One difficult learning that I struggle with is how loving my enemies and praying for those who persecute me. Linked with that is the prayer to “forgive our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”
I’ve been chewing on a piece by James Alison, “Love Your Enemy: Within a Divided Self” here that my rector shared with me. It gave me a better perspective on what it means to love my enemies, why this is fundamental to my own continuing forgiveness, and how to go about it.
Part of my difficulty with this teaching of Christ, is that I carry a residual misunderstanding of it’s meaning based upon how I most often heard it talked about and interpreted in my life. As Alison says, generally it is either “presented to us as a kind of heroic moral demand, the sort of thing that would make one somehow especially noble, if unworldly.” Or, it is understood simplistically as “Jesus wants you as a doormat.”
Jesus was not, Alison contends, teaching something called “morals”. Rather, he was speaking from complete understanding of who we are and how our “selves” are constituted that we are only now beginning to comprehend. Our identity—our sense of self-- is given to us as we mirror each other in mutual reciprocity. “He knows that we are reciprocally-formed animals; he seems to understand that we are ourselves radically imitative creatures who are very seriously dependent on what others do to us, for what we do.” We are trapped in this cycle of both negative and positive reciprocity that forms our very sense of ourselves over against the other.
God, of course, is not a part of this cycle; God is not part of the same order of being as us. God can hold us in being and loving without reacting against us in any way. And Jesus is showing us how to move out of our reciprocity and to move into relationship with “others” as God does.
The result of this shift, not unimportantly, is our forgiveness of ourselves. It is only in our relationship with others that we have any access to what constitutes us “in here”. “Only by means of a human mirror do we have access to ourselves.” And we can come to see ourselves as forgiven only to the extent that we can see others as forgiven as well.
I could have prayed for years to be able to forgive myself and not got anywhere at all; it was in being able to let the other go, forgive the other, that I began to be able to forgive myself. It is for this reason that I think that telling people that they need to forgive themselves is to place a terrible burden on them. It is to direct them to fruitless introspection and breast beating, since none of us has direct access to what makes us conscious. The only way to forgive yourself is projectively, which is to say, in another person. As you forgive another, so you will find yourself being let go.
This is not easy. In fact, as Alison says, “Living this out is going to look remarkably like a loss of identity, a certain form of death. And living it out as a human is what it is to be a child of God . . . .”
To make this shift, intentions are not enough; this is not an intellectual exercise. For, "it is how we are in relation to others which runs our reason, and not our reason which runs the way we are towards other”. We can’t simply think our way out of this. The act of praying for our enemies is required.
Now I’m fortunate not to have many up close & personal enemies, but there are a great many people out there who push my buttons and whom I perceive as threatening ‘me and mine’. And I rarely really pray for Ann Coulter, Pat Robertson, Bishop Akinola, etc. This is all new to me.
So what would this practice look like? Your suggestions are welcome!
One person related his simple two-stage approach: First, I grit my teeth and force myself to say: “Lord, help me - teach me - to forgive that bastard!" And then gradually over time (and I do mean time, it may take months or even years in some cases) the prayer evolves into something like this: "Lord whatever they are struggling with, wherever they need your help and comfort today - I pray you may grant it to them."
So now my morning and evening prayers will include at least one named person from the “Enemies List”. Who will that be tonight?
