Hate

I am thinking of how much hatred there is in the world, of how often we resort to words and actions filled with hatred to try to change another person, to try to get our way in the world, to try to declare our stance - what we believe is right and wrong. I don't believe that this works.

I think love, the loving of another human being in a relationship, that is the only way true transformation occurs. Only then can minds and hearts be changed and differences and experiences understood. But this is not an easy task.

Just something I am pondering.

While I ponder, here are some quotes on love and hate from those much wiser than I:

Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.
-Coretta Scott King

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.
-Herman Hesse

We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
-Jonathon Swift

Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being "drawn toward." Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one's friends and enemies.

Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. People working today on behalf of women, blacks, lesbians and gay men, the aging, the poor in this country and elsewhere know that making justice is not a warm, fuzzy experience. I think also that sexual lovers and good friends know that the most compelling relationships demand hard work, patience, and a willingness to endure tensions and anxiety in creating mutually empowering bonds.

For this reason loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called "love." Love is a choice -- not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity -- a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh.
-Carter Heyward

And as the priest would say at the end of the service, in the Episcopal church I attended growing up:

Go forth and love one another.


and just one more:

I may be the villain in your story....but I am a good man.
Dr. Richard Webber (Grey's Anatomy)