Loving enemies and conflict

love your enemies,
pray for those who persecute you…
Matthew 5: 44

Sometimes we think that if we love we will have no enemies. But loving enemies, loving the stranger, may bring us enemies, may cause us to find ourselves opposed to those who seek to demonize the enemy, the stranger.

Love can bring us conflict, but this conflict can be healthy. As Frederick Douglas (who died on February 20, 1895), said in an 1857 speech:  As Bruce Adams wrote in “Building Healthy Communities,” commenting on Frederick Douglas,

I am not trying to abolish conflict. There is great value in healthy conflict. And the dangers of group-think are real. Conflict can inspire creative leadership. Where there are fundamental conflicts over values, they should not be ignored in a sentimental yearning for consensus. The problem in our communities today is not that we have conflict, but that we manufacture conflict and exaggerate differences to the point where it is very difficult to make meaningful change. Too often we abandon basic civility and cannot disagree without questioning the motives of our adversaries. Our standard as we debate should be similar to doctors’ Hippocratic Oath: “Do no harm.” Disagree, but don’t tear the community apart as you do.

I often find it hard to really feel good about disagreeing with someone. I sometimes prefer “peaceful coexistence,” even in the face of a serious disagreement. But real love is not afraid of conflict. In fact, real love – which includes real respect for the other – should welcome conflict and find ways to make of conflict a step to greater community.

This week I spent three days in the Gracias, Lempira, jail for a workshop on Alternatives to Violence where we tried to learn how to facilitate workshops on that theme, finding ways to deal effectively and lovingly with conflict. It was not easy and is not easy. But experiencing the workshop with five persons in jail refreshed my spirit and gives me the hope that I can truly love the enemy in the face of conflict – even the enemy within!

 

Martin Luther King and Revolution

Forty three years ago today, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., U.S. civil rights leader, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and champion of nonviolence, was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. One year before he was killed he gave an extraordinary speech, “Beyond VietNam,”  in which he laid out his opposition to the war, noting the roots of war. Sadly his words still ring true, a challenge to US policy and aspects of US culture:

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military “advisors” in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken — the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

These words – including the historical references to Latin America – are still relevant in light of the US military, political, and economic presence in Latin America, including Honduras where I minsiter.

I pray that the United States listens to these words of a prophet – but, as Jesus lamented in today’s Gospel, John 4: 44, “No prophet is recognized in his own country.”

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The full version of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s speech – titled “Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence, can be found, with a recording of the speech, here.

Conflict and civility

I, like many people, don’t like conflict. I like to have everything calm and peaceful, but conflict is a part of life, at times a necessary part.

Frederick Douglas (1817-1895), escaped slave, abolitionist, author, died on February 20, 1895. In a speech in 1857 he said:

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.
“I am not trying to abolish conflict. There is great value in healthy conflict. And the dangers of group-think are real. Conflict can inspire creative leadership. Where there are fundamental conflicts over values, they should not be ignored in a sentimental yearning for consensus. The problem in our communities today is not that we have conflict, but that we manufacture conflict and exaggerate differences to the point where it is very difficult to make meaningful change. Too often we abandon basic civility and cannot disagree without questioning the motives of our adversaries. Our standard as we debate should be similar to doctors’ Hippocratic Oath: ‘Do no harm.’ Disagree, but don’t tear the community apart as you do. “

Pope John Paul II, in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus also saw the value of conflict:

“The Pope does not, of course, intend to condemn every possible form of social conflict. The Church is well aware that in the course of history conflicts of interest between different social groups inevitably arise, and that in the face of such conflicts Christians must often take a position, honestly and decisively. The Encyclical Laborem exercens [of Pope John Paul II] moreover clearly recognized the positive role of conflict when it takes the form of a ‘struggle for social justice’; Quadragesimo anno [of Pope Pius XI] had already stated that ‘if the class struggle abstains from enmities and mutual hatred, it gradually changes into an honest discussion of differences founded on a desire for justice’.”

And so, let conflict flourish when it leads to justice, but let it be civil – and, if it is heated, let it be “generously angry,” a felicitous phrase from George Orwell’s reflection on Charles Dickens:

“When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer…. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.”