I’m blogging about Martin Luther King’s Strength to Love. Each post can be read independently, but if you’re interested, previous installments are here. Unless otherwise noted, emphasized passages are Dr. King’s.
Chapter five – Loving your enemies
Another one of the chapters written while Dr. King sat in a Georgia jail. “Let us be practical,” he writes, “and ask the question, How do we love our enemies?”
“How,” indeed. I often say about Israelis and Palestinians (and anyone else whose relationship is controlled by hate) that the search for a kumbaya co-existence is at least occasionally wrong-headed. I don’t need to love or even like the Palestinians to recognize that they are deserving of human dignity — and I would be wise, I think, to not wait for the Palestinians to love me before trying to stop the killing.
But Dr. King is not talking about what we usually talk about when we use the word “love”:
The meaning of love is not to be confused with some sentimental outpouring. Love is something much deeper than emotional bosh….
First of all: “Emotional bosh”? I love these little moments where you can hear the humor and the intensity behind the carefully measured words. (My favorite example is in chapter three, when King ponders where the priest and Levite may have been going when they fail to stop for an injured man: “Perhaps they were on their way to an organizational meeting of a Jericho Road Improvement Association.”)
But more importantly, Dr. King now reminds us of three Greek words that translate to “love” but mean very different things: eros, philia, and agape:
[When we feel philia] we love those whom we like, and we love because we are loved…. [But agape is] understanding and creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. An overflowing love which seeks nothing in return, agape is the love of God operating in the human heart.
King often uses the word “creative,” and here I find it especially compelling. This love that we must feel for our enemies is neither passive nor detached — it’s “creative.” It not only refuses to go further down the cavernous hole of hatred, it builds up. It creates something where before the vista was “unformed and void” (Gen. 1:2).
And neither is it an act of ignorance. King’s immediate response to his own question (“how do we love our enemies?”) is clear: “First we must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive.” [emphasis mine]
Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship…. It is the lifting of a burden or the cancelling of a debt.
I’m reminded of Kol Nidre, the annual ritual with which Jews open Yom Kippur: Religious vows that we might regret (the prayer dates back to a time when Jews were sometimes forced to convert to Christianity) are forgiven en masse. The debt to our faith is cancelled – gone. But we cannot go on to pray for atonement and a renewal of God’s presence in our lives until that debt has been removed.
“Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer,” though, “the command to love one’s enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival.”
Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that…. We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate; we get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity.
“Of course,” Dr. King acknowledges from deep within the segregated American south, with its Whites Only signs and its police torture, “this is not practical.”
My friends, we have followed the so-called practical way for too long a time now, and it has led inexorably to deeper confusion and chaos.
For the salvation of our nation and the salvation of mankind, we must follow another way.
Emily L. Hauser - In My Head 