A Home With No Hate

my reflections in the aftermath of political violence

Photo by Courtney Hedger on Unsplash

Today I’m thinking about hatred, and violence, and the celebration of violence that hatred breeds. What concerns me is that hatred is never spent. It doesn’t burn itself out. It is a destructive spiritual fire that can only be extinguished individually, by cultivating neighborly love, if a person is able to recognize the battle within themselves and find the willingness to engage their heart and mind in a refusal to feed it. But the fires burning around us, the hatred outside of ourselves, cannot be persuaded into peace or compelled into kindness. They can only be contained by intelligent, circumspect, communal action that holds peace and justice as its central aim.

The degree of division in our country, the depths of antipathy manifesting in individuals today, especially online, and particularly after yesterday’s assassination attempt on former president/now candidate Trump, is shocking. It seems we are no longer Americans in any functional sense. National unity has become relegated to a comforting memory of our past, a steadfast hope for our future. But today, there is no general belonging in America. No sense of being united as citizens together. Whatever belonging that exists is to color groups — Red or Blue (or Purple) — or into analogous identity groups that are culturally coded and signaled by flags. Even our nation’s flag, the Stars and Stripes, has become so coded that only Americans of a certain mind feel a personal connection to it, a comfortable pride in flying it.

Where does this all lead?

In the first election season in which Donald Trump campaigned for the White House, the (in)famous “Hate has no home here” signs first emerged, blooming in yards all across the “blue” corner of eastern Montgomery county Pennsylvania, in which I live. These signs were a stand against Trump and his perceived message by those who saw him as an agent of chaos, a threat to America’s ideals and moral order. Many of those signs remain in place eight years later. So I cannot help wondering, in the aftermath of the news and images of yesterday. . . what was the reaction inside those homes to the attempt on Trump’s life? Shock and horror? Concern, not just for the victims, but for the target of the violence? Concern for what it reveals about the health of our nation? Or. . . was there any quiet (or open) disappointment that the shooter missed? The wrong person died. Was there the slightest pang of an opportunity missed?

The central issue, to my mind, and despite the desperate state of American politics, is not, at core, our disagreement over who is best suited to lead our nation, which candidate “must win” in order to “save our democracy.” My concern on this day following an attempted assassination is not about who is the better person to be elected president and/or who really might do the most harm in that role (as “harm” is subjectively understood). To my mind, people with those yard signs should feel zero obligation to defend Trump’s candidacy or to approach the prospect of him back in the White House as being unworthy of a true fight — a political fight — to defeat him. They have every right as citizens — and moral agents — to whatever fear or revulsion they feel at the thought of a second Trump administration, and to act within the law to oppose him.

No, the question that I am concerned with today regarding the sign owners (or sympathizers) is: What does yesterday mean to you? Would you wish Trump out of the running to the point that his death at the hand of another would feel acceptable? Would it assuage your fears, or multiply them? Satisfy your sense of moral justice, or challenge it? Would you, at any level of your being, be okay with his murder?

I’m guessing for many sign holders — hopefully most — the answer is no. The deliberate ending of a life is too far beyond the pale, even — or especially — for politics. For those for whom the answer is yes, even an equivocal or reluctant one, the yard sign may be serving an unexamined lie, as there is nothing within true neighborly love that reflects, or shares, the energy of hate — murderous destruction. Or its justification.

And yet, when something good and precious — for example, love for one’s country, or the future of one’s children or grandchildren — is being threatened or harmed, the zeal that arises within a caring person to defend and protect can look very much like the anger that rises from thwarted self-interest, from egoism run amok. The key to understand, is that underneath that similar appearance the difference between them is stark. To wit:

When the zeal born from a love for something good and true is satisfied — when protection is achieved, the threat of harm removed — the anger vanishes. The zealous fervor ends. It does not linger in gratifying fantasies of revenge or in simmering resentment, in mockery or schadenfreude. Love is known by its gentle nature, its energy towards connection: mercy, compassion, empathy, forgiveness. Love that is genuinely righteous, that connects us to its Source, does not wish harm to its enemies. Certainly it wishes an end to the harm those enemies perpetrate. Yet it also wishes the salvation of their souls, which is to say, an end to the harm they are doing to themselves. It wishes them peace and joy.

Only hatred, including in its most cunning disguise as virtue — as righteous concern for goodness — holds within itself the punitive desire for utter destruction, for annihilation of whatever threatens, for the suffering of the perpetrator. It seeks vengeance.

The ubiquity of this human experience is at the center of Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous realization about our human spiritual journey:

In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains. . . an un uprooted small corner of evil.

In other words. . . we are all in the same boat, guilty in our own ways, and to various degrees. Innocent in others. Yet all equally responsible to seek this line within ourselves. To learn to recognize the feelings that flow from each side and staunch the bloodlust of the one, however virtuously veiled, while fostering, amplifying, the beauty of the other. Again — within ourselves. The moment we shift our attention to investigating or trying to hold that line in others, we lose sight of the mote in our own eye. We step off our only path forward.

Jesus also warned us that “wide is the gate and broad is the way” that leads to destruction and there are many who go in by it, while “narrow is the gate and difficult is the way” which leads to life, and few find it. In other words, indulging egoism, with its self-protective hatreds, is the easiest and most popular route for the human heart to follow. The harder, less traveled road is that of humbling and softening our heart. One road entices us into self-destruction. The other forges us into vessels for joy. Jesus’ point here was not that we should focus on the gates, spend our energy policing each others’ choices. But rather, that we should attend our own steps, orient ourselves to love for one another with its requisite challenge to show mercy and compassion, empathy and forgiveness, often and abundantly. He is speaking to our higher selves which know where the dividing line is, when we pause to seek awareness.

So my prayer as we navigate this newly unsettling period of political tumult and cultural division, is that all Americans who value peace, who seek justice, who prize truth, will gather together on the path of neighborly love and commit, individually, to the difficult journey of honest self-reflection and courageous spiritual inventory. May we each attune ourselves to the voices of good and evil — heaven and hell — whispering within our hearts; may we distinguish their opposing energies and increasingly learn to spot — and spurn — those alluring hooks of righteous hate. May we heed the call of zeal, that desire to defend goodness without aggression, and may we discover ourselves in company with a myriad other souls, all humbly engaged in building true community, a home with no hate, for anyone.