III. The Fear of Redemption, P 3
3 In honesty, is it not harder for you to say “I love” than “I hate”? You associate love with weakness and hatred with strength, and your own real power seems to you as your real weakness. For you could not control your joyous response to the call of love if you heard it, and the whole world you thought you made would vanish. The Holy Spirit, then, seems to be attacking your fortress, for you would shut out God, and He does not will to be excluded.
Journal
Is it harder for me to say I love you than for me to say I hate you? I think that may be true. It has been shifting, and I say I love you more often, and I mean it. But I still feel resistance sometimes, especially if I feel attacked. I don’t use the word “hate” not out loud and not even in my mind. But I mean it. I even feel that way toward people I love at times.
Yesterday, I said something that triggered a response in my daughter. I apologized but she didn’t want to let it go and I started to feel guilty for my thoughtlessness. Instead of being loving, I was sarcastic. That sarcasm was just another way of saying, I hate you for making me feel bad. Then, of course, I felt worse. When I feel threatened at work, I respond with hateful thoughts. When I catch that, I ask for help to see differently, but I see that I choose defense first many times.
The idea that I need to protect this body, this image, this life, is what inspires the desire to attack and what provokes the hateful responses. As long as I keep defending and attacking, I will not be willing to hear the call to Love. When I defend myself against my brothers I defend against union, and so I defend myself against God because God is not division. My strength lies in God. In my defensiveness I am choosing weakness over my own power.
Another way to say this is that we know, deep within a hidden place in our mind, that the only way we can keep ourselves from responding joyfully and eagerly to God’s Call to Love, is to defend against it. We protect ourselves from this Call by convincing ourselves that guilt and fear are real, and that we must defend against them. So we have made a false association between hate and safety. In so doing, we have cut ourselves off from our true power which is love. Since we believe attack is our salvation, we have taught ourselves to see God as the enemy Who would destroy us with His love.
Understanding this, I feel more compassion for those who act out of fear. I can think of the man who killed all those people in Orlando and realize that he is unlike me only in that he acted on the fear and hate that is also in my mind. I can help us all if I ask that my mind be healed of hate, and that I open to love instead. Each time we see hate in our mind and allow it to be transformed by the Holy Spirit, we undo this insane thought system a bit more, and sanity becomes more attractive to us. We fear less and love more. We open to God a bit more and are more attracted to His love.
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