Beauty: Love your Enemies.

Last time I had a chance to stand here I started to talk about the idea of Beauty and in particular that Beauty is God’s glory.

We spent some time during that service where we looked through magnifiers at random objects—some which had been picked up from outside the church. Many of us really enjoyed how the mundane became wonder and the ordinary became extraordinary. In those moments the simple piece of “something” became a wonder to behold and we for a moment could catch the beauty all around us.

Scripture is resplendent with the beauty of creation revealing God’s glory and for many of us that is often one of the great witnesses that speaks when we walk in nature, enjoy a sunset or see a magnificent view. 

This is a great gift and a welcome relief especially in terms of its passivity. These revelations of beauty do not ask anything from us, they happen as they are and as they do. They simply stand as testimony to a goodness that stirs us into feeling a part of a divine act. 

So the aesthetics of nature can be a salve for our soul, but I find, and I dare say many of you find it too, that there’s a disconnect with this appreciating of nature when we look at people.

A few weeks ago. I chose the topic of beauty to extract myself from the constant flow of negative news in the last few months. It’s been an onslaught that triggers in me “I just can’t believe what’s going on—how can people be so heartless when it comes to those who are disadvantaged?” How angry I have felt at some people and how every report diminishes them more and more in my mind. 

It was in conversation with Jenny DL that I was deeply challenged. “Can I find beauty in these people I hold with disdain?”

‘You can’t mix politics and religion’ some have said. 

Yeah, nah. Scripture is littered with people mixing their faith in the political sphere. There was nothing more provocative to the powers that be in Jesus time about “Kingdom of God”. But that’s not what I’m actually wanting to talk about directly today. 

I’m still tripping up on Jesus injunction to “love your enemy”. 

The reality is that I don’t have an enemy in the sense that 1st Century Jews did—Rome being the occupying force. But there were smaller sets of enemies as well, religious factions and civil servants who allied with Rome. With the Romans, it was fairly brutal if you stepped out of line. So enemy who controlled sovereignty over your finance, speech and also your freedom of movement to a certain degree.

But I don’t have an enemy like that. There’s no life-or-death threat to me. The worst that happens is that people will get angry with me — but I’m unlikely to have anything physical happen to me or my property. (though the arsons in Masterton this weekend show that even that feeling of safety my be a bit of an illusion).

Not having an enemy per se though doesn’t negate the necessary engagement with that verse, “love your enemies.” 

This is I think the singularly most radical mixing of faith and politics. It doesn’t get harder than this and I’m really wrestling with it.

But then, Fr Chris Loughnan, my elderly Dominican friar friend told be about this story about Thomas Merton. And I need to read it, it comes from Merton’s book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander and it tells of a pivotal moment in his life as a monk.

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realisation that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream.…

I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realise what we all are. And if only everybody could realise this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

It is such a fantastic insight: There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. In the same way that we are each God’s beloved, so too is the person driving past us now, the rough sleepers, the person supervising the automatic checkouts, the bus driver who might be grumpy that day, the person who cut us off in traffic, the politician who is making life hell for beneficiaries, the world leaders who support death and destruction. 

There’s an irony how, when I look with disdain on some of these in the media, in my mind I am turning them into the “least of these” that Jesus talks about. And if my disdain for them turns into  dehumanising contempt, I am diminishing their belovedness. Now I’m not being idealistic here or perhaps I am, but the sweet spot is to despair at the problem without losing sight of their belovedness.  Their belovedness is God’s beauty. As Merton continues:

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. But this cannot be seen, only believed and “understood” by a peculiar gift.

So I must seek the beauty in these people. And if I can’t see it, acknowledge it is there.

Now, I need to say this. In the complicated world we live in, in the contradictions within that, I don’t think the burden for this rests on victims who have been grievously hurt by perpetrators. I sincerely believe there is enough grace and spaciousness in this conversation to take that burden off them—they need to find beauty in something else and run to it rather than be retraumatised. This is a burden for us to carry for you.

As painful as it is then, there is a task for some of us to find the beauty in even the perpetrator and oppressor. 

Here I am informed by Miroslav Volf, who wrote an extraordinarily raw theological reflection in his book Exclusion and Embrace. The opening words of the book:

After I finished my lecture Professor Jürgen Moltmann stood up and asked one of his typical questions, both concrete and penetrating: “But can you embrace a cetnik?” It was the winter of 1993. For months now the notorious Serbian fighters called “cetnik” had been sowing desolation in my native country, herding people into concentration camps, raping women, burning down churches, and destroying cities. I had just argued that we ought to embrace our enemies as God has embraced us in Christ. Can I embrace a nik—the ultimate other, so to speak, the evil other? What would justify the embrace” Where would I draw the strength for it? What would it do to my identity as a human being and as a Croat? It took me a while to answer, though I immediately knew what I wanted to say. “No, I cannot—but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to.” 

Again, there’s the idealism which I appreciate, but victims do not carry the burden of the “should.” However, this is the radical nature of Christs injunction to love your enemies. Finding their belovedness and beauty is key.

To conclude these thoughts on finding beauty in the awful spaces: I quote from Michael Spencer aka Internet Monk who reflects on Merton:

God is love. God loves me. God loves people. I love people. Not a series of “shoulds” and “oughts,” but a discovery of the reality of the Christian God.

While we travel through this life we will see ugliness and it will become hard to see beauty in others, but there is still something of delight to hope for that epiphany when we see everyone around us shining like the sun.

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