Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge
against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself: I am the LORD.
What do we want most from others for ourselves? Mercy.
I am human and I make mistakes. A lot of them. Not being God and, therefore, not being
perfect, I am bound to have flaws, to get things wrong, and to do things that I
wish I wouldn’t do. Sometimes, as I am
responding to my loved one, I will hear the words coming out of my mouth and
wish them back just as they hit the air.
My words can be mean – petty, spiteful, downright cruel. And in that moment, with my murderous speech
hanging between the two of us, my heart drops down into the pit of my stomach
and I hold my breath, begging silently for mercy.
It’s not often that the dagger slashes of my tongue
are received with warmth and kindness – okay, not ever. My loved one feels the pain, I hurt her, I
hurt him, and the love they feel for me gets locked down inside of them and
they harden with anger, putting up their defenses, whipping out weapons of
their own. Often, in the deadly
speechlessness of their heavy, raging sigh, arrows shoot out their eyes and I
feel myself cowering. But I don’t
cower. I don’t apologize or try to
console or make it up somehow. I just
want – need – to be forgiven. More than
anything I want to be spared the wrath of vengeance I have spurred.
Yet… What do I do when someone is mean to me? What do I do when someone’s rash words cause
me pain or, worse, when someone’s willful act of cruelty slices through
me? I’ll tell you what I do – I give it
right back. They say hell hath no fury
like a woman scorned and I well believe it.
Though, to be fair and clear, I have inherited from my father a violence
of temper unmatched by my mother’s in tamed and deep-seated force. Please don’t misunderstand me – my family is
not physically violent in any way. I
thank God there is no abuse of that kind in my home. Even if, however, our angry responses don’t
rise to the level of abuse, physical or verbal, we still find ways to seriously
hurt each other. The only thing that saves
us from dysfunction and despair is the depth of our love – not only for each
other, but also for ourselves. We know
how to be cruel, but we also know how to be merciful.
To “love thy neighbor as thyself” is to follow the
golden rule by treating one’s fellow human beings the way that one wants to be
treated oneself. If we want to be
forgiven by our loved ones when we say or do things to hurt them, then we
should be ready to forgive them when they hurt us. We react and respond too often out of anger,
frustration and irritation. We let our
fears get the best of us and we irrationally take it out on the people who love
us the most. We are sorry when we do
this, sometimes right away, sometimes several days later, and sometimes not
until our loved ones show us the harm that we have done. We bump against and batter each other,
causing damage. Efforts to minimize the
friction and to repair the breaks and dents are good. But, really, sometimes a person can be so
hurt by another’s willful act of cruelty that only God can repair the damage. My friend, who has suffered from every kind
of abuse, once told me that there are some wounds that only God’s love can
heal.
It’s God’s healing love that we truly want more
than anything. We want that divide
between flawed humanity and perfect divinity to be bound up so that we may know
wholeness. To be who we are created to
be, we cannot wallow in worldliness, we cannot inflict each other – and so
inflict ourselves – with vengeance and destruction and violent dominance. We must look past pain to the source of all
joy. Every tongue lashing is the
scourging agony of a whipped back. Every
act of selfishness is the piercing of a crown of thorns. Every cruel twist is a spike driven through
the flesh. God knows.
To stand one’s ground in the face of cruelty is not
an act of unkindness. To let the mean
one know the pain that the meanness is causing is the right and kind thing to
do. But, what is one’s ground? Is it vengeance? Is it to give back as good as one gets? Or is one’s ground love? When my loved one meets my cruel words with
silence and a look that tells me how wrong I was, I feel more penitence than I
do when my unkindness is met with matching rage. There’s something within me that will not
allow me to learn or grow or improve under force and aggression. That something is the divine image in which I
am created. That something is my
soul. I was created by God with the gift
of free will. I was created by God to
reflect divinity into the world. Not to
reflect my own self, my offended pride, my insulted ego – but divinity, I am
made to reflect God. I am fearfully and
wonderfully made, exquisitely beautiful in the eyes of the Infinite Eternal One
and I will love myself as He loves me. I
will love my God-given ability to love, I will love my God-given capacity to
forgive, I will love the gift of healing that God has given me. And then, and only then, will I love,
forgive, and heal. I am not the
Lord. I shall not lord myself over
anyone. I shall receive, rather, the
Lordship of God deep in my heart and through my whole being, becoming the
person that the LORD created me to be.
Merciful. Merciful is God, giving
me perfect love when I do not deserve it.
And merciful am I created to be.
To forgive is to not forget that another person is
capable of cruelty, but, rather, to remember that I am likewise capable. To forgive is not to condone the hurtful
behavior of another person, but, rather, to foster love and healing behavior
within me – and so the world. To forgive
is to receive and share God.
Christina Chase
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