It can be tough to love someone whose views or beliefs oppose your own. It’s tough to love someone you feel has hurt or victimized you. It’s tough to love if someone is not helping you the way you feel they should.
But is there a way to learn to love consistently, in spite of others’ failings? Yes!
One time a friend came to me because she was having a hard time getting along with a relative. While she recited the reasons she couldn’t love him, I was silently praying to know how to help her. I found myself saying, “You don’t love him because of who he is. You love because that’s who you are.”
As we both thought about that idea, she began to see that she could make progress in loving him if she remembered who she was as the expression of divine Love and let go of the mental rehearsal of all of his seeming flaws. It didn’t mean that she was Love’s reflection, God’s child, but he wasn’t. Rather, by starting with a recognition of her own good and limitless nature, she was able to begin understanding her relative’s true nature as well. This brought healing.
St. John, a disciple of Jesus, writes that “God is love” (I John 4:8). Combine that with the fact that we are made in God’s likeness, entirely spiritual and whole, and we realize that we are working against ourselves if we think, speak, write, or act in any way that is un-Love-like.
Christ Jesus is the ultimate example of loving our enemies. His consistency in loving in the face of relentless persecution, mockery, and violence came from his clarity about who he was as God’s Son. He didn’t accept another origin, or a mind or a life that was separate from his Father-Mother God.
Jesus said, “I can of mine own self do nothing” (John 5:30). He understood the Scripture to be absolute truth that says God made man in his image and likeness (see Genesis 1:26). This meant that he was nothing but the likeness of Love and that his enemies were actually brothers and sisters, children of the same divine Parent, Love.
When Jesus’ disciple Peter impulsively cut off the ear of a man who was part of the group that was going to arrest Jesus before his crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus rebuked the violence and immediately restored his ear (see Luke 22:50, 51 and John 18:10, 11). And while on the cross, he asked God to forgive those who had transgressed (see Luke 23:34). He could only have responded in these ways by living the spiritual love that reflected divine Love, God.
Jesus’ conviction that his nature was the expression of his Father-Mother Love, enabled him to resist the temptation to react to evil or resent or retaliate against his enemies. He was able to teach his followers with unflinching sincerity to love their neighbor as themselves, because he himself faithfully demonstrated this precept.
A hymn in the “Christian Science Hymnal: Hymns 430-603” starts, “Forget not who you are, O child of God, / For God demands of you reflection pure” (Mildred Spring Case, No. 475, alt. © CSBD). Remember that you are created to love as Love’s expression.
It really doesn’t matter who or what might tempt us to be less than loving. We love with a healing love because that’s who we are.
