Buechner: Love your enemies
“Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.’” Luke 23: 34a.
We have talked a lot about forgiveness, but not as much about loving our enemies. We pray for them, but the loving part is so much more difficult. Frederick Buechner1 reminds us that forgiveness becomes a little more possible when we are around our enemies, when we can look them in the eye. If we try to see a tiny peek into the Christ in them, we are on the starting line for learning to forgive. If we can see how they got that way, how they were hurt and the hurt did not heal, we are around the first bend. More and more we see how wounded they are. We cannot change them. That is for God to do. We can learn from them. We can learn what happens when we do not deal with our own wounds and instead start hurting and wounding others. As we heal, we learn about empathy, caring for others who like ourselves have been wounded.
Forgiveness, especially of our enemies, is an exhausting race to run. Mine is more like a walk, more often a slow walk. I compare it to one Race for the Cure where I finished behind the street cleaners.
But forgiveness is our only option. If we don’t do it, those who harm us are still hurting us. Edward Herbert (the poet George’s brother) wrote, “He that cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself.”
We forget that only grace can break the cycle of ancient hatreds among peoples. This loving part is even harder than forgiveness. We are called to “wish them well.” I think this means seeing their woundedness and how they hurt themselves and finally seeing a bit of the Christ within them.
Buechner believes that forgiveness and loving is easier if we are in contact with the enemy and can face him or her face to face, eye to eye, and seeing a peek of their woundedness that brought them to the place of hurting themselves and others.
A bigger problem is for those we cannot look in the eye. They are no longer around us. WE avoid them. We stay away. We cannot watch them on television.
Henri Nouwen2 keeps reminding us that loving our enemies is part of agape love, it is divine love. It is not within our power to do this. The forgiveness by Jesus from the cross tells us that God’s love has no bounds. For us, loving our enemies must be accomplished by the Holy Spirit within us. Praying for our enemies again may be one of the best ways for the Holy Spirit to work this out within us.
1-Frederick Buechner originally in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words
2 -Henri Nouwen in You Are the Beloved (Convergent Books 2017)
Joanna. joannaseibert.com