Them That Hate Me

Cycles of violence … Who hates God? 

Exodus 20:5

Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;

Who hates God?  The easy answer that comes to mind might be atheists.  But, of course, a true atheist doesn’t believe in the existence of God – how can someone hate something that doesn’t exist?  Satanists are another group of people that we could point to and say that they hate God.  Certainly with their creed, their words and their rituals, they seek to align themselves with the mystical enemy of God and eschew all things upright and wholesome.  But… I would wager that most Satanists in action, in the world and in their families, are no less destructive and unwholesome than some who profess to believe in God.  Oh, there are certainly Satanists who choose evil deeds, who hate and curse and torture and kill.  But, are there not God believing people who do the same, calling on a different name?

How many Muslims, how many Christians, how many peoples throughout history around the world have preached and practiced acts of violence and cruelty in the name of their gods?  Enough to make a person think about wanting to be an atheist – indeed, some want-to-be influential people, like Bill Maher, for one example, blame all the wars that humans have fought on religion.  However, in all truth and reason, we can clearly see that wars arise from ideologies – which often claim no god.  Stalin’s communist regime was one of the most brutal in history and he did not systematically kill for the honor of any god, for he was an atheist.  He was vicious and destructive for himself, for power and greed (maybe even for his own amusement) for the sake of his way of looking at things, his ideology.  And is that not the true cause of every war?  Is not the real reason humans are bent on cruelty and domination that they want to be?  Wars are fought by individual soldiers in trenches and on front lines who may very well have loving reasons for being there – but wars are instigated and created by people who want what they want and will gladly have killed or destroyed anyone who they think gets in the way.  Even smaller-scale acts of violence – the cold-blooded murder of a girlfriend, the rape of a stranger, the lethal shooting of a dozen kids in a school – are not caused by religion.  Man’s cruelty to man has nothing to do with the love and worship of God.

The people who hate God are the people who hate other people.  For every person is created in God’s image.  If you hate anyone in the world – even if you hate the most horrible and vilest of persons – you hate God.  We often think that it is right and good to hate evil doers.  We laud all talk of destroying the enemies of freedom and justice.  Although it is true that anyone who is an enemy of true freedom and true justice is choosing to go against the ways of God, if we choose to hate that hate-filled person, then we, too, are choosing to go against God’s ways.  Christ said, “You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”  God does not close off divine mercy from anyone – and neither should we.  For, if we are to live as we were created to live, we must strive to do as God does and struggle to walk in the ways of mercy and selflessness – of real love.

Yes, people do horrendous things and claim to do them for the love of God – but that’s not really love.  Or, perhaps more accurately, that’s not really God.  It’s very easy to think of God as meting out pain and vicious punishment on those who would seek to go against Him.  The Bible has many, many verses that tell of God’s wrath and vengeance and the hurt He puts upon His enemies.  In the verse from Exodus 20, about the Commandment against worshiping false idols God says, “I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand [generations] of those who love me and keep my commandments.”  What we often think of as God’s willfully wrathful punishment, however, is, I believe, simply the natural consequences of our own willfully wrathful choices.  Do we not know that violence begets violence and those who live by the sword die by the sword?  Do we not see the rational truth of this in the world, even in our everyday lives?  It doesn’t mean that the One and Almighty God will smite anyone who seeks to worship through a religion other than the one and only one prescribed by Him.  If it did, God might welcome arguments that escalate into violence about which religion is the true religion – but, God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”  God gives us freewill and allows us to freely choose, pouring His love and mercy upon each and every one of us, relentlessly.  That loving mercy can feel like eternal pain to those who never want to receive it, not even in the last moments of their lives; or it can feel like eternal sunshine and grace to those who long for the forgiveness and love of God.

If a child is taught to hate by his parents, he will usually become a hater.  If his child, then, is taught to destroy the hated ones, then he will usually become destructive.  The person in the family who first chose, in freewill, to hate a human being or human beings, who first saw cruel domination as a good, set up a cycle of hate, a cycle of violence, that is, as we know, very difficult to break.  But, then, there are those people who willfully choose to have mercy.  Though, sometimes, they are punished by the hating people, their acts of kindness and selflessness do not go unseen.  Their true love, that choice to walk in divine ways, inspires others for generations upon generations upon generations… as are the saints of old, and new, ever inspiring, ever celebrated even after 2000, 5000 years.  And their individual lives do not end with the death of their limited bodies, their self-centered thinking, as do the lives of those who hate God by hating human beings – the lives of those who love God by selflessly loving human beings are as eternally beautiful as the Beautiful One, Who Is Eternal Love.

 

Christina Chase

All Rights Reserved

 

Departed

I would like to say that I am innocent… But I am not.

Psalms 18:21

For I have kept the ways of the LORD, and have not wickedly departed from my God.

When I was nine years old, I was a thief.  Not only did I steal gulps of wine with my friend from the kitchen (warm alcohol in a Mickey Mouse tumbler) and grams of chalk dust from the school gym supply (folding it up in some paper and sticking it inside my wheelchair while waiting for the short bus to come and take me home) and various small things – construction paper, carbon, broken chalk – that I wanted and I judged no one would miss… but I also stole knowledge.  At the end of third grade, I was allowed to stay inside with my friend Beth for recess one day and we decided to open our teacher’s desk drawer and find that secret list.  A secret list existed near the close of every school year with the names of the teachers that each student would receive the next year.  We all wanted to know what classroom we would end up in – would we get our favorite teacher, would our friends be with us?  But, that information, as I recall, was never shared until the summer.  Beth and I didn’t want to wait.  We wanted to know.

 

If memory serves, I was the one who instigated and told Beth to do it.  Being physically limited, I was used to “bossing people around”.  Not only did we find out who we would have for teachers, but also who our friends, and people with whom we would like to be friends, were going to have.  Before the end of the school day, we whispered the secrets to everyone that we could.  Eventually, other kids in other classrooms let it slip that they knew – and when asked where they had heard the news, directed authorities to Mrs. B’s class.  Mrs. B made us all put our heads upon our desks until the guilty party, or parties, confessed the crime.  I did not raise my head.  I did not say a word.  And neither did Beth.  Mrs. B couldn’t keep us there forever, we had to go home.  But, as we were lining up to leave, a boy in my class told Mrs. B that I was the one who had told him, that I was the one who had stolen the list.  My teacher looked down at me and I looked up at her with my big brown eyes.  I remember myself mumbling something about Beth, ready to throw her under the bus – we really weren’t that close anyway – but Mrs. B had poor hearing.  She just regarded me through her glasses, her bright red lips extra thin and tight.  But, then her face softened.  She didn’t believe the boy.  She didn’t believe that I could do something so wrong.  To her, and to most everyone as I would find out in my life, I was an innocent.

 

Indeed, this may seem like a small and innocent offense – what real harm was done?  But, the harm was to my classmates who were all under the shadow of suspicion, for that afternoon with their heads down in the dark and silence, and, for all I know, for the rest of Mrs. B’s life.  And the harm was done to my relationship with Beth, for we never did get close.  Perhaps she overheard my mumbled ratting or perhaps the guilt was just too much for me.  And the greatest harm, I know, was to myself.  For I showed myself, in this incident, my true colors.  Thievery was easy to me and I honestly felt no guilt about that.  I was even proud.  Proud that me, who everyone thought was a little angel in a wheelchair, could commit such an act that got the whole third-grade buzzing.  The fact that I so blatantly got away with it just added to my happiness over the whole event.  But… what I was willing to do to Beth… how I was willing to hide behind the cloak of innocence with which my wheelchair draped me while pointing my finger at her….  I was not a good friend.  This is not only a crime against someone whom I considered a friend, this was, and I say this most seriously, a crime against God.  Sneaky, deceptive, smarmy, and proud of myself, I was bolstered up for many years by the memory of this robbed knowledge.  It was not merely the ignorant act of a child.  For, was there not some innocence in Eve when she simply wanted to gain wisdom, as I simply wanted to know?  And, was there not also pride and greed at grasping for something higher than herself, to put herself at the level of a superior?  And was there not shameful finger-pointing, a desperate attempt to inflict any punishment that she deserved away from herself and onto a co-conspirator?  Wasn’t Adam, too, guilty of this last crime, this greatest crime: willfully inflicting harm upon another in an attempt to hide from the consequences coming justly to oneself?

 

To escape justice, the first humans had to hide themselves from one another – to hide themselves from God.  But… there is no hiding from God.  And don’t I know that, too!  Knowledge thief that I am, did I not dare to proclaim that there is no such thing as God and devote myself entirely to a godless life with myself as the center of a meaningless universe?  No, I never committed murder in that life – although I did strangle my soul’s promptings and suffocate my own spiritual nature.  I did not steal – but I had already hijacked my own reason.  And I did not commit adultery or anything like that – although I did desecrate the temple of my body.  I broke the ways of the Lord by departing from my God.  From truth.  From real love.  From life itself.  And though this willful act was not committed through wickedness, I was still far from the truth of my identity as a being lovingly Created in divine image; I had banished myself far from the tree of life and the reality of reality.

 

Forever east of Eden, we thieves of knowledge go – and the innocent truth of who we really are, we can’t get to know.  There, but for the grace of God, would I, ever seeking, lie; it’s grace that’s brought me home again… I cannot hide from I.

Christina Chase

 

With Open Face Beholding

Lord, change me, make me new.  Make me like you!  – the plea of the sunflower.

2 Corinthians 3:17-18

Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.

But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the LORD.

There is a flower in my garden which is named for the sun.  In appearance, much like the sun is she, golden arrayed, burning bright from the center with flaming colors outward spread.  But there is more – much more meaning to her identity, because with the sun her whole existence is so lovingly aligned.

She does not mean to mimic or fool by merely sporting appearance – for what bird would dare to perch upon an orb of fire, and, so, what would she have to gain if she would scare away her own propagators, the midwives of her progeny with which she will be so heavy pregnant?  She is humble and knows that she is merely a creature bound to the life-giving sun, and by no means desires to be a substitute.  Yes, she stands tall and bold, but her height and breadth is but a measure of the depth of her humility, for her only wish, as far as a flower can wish, is to look up to that which she adores.  It is the looking up that has raised her.  It is the love of heavenly light that has opened wide her green-leafed arms.  It is her submission to her Master that has given her flowery majesty.

For, all day long, while the sun shows forth his open face, shining full with glory, her rapturous gaze is all caught up in him.  Every minute of every hour that passes, she faithfully follows his path with steadfast love.  No matter what may come between them, whether mist or cloud or dark of night, it is him she always seeks, it is him that her hope will always find.  Some dark days will fall, when a downpour may weigh her head too heavy to lift, but when the rays of the sun are visible again, the drops will slip from down her sunny cheeks and she will pay them no mind, not even to shake them away.  She looks upon the sun again, never having lost him, for she has kept the thought and memory of him, the warmth of the gift that he has given, deep in her heart.  Yes, even when the sun slips over the edge of sight and pulls the veil of night down behind him, she is patient and trusting, and does not collapse in the darkness.  Her head she bends down low – but not in despair, for one who loves as she loves can never hold despair – but in ever recognition of where her beloved lives.  Though invisible to her petal eyes, her heart is not deceived and senses, with true love’s faith, his presence beneath the surface of the world.  And so her vigilant gaze, ever fixed upon its deathless source, follows him as he shines on realms unknown and unseen, far from his touch get ever near to his soul.  And when the night is opened slow, with tender, aching rush, the sun’s rays find her ready face, expectant in faith, and she receives anew the outpouring love of him whom she adores.

From this cause, then, is this flower called for the sun.  He is her love, her reason, and her destiny.  Her blossomy pledge of devotion is her very blossoming – and she is transformed by and into the one whom she loves.

Christina Chase