I choose love over hate, because the Author of the story’s not done

By David McElroy · June 12, 2016

We all have a natural inclination to hate those we see as our enemies. We hate those who hate us. We hate those who hurt us. We hate those who threaten us.

The righteous indignation of anger leads to burning hate — and it feels so justified. We’re the ones who are right. Everyone else is wrong. It seems so simple.

Hate is easy. Love is staggeringly difficult.

Hate is the default reaction for all of us, me included. It feels so good and so right to burn with rage at certain people, even if we claim principles that teach love.

Love isn’t a default reaction. Instead, it’s a difficult choice, especially at first. But as you continue to make that choice, you change. Your heart softens and gets bigger. Eventually, love seems like the only viable choice — even though you know it will remain difficult as your choice is tested again and again.

If you read or watch news — something I strongly advise you to avoid — you’ll soon be filled with reasons to hate people, both individuals and groups. Everybody has a good justification for their hate.

“They hated us first.”

“Those people have been killing us for generations.”

“My group has always been oppressed and hated.”

All of the justifications will be true on some level. History is full of groups hating each other. Humans have murdered and stolen from each other, almost always blaming the victims or — even worse — saying, “God told us to do that.”

But I choose to love, even if others choose to hate. I choose to love, even if that doesn’t make sense to you. I’m not trying to convince you to adopt my point of view. I’m just explaining my choice.

Hate hurts the person who’s full of hatred. Even if you don’t call it hate — even if you dress it up as righteous — it still hurts you more than anyone else. It warps your ability to think and feel. You see other people as sub-humans who don’t quite deserve what you and your allies deserves.

Worse, hate hardens your heart. Even if you feel softness toward your own kind — your own allies or group or friends who have been hurt — your heart hardens from rage that makes it hard to be reasonable or rational. You see everything through the lens of your rage and hate. You will end up justifying things which you would have never justified before — taking that attitude that those who “do that sort of thing” or who are of another religion or ethnic group, for instance, deserve whatever bad things happen to them.

Second, I believe there is a Creator who isn’t finished writing the story of the human race. I’m not interested right here in what we call this Creator. I simply know beyond doubt that I’ve experienced a Spirit — God, Creator, Supreme Being, whatever your term is — who is absolute love. I’m counting on what I have experienced, not anybody else’s interpretation of what they believe God is.

If you claim to follow Jesus — as I do — you have no way to follow Him and yet also hate other people. He wasn’t vague about it. In the Sermon on the Mount — in which He preached very clearly about morality — He told His followers to “…love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you….”

That isn’t vague. It didn’t come with an asterisk saying, “Love people unless they’re gay — or Muslim or black or unless they’ve hurt you.”

I’m terrible at obeying Jesus about this. I’m not the example to follow, because I’ve failed so many times. But I’m not going to try to justify the times I’ve failed or seek to create an exception that justifies hate that might be comfortable for me. I’m just going to keep trying to get better at it — by constantly making better choices.

I believe that the Author of life — the Creator of everything — is going to perfect us at some point. I don’t believe that where we are in history is the end. I believe we’re going to learn to love each other and that everything will be peaceful. I don’t expect that anytime soon, but I expect that to happen by the end of the story.

So because I believe hating others damages myself and because I believe a Creator wants me to love in ways that aren’t natural to me, I choose to love.

I don’t pretend that’s always an easy choice. Sometimes you have to separate yourself from people or from information or from certain influences. If those things trigger hate and rage in you, maybe they’re not good for you. Maybe you’ll see the world differently without those things in your life. Maybe if you see the world in a different way, love will seem like the only reasonable choice to make. Maybe.

I can’t make you see the world as I do. That’s hard for me to accept, because I feel as though I should be able to make you see things my way — and you’d surely agree with me.

But I can’t do that.

I can just tell you this is the choice I’m making for myself. I’m betting that love is going to find the way to win.

Hate is easy. Humans have always done it. Love is difficult, but your choice about whether to experience love or hate changes you and it changes your experience of life.

I choose to love — and I believe that’s what makes life worth living.

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Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

Narcissists tend to turn their children into narcissists — and since a narcissist doesn’t realize he or she is a narcissist, there’s no bad intent. How does this happen? I watched a YouTube video over the weekend from an Australian psychologist who does a nice job of summarizing how it works. None of this is new to me, but I thought it was useful for those who haven’t spent years digging through books and articles about it. The same psychologist has an excellent summary of something which confuses a lot of people about narcissism. You’ve all seen examples of the loud, boisterous and overbearing narcissist, but what about the ones who are more introverted and vulnerable? This type is called a covert narcissist (or a vulnerable narcissist), and this is what my father was. In the first video, I strongly see myself in the ways my father treated me and in the second video, I see what my father was almost successful in making me become.

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