldness
you inspire
for the fire
alight in us
that is you in us
you the just.

Thus a profound and rich peace was given to all, and an insatiable desire of doing good. An abundant outpouring also of the Holy Spirit fell upon all.

Theresa [of Avila] adds something that sounds to us quite strange. She writes, “Along this path of prayer, self knowledge, and the thought of one’s sins is the bread with which all palates must be fed …” We must not deny or ignore the depth of our evil for paradoxically our sinfulness becomes our bread. When in honesty we accept the evil that is in us as part of the truth about ourselves and offer that truth up to God, we are in a mysterious way nourished. Even the truth about our shadow side sets us free (John 8:32).

[Me:  Especially the truth about our shadow side.]

Any form of service to others is an expression, essentially, of love. And because the opportunities for service are always present, there are few, if any, reasons that anyone should lack for rich and deep experiences of meaning in life.

Nothing I see
fails to give pleasure

no thirst for righteousness
dries my throat, I am silent
and happy, and troubled only
by my own happiness.

The Book of Job is the great poem of moral outrage. It gives voice to every accusation against God, and its blasphemy is cathartic. How liberating it feels not to be a good, patient little God-fearer, scuffling from one’s hole in the wall to squeak out a dutiful hymn of praise. … It is this passionate insistence that carries him into the eye of the whirlwind. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness,” as another Jewish teacher said, “for they shall be filled.” (p. xvii)

A man who hungers and thirsts after justice is not satisfied with a menu. It is not enough for him to hope or believe or know that there is absolute justice in the universe: he must taste and see it. It is not enough that there may be justice someday in the golden haze of the future: it must be now; must always have been now. (p. xxvii f.)

We do not grow tired of eating and sleeping day after day, because hunger and fatigue return; without them, we should be bored. It would be the same without hunger for spiritual things; we should be bored. Hunger for justice is the eighth beatitide.

One day I complained to Suzuki Roshi about the people I was working with.

He listened intently.  Finally, he said, “If you want to see virtue, you have to have a calm mind.”

Christ is longing to be your Food. Surrounded with fullness of living Food you allow yourself to starve.

Thirst is my water

… the love you have for a fortunate person, to whom you have nothing you can give, is fuller and truer love; it’s purer and far more sincere. If you do good to some wretched person, you may want to exalt yourself and have the object of your good deed under obligation to you. Say there is someone in need, and you share what you have. Because you’re the giver you feel superior to the one who receives your gift. You should want to be equal, so that you may both be subject to the One to whom nothing can be given.

Be merciful.
The cross-shaped leaves
already budding
for another wasteful season,

The rich in seeing nothing but injustice
In their impoverishment by revolution
Are right. But ’twas intentional injustice.
It was their justice being mercy-crossed.
The revolution Keeper’s bringing on
Is nothing but an outbreak of mass mercy,
Too long pent up in rigorous convention—
A holy impulse towards redistribution.

A generous person is a wealthy person.

And the pickers balanced on the hot hillsides
…
in that world of leaves no poor man
has ever picked his way out of.
…
don’t ask
if we were determined to live at last
with merciful hearts.

the pine tree is perfect
…
Back there no big houses only a little farm shack
crows cawing back and forth
over the valley of grass-bamboo
and small pine

If I had a peaceful heart it would look like this.
the train down in the city

was once a snowy hill

Educated people in my opinion must satisfy the following conditions:
…
4. They are pure in heart and fear a lie as they fear fire. They do not lie, even in trifles. A lie is humiliating to the listener and it debases the speaker before his own eyes. … and do not make up soul-to-soul conversation when they are not asked. Out of respect for other people’s ears they are often silent.

You are seeking something along with God, and you are acting just as if you were to make a candle out of God in order to look for something with it. Once one finds the things one is looking for, one throws the candle away. … Once I said (and it is true), if someone were to have the whole world and God, he would not have more than if he had God alone.

There are many people who are sincere without being simple; they are ever afraid of being seen for what they are not; they are always musing over their words and thoughts and thinking about what they have done, in fear of having done or said too much. These people are sincere, but they are not simple: they are not at ease with others, and other people are not at ease with them. There is nothing easy about them, nothing free, spontaneous, or natural. People who are imperfect, less regular, less masters of themselves, are more lovable. This is how men find them, and it is the same with God.

What you have to attempt—to be yourself. What you have to pray for—to become a mirror in which, according to the degree of purity of heart you have attained, the greatness of life will be reflected. (p. 8)

Give us
A pure heart
That we may see Thee,
A humble heart
That we may hear Thee,
A heart of love
That we may serve Thee,
A heart of faith
That we may live Thee. (p. 214)

Sound thinking
is to listen well and choose
one course of action.

No man can look on God and live, live in his own faults, live in the shadow of the least self-deceit, live in harm toward his least creatures, whether man or bird or beast or creeping thing. … The pure in heart shall see God? More, they who see God shall cry out to become pure in heart, even as He is pure, with all the energy of their souls.

Father in Heaven! What are we without You! What is all that we know, vast accumulation though it be, but a chipped fragment if we do not know You! What is all our striving, could it ever encompass a world, but a half-finished work if we do not know You: You the One, who is one thing and who is all!

So may Thou give to the intellect
wisdom to comprehend that one thing;
to the heart,
sincerity to receive this understanding;
to the will,
purity that wills only one thing.
In prosperity, may you grant
perseverance to will one thing;
amid distractions,
collectedness to will one thing;
in suffering,
patience to will one thing.

You that gives both the beginning and the completion, may You early, at the dawn of day, give to the young the resolution to will one thing. As the day wanes, may You give to the old a renewed remembrance of their first resolution, that the first may be like the last, the last like the first, in possession of a life that has willed only one thing.

Moses seems to be asking for a direct and unmediated experience of God—and this even the highest prophet cannot have. God offers to pass by Moses and show him that which is after God, God’s back side, or more correctly, God’s effects in the world. God invites Moses to gaze in the same direction in which God is gazing.

This account of the mystical union provides us with one model of the loving relationship among God and beings who embody God’s presence. Non-Jewish instances of mystical union often aim at fusion with the spirit of God, coming to know God’s essence through looking into God’s face. But Moses is told, No, that’s not the way. The way to know God is to look out onto the world the way God looks out onto the world. Moses is to face the same way God faces, and to see God’s effects in the world.

Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives.

and something in me is pure enough
for an instant
to see your kingdom in a glance,

[Harold Bloom] doesn’t quite know what to make of a writer [like Shakespeare] who has no anxieties—who exists in an almost pure relation, not to other authors, but simply to the world.

So when the shoe fits The foot is forgotten When the belt fits the belly is forgotten When the heart is right “For” and “against” are forgotten

Seeing God means that they have died to self, since “no one can see God and live” (Exodus 33:20). Not that selfish concerns don’t arise for them; but they aren’t attached to these concerns; they have no self for selfishness to stick to; hence they can be carried along in the clear current of what is.

“I have seen your face, as one sees the face of God” (Gen. 33:10, Fox). This story says to me that if we have ever truly been forgiven, we have seen the face of God. If we’ve ever been on the receiving end of an act of mercy that made a difference in our lives, we have seen the face of God.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

… it is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain …

Intentions have side effects.

One day I complained to Suzuki Roshi about the people I was working with. He listened intently. Finally, he said, “If you want to see virtue, you have to have a calm mind.”

Purity does not lie in separation from, but in deeper penetration into the universe. It is to be found in the love of that unique boundless Essence which penetrates the inmost depths of all things and there, from within those depths, deeper than the mortal zone where individuals and multitudes struggle, works upon them and moulds them. Purity lies in chaste contact with that which is “the same in all.” (p. 64 f.)

To be pure of heart means to love God above all things, and at the same time to see him everywhere in all things. … objects have lost their surface multiplicity: in each of them, according to the measure of its own particular qualities and possibilities, God may truly be laid hold on. The pure of heart is of its nature privileged to move within an immense and superior unity.

What purity effects in the individual charity brings about within the community of souls. (p. 124)

The Psalmist says: (Ps. 102:1 [Heb])
“A prayer of a poor man”—
But the text may also read:
A prayer to a poor man!
Though the treasure houses of the king are full
they are managed by the king’s officials.
Having nothing to do with all his treasures
the king himself is like a poor man.
One who comes in search of treasure
will never see the King
Only one who seeks no riches
who prays as to a poor man
can come before the King himself.

xl. The essential point is the ancient one: that to be peaceable is by definition to be peaceable in time of conflict. Peaceableness is not the amity that exists between people who agree, nor is it the exhaustion of jubilation that follows war. It is not passive. It is the ability to act to resolve conflict without violence. If it is not a practical and practicable method, it is nothing. … In the face of conflict the peaceable person may find several solutions, the violent person only one. (p. 86 f.)

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

…

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

Peace is not a passive but an active virtue. Our Lord never said, “Blessed are the peaceful,” but “Blessed are the peacemakers.” The Beatitude rests only on those who make it out of trial, our of suffering, out of cruelty, even out of sin.

Meng … is absolutely committed, as you will soon see, to mindfulness, creating the conditions for world peace, and making peacefulness the default mode on this planet, at least among the human species.

Once there was a disciple of a Greek philosopher who was commanded by his Master for three years to give money to everyone who insulted him. When this period of trial was over the Master said to him: Now you can go to Athens and learn wisdom.

When the disciple was entering Athens he met a certain wise man who sat at the gate insulting everybody who came and went. He also insulted the disciple who immediately burst out laughing. Why do you laugh when I insult you? said the wise man. Because, said the disciple, for three years I have been paying for this kind of thing and now you give it to me for nothing. Enter the city, said the wise man, it is all yours. Abbot John used to tell the above story saying: This is the door of God by which our fathers, rejoicing in many tribulations, enter the City of Heaven.

Now all the truth is out
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat
For how can you compete
Being honour bred with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes?
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone
Be secret and exult
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

Whitehead … pronounced that generality is the salt of religion just as it is the salt of science. …

We might then be content here to agree to disagree about what salt is and whether or not in becoming general it loses its savor.

The center for the new people is the new hearth of the new church; around it their communal dwelling place arises. around the radiating fire of the Holy spirit their spiritual temple is built up as a tangible house of God. This is the city on the hill whose light beams out into all lands. This place of worship burns in spirit; it shines in truth.

Valley settlements put on their lights like armor; …

There is an indelicacy in too-ready speech. Paul felt it unlawful to speak of the things of the third heaven. But there is also a false reticence, as if these things were one’s own work and one’s own possession, about which we should modestly keep quiet, whereas they are wholly God’s amazing work …

Unclench your fists
Hold out your hands
Take mine.
Let us hold each other.
This is his Glory Manifest.

Wind from the compass points, sun at meridian,
these are forms the spirit enters,
breath, ruach, light that is witness and by which we witness.

Stay with me, and then I shall begin to shine as thou shinest: so to shine, as to be a light to others. The light, O Jesus, will be all from thee. None of it will be mine. No merit to me. It will be thou who shinest through me upon others. O let me thus praise thee, in the way which thou dost love best, by shining on all those around me. Give light to them as well as to me; light them with me, through me. Teach me to show forth thy praise, thy truth, thy will. Make me preach thee without preaching—not by words, but by my example and by the catching force, the sympathetic evident fullness of the love which my heart bears to thee.

… they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?

Of course, it isn’t.
Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only
the light that can shine out of a life.

The church is a lamp that has to give light and therefore it must involve itself in tangible reality and thus be able to enlighten pilgrims who walk on this earth.

Our deepest fear is, not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light and not our darkness, that frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I, to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We are born to make manifest the glory of god that is within us.
It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

In San Francisco John Logan said, light
is the shadow of God

Every good deed is its own advertisement.

(4) The law is completely valid as far as Matthew presents Jesus’ teaching.

(5) The law reveals God’s purpose when interpreted by a specific hermeneutical key. Both options four and five, it seems to me, express Matthew’s understanding.

God’s desire finds expression in the ministry of Jesus who speaks often of the rule of God. Norbert Lohfink points out that Jesus nowhere states clearly what the content of this rule is … That was not necessary, declares Lohfink, because it was already established in the Old Testament and underscored in Judaism: The rule of God takes place when human society, grasped by God’s saving action in the exodus, embraces the divine teaching (the Torah) whose emphasis on righteousness and mercy creates shalom. Jesus himself declared that he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it—to carry it forward.

The verb “to fulfill” suggests the image of a vessel which is filled to the top. The vessel here referred to is the written Word, the Law and the Prophets … When Jesus is through working, the whole Old Testament will be fulfilled …

The Old Testament is already complete … It needs no addition and should suffer no subtraction. The vessel needs no enlargement or alteration: all it awaits is to be filled full by what Jesus says and does.

As is so often the case, the most radical attack on an institution is the demand that it live up to its own myth. It is not an attempt to overthrow it but an attempt to cleanse and perfect it. “Think not that I have come to destroy the law or the prophets. I have not come to destroy but to fulfill.” [Matthew 5:17]

To adapt a phrase from Jesus, the daughters of Zelophehad come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. Technically, they ask Moses to bend the rules, but with the result that the original intention of the law is honored rather rather than compromised. [Numbers 27]

What Paul sees happening in Christ and in the Christian Church, likewhat Jesus had said in Matthew, is the fulfilment and not the abolition of the meaning of Torah as covenant of grace. ‘Fulfilment’ is a permanently open border between what went before and what comes next.

They become little, in the girding of their own stringent selfishness.  … awfully intense but still little men …  Is it toward this pungent, acrid, awfully intensified, and talented littleness, that all souls under sin are gravitating?

The superstition of the anger of our current sexual politics, as of other kinds of anger, is that somewhere along the trajectory of any quarrel a tribunal will be reached that will hear all complaints and find for the plaintiff; the verdict will be that the defendant is entirely wrong, the plaintiff entirely right and entirely righteous. This, of course, is not going to happen.

God is something more than an exterior force. (Murfee? p. 696)

This—this thing of the spirit you call God—and I thoroughly understand your differentiation between the exterior entity some people worship and the interior presence—cannot occupy the human soul at the same time that it is occupied by hatred. (p. 697)

One of the brethren questioned Abbot Isidore the elder of Scete saying, Why is it that the demons are so grievously afraid of you? The elder replied: From the moment I became a monk I have striven to prevent anger from rising from my lips.

Foreign powers will then know that to withhold a due respect and deference is dangerous, that wrongs may be forgiven but that insults will be avenged.

God will judge all forms of lovelessness, but especially contempt — the act of making someone believe he is a fool.

But to say, “You fool,” is to negate God’s presence in a creature God has made. It is to invite God’s absence, which is my definition of hell.

“I was in the car, and I was ready to go, and then I said to myself, Hey, stop a minute. What’s more important—to go to church and sit there and fume and ask Jesus to feel sorry for you and to condemn your husband or to skip church and go back inside and sit with him and hope he’ll really break down and cry and cry, so all that disappointment in him will come out, …”

I even have the freedom to close the Bible from which I derive my deification, put away my hymn and prayer books and even stop going to church in order to become reconciled to the brother with whom I am at odds.

Incident with worship in the park. Tom forgot to pick up key at city hall. Called Glee who called Ad DiGregori early Sunday morning, who came down to bring Tom the key (which Tom didn’t need anymore because Ward had a key). So Tom never showed to pick up the special requested key.

Glee: “Called in a favor.” But then the favor became bigger when Tom didn’t show. Now Glee owes Ad, and Tom really owes Glee.

(debt and anger all mixed up)

That is exactly how the peasantry of the ancient world thought about human justice: stay away from the courts or you will remain embroiled until your last penny is taken from you in useless bribes. If you do not find distributive justice here below, you yearn for a God who will administer it fairly and equitably.

In ten seconds, we can create an entire and self-justifying scenario of blame, anger, and hurt —toward ourselves or toward another. Jesus is saying, Don’t go there! or the judge, officer, and courtroom will quickly take over and have their way with you. Buddhist nun and writer Pema Chodron says that once you create a self-justifying story line, your emotional entrapment within it quadruples!

From what licentiousness have your eyes, from what atrocity have your hands, from what iniquity has your whole body ever abstained?

Jesus’ point here is that selfish and harmful actions begin in selfish and harmful thoughts. Anyone who is serious about living in the light will have a passionate desire to correct his mistakes at the root.

Any man who reduces a woman to a sex object, a thing for his pleasure, is guilty of adultery. Her worth is not restricted or equal to her usefulness to a man. She has worth to herself.

Understand that resolved one of my adolescent mysteries. I had lusted after my female classmates when they were not around, I had devised strategems for their seduction when I was alone, but when I was with one of them, I was a courtly as Robert E. Lee. I desired them, but I desired them as women to be loved, not things to be used of possessed. At least, that’s my memory. (p. 204)

To look upon a woman and seek to use her person for your pleasure is to commit adultery in your heart. To look upon your country and to lust after its privileges to reserve them to yourself is to commit sedition in your heart. To look upon your religion and to lust after its power to force conformity to your will is to commit blasphemy. (p. 205)

One must keep the context in mind. Jesus is exhibiting the righteousness that goes beyond “the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees.” This latter was a righteousness that took as its goal to not do anything wrong. If not doing anything wrong is the goal, that could be achieved by dismembering yourself and making actions impossible. What you cannot do you certainly will not do. Remove your eye, your hand, etc., therefore, and you will roll into heaven a mutilated stump. … He reduces their principle—that righteousness lies in not doing anything wrong—to the absurd, in the hope that they will forsake their principle and see and enter the righteousness that is “beyond the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees”—beyond, where compassion or love and not sacrifice is the fundamental thing.

After I had cut of my hands
and grown new ones

something my former hands had longed for
came and asked to be rocked.

After my plucked out eyes
had withered and new ones grown

something my former eyes had wept for
came asking to be pitied.

Anything extra—those hand-over-heart assurances that we’re real, we mean it, we guarantee satisfaction—is the con game. Someone’s selling something.

It is the essence of truth that it is never excessive. Why should it exaggerate? There is that which should be destroyed and that which should be simply illuminated and studied. How great is the force of benevolent and searching examination! We must not resort to the flame where only light is required.

[Paolo] Prodi examines how this could happen, how people could tire under the enormous burden imposed on the ordinary word of having to be always truthful, and how this could lead them to make an institution of their mutual engagement by calling on God to witness their oaths. … God becomes, so to speak, the necessary instrumentality when he is summoned as a witness.

He who adds to truth decreases it.

… That he is perfectly resigned, perfectly submitted [to God]; for precisely here is the distinction between a half resignation and one that is complete,—the half resignation is passive, ending there, and the other is a resignation to being active, personally responsible, personally efficient for God.  The former is the resignation of the Brahmin, the latter of an apostle.

     When the young man spit in Lawson’s face, Lawson regarded him calmly and asked for a handkerchief. The young man was so surprised, he handed the handkerchief to Lawson before he realized what he was doing.

“How can evil exist in a world created by God, the Benefident One? It can exist, because entrapped deep inside the force of evil there is a spark of goodness. This spark is the source of life of the evil tendency. … Now, it is the specific mission of the Jew to free the entrapped holy sparks from the grip of the forces of evil by means of Torah study and prayer. Once the holy sparks are released, evil, having lost its life-giving core, will cease to exist.” So wrote Rabbi Yehuda Aryeh Lieb Alter of Ger, in nineteenth-century Poland. it was the Baal Shem Tov who taught this vital idea.

Gift wrap your coat for others when they steal your sweater.

Force ought never be used; this is the mind of Christ. Instead you ought to endure injustice, witnessing also to the truth until the other party cannot hold out in doing wrong and voluntarily gives up doing it. Suffering can have a paralyzing effect. Just as a hypnotist puts his subject to sleep, and one limb after another loses its vitality, so suffering endurance paralyzes injustice. No evil can ultimately hold out against it.

By Moral Accounting, either harming you further or accepting something good from you would incur an even greater debt: By turning the other cheek, you make me even more morally indebted to you. If I have a conscience, I should feel even more guilty. Turning the other cheek involves a rejection of retribution and revenge and the acceptance of basic goodness—and when it works, it works via this mechanism of Moral Accounting.

The career of Gandhi is the best commentary on this verse. As in the previous commandments, Jesus is asking for a deeper level of righteousness here. Not only are we to compensate our neighbor when we injur him; we are to compensate him when he injures us. Not only are we to pay him what is fair; we are to give him what is more than fair: good in return for evil, love in return for hatred.

This attitude is admirable if it comes from true non-attachment, as in the following story about the Zen poet Ryokan:

Ryokan lived in a small hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief broke in, only to find that there was nothing in the hut worth stealing.

When Ryokan returned, he found the thief and said, “You’ve probably come a long way, and you shouldn’t return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.”

Shamefaced, the thief took the clothes and left.

Ryokan sat down naked and looked up at the sky. “Poor fellow,” he said, “I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”

     The thirty Batwa families determined to “embarrass the neighbors with their love,” as the Burundian adage says. When the Hutus falsely accused them of stealing cabbages, the families gave them twice as many cabbages in return. When the Tutsis stole their carrots out of the ground days before harvest, the families didn’t seek revenge but gave them potatoes, too.

After the verdict, the murdered man’s twin
was suddenly there on the courthouse steps.
He said nothing, just calmly unbuttoned
his jacket and shirt, revealing a vest.
In red, it read Matthew, 5:38.
Then he re-buttoned his suit and he went.

*

Well, I ‘unted ‘im down to a council estate
on t’side on an ‘ill. Burnt out Vauxall Nova
for a garden shed, one dead cooker on t’lawn,
that kinda thing. It’s dark. So I gets t’car jack
out of t’boot and jemmies t’window casin’—
wood were rotten, putty gone to shot—and slides in.
Dog-leg stairs. Dog-piss carpet. Dog-ends all over t’shop.
‘E’s sat on ‘is bed doin’ X-Box with ‘is thumbs.
Looks up and sees me lollin’ in t’door ‘ole. Sees t’gun.
I stands there a minute, clockin’ ‘im. You know t’sort:

Mettallica T-shirt, trainers, camouflage shorts,
number-four cropped curly ‘air and pony-tail,
tatts on ‘is forearms. Cackin’ ‘imself, I could tell.
“What?” ‘e’s at it. “What?” Then, “Don’t, man. Don’t be a cunt.”
I lifts t’barrel level with ‘is face, and I pulls.
But it weren’t lead shot what peppered ‘is stupid ‘ead—
I’d emptied t’ cartridge at ‘ome, and loaded up
with ashes instead. Me bruvver’s. What they’d givved us
to take ‘ome in a brass urn. Then I turns and walks,
leaves ‘im with a powdered face and white frightened ‘air

like what those ‘igh court judges wear. I got three year.

Turning the cheek, stripping naked, carrying a soldier’s pack the second mile (Matt. 5:39-41) do not at all mean acquiescing passively in evil, but are a studied and deliberate way of seizing the initiative and overthrowing evil by the force of its own momentum.

There are very many ways in which an aphorism starting with “if any one strikes you on the right cheek” might have been finished: kill him, strike him, ignore him, forgive him, even love him. But when it is ended with “turn to him the other also” in Matt. 5:39, one is no longer giving helpful moral admonition or even radical pacifistic advice. One is deliberately overthrowing ethics in the sense in which Heidegger spoke of the necessity of overthrowing metaphysics. The aphorism brings ethics also under the radical challenge of the Kingdom. It intends us to experience how the logic of ethics is undermined by the mystery of God and that, if one can accept it, is the most crucial moral experience of all.

Meekness is perhaps the Christian’s most distinguishing mark. “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Mt. 5:39). Not to strike back is not, in itself, meekness. Nor is it meekness to merely put up with being wronged and accept it for what it is. But it is meekness to turn the left cheek. Pride also bears the wrong, but as it lifts itself above the wrong usually in self-righteous judgment – it actually makes the wrong seem greater than it is. Patience also bears the wrong, but it does not make the wrong less than it is. Only meekness makes the wrong less, only meekness lightens the load. It takes the wrong into itself, be it injury, insult, or whatever, and in this way lessens it.

I cannot turn the other cheek
it takes all the strength I have
to keep from hitting back

You learn to positively ignore and withdraw your energy from evil or stupid things rather than fight them directly.

The double commandment of love, toward God and neighbor, motivated Jesus’ life. This love energy suffused an other-centered life of service. But this service was not a service of servility. It was sustained attention to the liberation of people from whatever forces oppressed them. One set of powerful oppressive forces which people seldom reflect on is the violence of society which they have internalized. Our own violence is the sin closest to home. It was precisely this violence, unleashed and at full fury, that was directed at Jesus. To resist it would be to multiply it. To receive it in his own person as an act of love would be to bear it away. The violent may bear the Kingdom away; but the loving bear the violence away. “He took away the sin of the world” is an experiential truth before it is a theological conviction.

When the young man on State Street
approached as if to ask directions,
saying, “Can you help me out a little here?”
and I, though I already knew, said,
“Help you out how, exactly?”
“A dollar or two if you can,”
he said, and I took a deep breath,
holding in what I might’ve held out,
hearing When someone asks, you
give what you can, from my bank
of training in the ways of compassion,
and though I didn’t want to,
opened my wallet, and
with the munificence of a toad,
pulled out a five and bought him off.

The text has brought me into an experiential relationship with my neighbor, but also into a dilemma: I feel two ways about the situation. On the one hand, fair is fair. … On the other hand, I now see my neighbor as a vulnerable human being, shivering in the cold night. …

Yes, we humans being could argue economic realities all day long, but finally, when the neighbor cries out, God does not thunder economic rules but turns a compassionate ear and responds to protect and save the neighbor.

Abbot Agatho frequently admonished his disciple saying: Never acquire for yourself anything that you might hesitate to give to your brother if he asked you for it, for thus you would be found a transgressor of God’s command. If anyone asks, give to him and if anyone wants to borrow from you, do not turn away from him.

[Two men in suits walking past a beggar with hat in hand] “Here I was, all this time, worrying that maybe I’m a selfish person, and now it turns out I’ve been suffering from compassion fatigue.”

Aunt Mabel used to say,
“Hands are for giving.”
She gave away all she had
while she was living.

She drove an old Dodge
that wouldn’t shift into reverse,
and she had to swing it outward
when she went to church.

The most vulnerable person
in all our town—
her belief and her love
combined into one;

So everyone cheated her.
And when she died
I saw strange people sneak
to her graveside

and cry quietly—
afraid of the law
but come back to visit
Aunt Mabel once more.

When I go back there now
I still see her store.
“Hay, Grain, Feed, and Seed,”
an old dog by the door.

Such a long time ago—
what is there left
for us to remember
of Aunt Mabel’s gift?—

The flowers on her hat,
the old car she drove,
the smell of the hay,
her voice: “God is love.”

Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only. The man who does not manifest love in the present has not love.

Except for my friends, my enemies are closest to me. It is with them that I have to come to terms most frequently in my thoughts and actions, but most of all, in my emotions … I must concern myself with them in the most intensive way. Since I cannot avoid doing this the question is in what spirit this intensive occupation will be the strongest and most fruitful.

Show mercy, then as do people with merciful hearts, because even in loving your enemies you are loving your sisters and brothers. … I ask you: Why should you love your enemies? Is it for the sake of good health in this life? What if that’s not expedient? Do you want them to be rich? What if they’ll be blinded by their riches? … Desire for them rather that they share eternal life with you. Desire that they be your sisters and brothers. If this is what you desire when you love your enemies, that they be your sisters and brothers, then when you love them it’s sisters and brothers you are loving. It’s not what they are that you love in them but what you would have them be.

… It’s as the craftsman looked on the tree from the forest that our Craftsman looked on us: what he saw was not the raw material but the edifice he was going to make of it. … It’s not what they are that you love in them but what you would have them be. So when you love your enemies, you are loving your sisters and brothers.

It may be that the only possibly effective defense against the ultimate weapon is no weapon at all. It may be that the presence of nuclear weapons in the world serves notice that the command to love one another is an absolute practical necessity, such as we never dreamed it to be before, and that our choice is not to win or lose, but to love our enemies or die.

But Christian prayers are made to or in the name of Jesus who loved, prayed for, and forgave his enemies and who instructed his followers to do likewise. (p. 84)

To my granddaughters who visited the Holocaust Museum on the day of the burial of Yitzhak Rabin

Now you know the worst
we humans have to know
about ourselves, and I am sorry,

for I know that you will be afraid.
To those of our bodies given
without pity to be burned, I know

there is no answer
but loving one another,
even our enemies, and this is hard.

But remember:
when a man of war becomes a man of peace,
he gives a light, divine

though it is also human.
When a man of peace is killed
by a man of war, he gives a light.

You do not have to walk in darkness.
If you will have the courage for love,
you may walk in light. It will be

the light of those who have suffered
for peace. It will be
your light.

Dear John,
You said, “Treat your worst enemies
as if they could become your best friends.”
You were not the first to perpetrate
such an outrage, but you were right.
Try as we might, we cannot
unspring that trap. We can either
befriend our enemies or we can die
with them, in the absolute triumph
of the absolute horror constructed
by us to save us from them.
Tough, but “All right,” our Mary said,
“we’ll be nice to the sons of bitches.”

perfection—regained the entirety of your original endowment.

We must not hate, even when there is good reason, or we take the other’s sin upon ourselves.

When America
has made a black wall with all
the names of those of
the Vietnamese who died in
that war life will have grown up.

The love that matters is that which does not fear difference.

On his face
saliva remains
like drops of rain

Near his ears
abusive language
like thunder’s roar

The thrush
begins again its outpouring of silver
to rich and poor alike, to the just
and the unjust.

Therefore he who in truth loves, loves his neighbor. And he who in truth loves his neighbor loves also his enemy. This is obvious; for the distinction of friend or enemy is a distinction in the object of love, but the object of love to your neighbor is always without distinction. Your neighbor is the absolutely unrecognizable distinction between one person and another; it is eternal equality before God – enemies, too, have this equality.

Perhaps, I thought,
passing the duckpond,
perhaps–seeing the brilliantly somber water
deranged by lost feathers and bits of
drowning bread–perhaps
these imperfections (the ducklings
practised their diving,
stylized feet vigorously cycling among débris)
are part of perfection,
a pristine nuance? our eyes,
our lives, too close to the canvas,
enmeshed within
the turning dance,
see to it?

[Me: the love of enemies is a confusing sort of perfection—to be perfect we must confuse our enemies and our friends. Perfection, in order to be complete, must include imperfections.]

… the command to love the enemy rests on the astonishing assertion that God himself has come as the enemy because he first loved men [and women], and come to them under this very form. For the Christian, this identification is unmistakable: Jesus is the enemy; he is the implacable foe.

… in the sayings of the eighteenth-century Hasidic rabbi Yehiel Mikhal of Zlotchov: “Pray for your enemies that everything may be well with them. More than all other prayers, this is truly the service of God.”

“[Jesus] didn’t play favorites at all, which is miraculous in itself. That fact alone may have been the most supernatural thing He did. He didn’t show partiality, which every human does.”

These passages [Job 38-41 and Isaiah 45:7] may remind us of the radiant, large-hearted verse in which Jesus of Nazareth gives his reason for loving our enemies: “That you may be children of your father who is in heaven.”

The other is always much closer to being our kin than we imagine.  …  With eyes opened, we realize we are a family so wide with welcome that enemy love is inevitable.

Above the modest house and the palace—the same darkness
Above the evil man and the just, the same stars.
Above the child who will recover and the child who will not recover, the same energies roll forward,
from one tragedy to the next and from one foolishness to the next.
I bow down.

under the blue sky
that loves us all

Having recognized that the enemy is not simply “out there” but first and foremost “in here,” in our personal collaboration with evil, Rosa Parks was able to act from love rather than hate—the love that wants to redeem the enemy that can be found in us as well as around us.

[quoting Frans Josef van Beech in Christ Proclaimed]

Loving one’s enemy is suffering for him at his own hands.

This monument is for the unknown
good in our enemies. Like a picture
their life began to appear: they
gathered at home in the evening
and sang. Above their fields they saw
a new sky. A holiday came
and they carried the baby to the park
for a party. Sunlight surrounded them.

Here we glimpse what our minds long turned
away from. the great mutual
blindness darkened that sunlight in the park,
and the sky that was new, and the holidays.
This monument was that one afternoon
we stood here letting a part of our minds
escape. They came back, but different.
Enemy: one day we glimpsed your life.

This monument is for you.

The heart of the message of Jesus is to love your enemy, but we need to remember that forgiveness is a long journey and not just a spiritual thing.  (p. 63)

I would like you to ask yourself, Who is your enemy?  Who is that person you are afraid of?  Who is the person you would be happy if they disappeared?  Who is that person who has hurt you so much?  (p. 108)

… we will hear Jesus saying, “No longer love your enemies in a very general way, but love this person.”
… there are those that we do not realize are enemies because we have pushed them aside.  (p. 109)

O Lord, no matter how much I pray I cannot forgive them.
No matter how much I try I cannot bring myself to forgive you.
You, the All-Powerful, the All-Knowing, the All-Merciful God.
Where was your power and mercy when they did this?
Do you know what it’s like to have people insult you
and want you dead for just being who you are?
Do you know how it feels being the object of scorn?
Crucified God, Teach me to pray, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”
For only in living these words do I experience freedom and rebirth.
You, Lord, have given me the key to unlock the prison of my memories in which my salvation lies.
But Pride has rusted shut the door and Spite still stands guard.
Help me to see, to understand, to accept that until I forgive,
unless I renounce my urge to retaliate and let go of my grudge
I have placed my happiness in the hands of my adversary.

Therefore, O God of Justice, font of eternal Wisdom
Grant that all my enemies may drown in the deepest ocean of your Mercy.
Rain down upon their heads the unquenchable fire of your Love
Bind them securely with the unbreakable bonds of your Compassion
For only in this way will my wounded soul find Healing
my heavy heart find Peace
and my crushed spirit the lost Joy of my youth.

As long as we do not pray for our enemies, we continue to see only our own point of view – our own righteousness – and to ignore their perspective. Prayer breaks down the distinctions between us and them. To do violence to others, you must make them enemies. Prayer, on the other hand, makes enemies into friends.

When we have brought our enemies into our hearts in prayer, it becomes difficult to maintain the hostility necessary for violence. In bringing them close to us, prayer even serves to protect our enemies. Thus prayer undermines the propaganda and policies designed to make us hate and fear our enemies. By softening our hearts towards our adversaries, prayer can even become treasonous. Fervent prayer for our enemies is a great obstacle to war and the feelings that lead to war.

Go talk with those who are rumored to be unlike you,
And whom, it is said, you are so unlike.
Stand on the stoops of their houses and tell them why
You are out on strike.

It is not yet time for the rock, the bullet, the blunt
Slogan that fuddles the mind toward force.
Let the new sound in our streets be the patient sound
Of your discourse.

Doors will be shut in your faces, I do not doubt.
Yet here or there, it may be, there will start,
Much as the lights blink on in a block at evening,
Changes of heart.

They are your houses; the people are not unlike you;
Talk with them, then, and let it be done
Even for the grey wife of your nightmare sheriff
And the guardsman’s son.

Secondly, the standard account says, Jesus’ pacifism is a rejection of the Old Testament story, with its holy wars and righteous royalty. Thus the position Jesus is portrayed as taking was anti-Jewish. Three times in Matt. 5 his phrase, ‘… but I say to you … ’identified within the old regime issues of violence and the treatment of enemies. Love of the enemy is frequently characterized as the point at which Jesus is most original over against ‘the Jews’.

Thirdly, Jesus’ pacifism is thought to be the product of mental moves, or moral insights, which we might call ‘individualization’ and ‘interiorization’. We think of his saying that angry thoughts or language are as bad as killing, or lustful thoughts as bad as adultery. Jewish morality, it is held, was external and communitarian. Or others will say, Jesus was apocalyptic, impatient, expecting divine intervention in history, whereas ‘the Jews’ were more realistic about the world’s regularities.

This view has been held, not surprisingly, by Christian pacifist minorities, who could use the ‘but I say to you’ passages as an answer to others’ arguments about wars having been morally legitimate in the Old Testament. …

… Jesus did not reject anything Jewish in calling for love of enemy …

… The intent of het original Torah is broadened, or intensified, or interiorized by the antitheses: never diverted or negated.

There must then be, in the mind of the Jesus of Matthew, an original intent which we can discern as having been within the Torah itself, which points toward the renunciation of violence and the love of the enemy. Without having got that far, the Law and the Prophets must have been reaching, pointing toward that fulfillment.

If you are not to become a monster
you must care what they think.
…
love for your enemy that is the way of liberty?
…
You must not
think of them again except
as monsters like yourself
pitiable because unforgiving.

XVIII. In a time such as this, when we have been seriously and most cruelly hurt by those who hate us, and when we must consider ourselves to be gravely threatened by those same people, it is hard to speak of the ways of peace and to remember that Christ enjoined us to love our enemies, but this is no less necessary fro being difficult.

… the love he has for his enemies brings a burden of concern upon his heart, that oppresses and, for the time, well nigh crushes him.  (l. 3686-3687)

Expect to have your part then with Jesus in his Gethsemane. Come in freely hither, tarry ye here and watch. Out of his agony learn how to bear an enemy; what to do for your enemies and God’s.  (l. 3798-3800)

… the more passionately we love our enemies, the more evil will diminish.

And yet I will not have thee hate thy neighbors;
Thy life shall have a future far beyond
The just chastisement of their perfidities.

Another approach comes from the great preacher and pray-er, George Buttrick. He recommends that we begin with prayer for our enemies: “The first intercession is, ‘Bless So-and-so whom I foolishly regard as an enemy. Bless So-and-so whom I have wronged. Keep them in Thy favor. Banish my bitterness.’” (p. 200)

Dietrick Bonhoeffer says that when we pray for our enemies “we are taking their distress and poverty, their guilt and perdition upon ourselves and pleading to god for them. We are doing vicariously for them what they cannot do for themselves.”

In Revensbruk Nazi concentration camp—… “And when they come to judgment let all the fruits that we have borne be their forgiveness.” (p. 224)

One needs to love those they have yet to love
To stand near the Friend.

And whom do I call my enemy?
An enemy must be worthy of engagement.
I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.
It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind.
The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything.
It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.
The door to the mind should only open from the heart.
An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.

But praying for difficult people confuses us—do I want this person to be blessed? … In these cases we can borrow from the best, using ideas form the saints. For example, Jesus and the Apostle Paul used the following phrases:

• that [Christ] would be in them and they in [Christ] (John 17:23)
• that they may become completely one with others who love God (John 17:21,23)
• That they be strengthened in their inner being with power through Christ’s Spirit(Eph. 3:16)
• That they be rooted and grounded in love (Eph. 3:17)
• That they know (interactively) the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge (Eph. 3:19)
• that they would overflow with God’s love and be full of discernment (Phil. 1:9-10)

Abraham Lincoln once said, “I destroy my enemy when I make him my friend.” He could have added, “I master my difficulty when I make it my opportunity.” It is always to our advantage when we turn a critic into a friend; when we keep our temper in spite of angry accusations made against us, allowing the accuser to cool off; when we learn to profit by our mistakes so that they pay dividends; when we remain humble when we are praised; when we believe the best in spite of the worst, and when we begin to live with the knowledge that God cares for us deeply.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each person’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

Begin practicing this love meditation … on someone the mere thought of whom makes you suffer.

Wars are waged to get rid of conflicts and differences. They will never end until we learn to respect conflict, to love the enemy.

How do we do that? … Peace is an ART of war. It is not a bland static condition in which everyone agrees to agree, it is a dynamic condition in which diversity and conflict are centered in the body of ourgrowth.

Who is the enemy? We have two enemies: the one who wants to own us and enslave us and from whom we must gain our freedom, and the one who is separate from us and has no feeling for us. The enemy from whom we must separate and the enemy with whom we must join.

Others have burdens of their own: everyone
does. When you stir at night you can feel
your enemies pray—necessity holding their paws
in its grip, and their own kind of pain in their eyes.

… it was upon the anvil of the Jewish community’s relations with Rome that Jesus hammered out the vital content of his concept of love for one’s enemy.
“The enemy” can very easily be divided into three groups. There is first the personal enemy[ One.], one who is in some sense a part of one’s primary-group life. …
To love such an enemy requires reconciliation, the will to re-establish a relationship. It involves confession of error and a seeking to be restored to one’s former place. Doubtless it is this that Jesus had in mind in his charge: “If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, … and go be reconciled to thy brother and then come and offer thy gift.”

p. 93
Love those who have a natural claim upon you. To those who have no such claim, there is no responsibility.
The second kind of enemy comprises those persons who, by their activities, make it difficult for the group to live without shame and humiliation.[ Two.] … taxgatherers … To be required to love such a person was the final insult. … When Jesus became a friend to the tax collectors and secured one as his intimate companion, it was a spiritual triumph of such staggering proportions that after nineteen hundred years it defies rational explanation.

p. 94
The argument for loving this second enemy was the fact that he too was a son of Abraham. He was one of them, unworthy though he was. Here was the so-called call of blood, which cannot be stilled. God required that Israel be one people, even as he was one.
… uprooting of the bitterness of betrayal, the heartiest poison that grows in the human spirit.

p. 95
… to penetrate their thick resistance to public opinion and esteem and lay bare the simple heart. This man is not just a tax collector; he is a son of God.
The third type of enemy was exemplified by Rome[ Three]. … To love the Roman meant first to lift him out of the general classification of enemy. The Roman had to emerge as a person.
For the most part, such an experience would be impossible as long as either was functioning only within his own social context. The Roman, viewed against the background of his nation and its power, was endowed in the mind of the Jew with all the arrogance and power of the dominant group. It would matter not how much the individual wished to be regarded for himself alone

p. 97
Love of the enemy means that a fundamental attack must first be made on the enemy status. … Once the status of each is frozen or fixed, contacts are merely truces between enemies—a kind of armistice for purposes of economic security. … during such moments status is merely transcended; it is not broken down.

p. 98
It is necessary, therefore, for the privileged and the underprivileged to work on the common environment for the purpose of providing normal experiences of fellowship. … The first step toward love is a common sharing of a sense of mutual worth and value.
The experience of the common worship of God is such a moment. It is in this connection that American Christianity has betrayed the religion of Jesus almost beyond redemption.

p. 100
The religion of Jesus says to the disinherited, “Love your enemy. Take the initiative in seeking ways by which you can have the experience of a common sharing of mutual worth and value. …” … opportunity must be provided, found, or created for freeing such an individual from his “white necessity.” …
Once an attack is made on the enemy status and the individual has emerged, the underprivileged man must himself be status free. It may be argued that his sense of freedom must come first.

Christians whose loyalty to the Prince of Peace puts them out of step with today’s nationalistic world, because they are willing to love their nation’s friends but not to hate their nation’s enemies, are not unrealistic dreamers who think that by their objections they will end all wars. On the contrary, it is the soldiers who think they can put an end to wars by preparing for just one more.

Christians love their enemies because God does so, and commands his followers to do so. That is the only reason, and that is enough.

… Their needles offered oxygen
to victims and executioners, the same.

… as Nature continues
serenely her world-making, in spite
of us if we oppose her, indifferently using us
if we would be her friends.

The new Sun’s gothic nameplate is an exact replica of the old one’s, with the same colophon—an engraving of a sunrise flanked by the goddesses of Justice and Liberty over the slogan “It Shines for All.”

Gold light in blind love does not distinguish
one surface from another, the savor
is the same to its tongue, the fluted
cylinder of a new ashcan a dazzling silver,
the smooth flesh of screaming children a quietness, it is all
a jubilance, the light catches up
the disordered street in its apron,
broken fruitrinds shine in the gutter.

“Wild Geese”

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers

“Sunrise”

… I thought
of China,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun

blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises

under the lashes
of my own eyes …

And the sun gives equally to each
its own shadow, thus establishing
a model for justice, even to the blind
dog a shadow, even to the earth.

Drought and flood affect the wicked and the good alike; the divine power we see exercised with our own eyes … appears to be random, senseless, devoid of moral meaning. (p. 10)

Down the walk from the children who misbehave
The generosity of the trees. These answer
The shouting with shade …

For Epicurus God does not intervene in the world. In operational terms, that is, in terms of reward and punishment, it is as though God does not exist.

Millionaires
Come and drink of this clear water,
And bears.

In happiness
Or sadness,
Weeds grow and grow.

The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella,
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust steals the just’s umbrella.

I put my face close to the lily,, where it stands just above the grass, and give it a good greeting from the stem of my heart.

Once we talked about the life to come.
I took the Bible from the nightstand
and offered John 14: “I go to prepare
a place for you.” “Fine. Good,” he said.
“But what about Matthew? ‘You, therefore,
must be perfect, as your heavenly Father
is perfect.’” And he wept.

… the call to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect was not a call to perfectionism, but an invitation to let ourselves be completed, permeated through and through with the breath of the Spirit that sometimes escaped in shared laughter and sometimes in halting words.

All of them have their place inside eternity. They are perfect—that is to say real: a conclusion not easy to realize. But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

8. THE GARDEN

What I want to know, please, is
what is possible, and what is not.
If it is not, then I am for it.
My heart is out of its flesh-phase
…
A mossy house anyone with any sense would enter
as soon as the soul begins
to desire the impossible.
I have never felt so young.

Everyone is in heaven when he or she has plenty of room for communion and no need for exclusion.

How did the Besht put it? A small Tzaddik loves small sinners; it takes a great Tzaddik to love great sinners. That is a basic principle of Hasidic teaching: our love for our fellow man must resemble God’s; it must aspire to be infinite.