Challenging Limitations

Last week we talked about Forgiveness and, in the course of that discussion, the question came up (as it often does with these practices), “How do you extend love to someone you dislike? someone who has hurt you or your family? someone who is evil?”

I offered my limited understanding and experience with this concept, but I would like to give you a quote from the book, Awakening Through Love, by John Makransky:

[WARNING – RADICAL CONCEPT AHEAD!]

Those who point to Hitler as reason not to cultivate all-inclusive love, insisting that people who are that evil should never be included in such a wish, do Hitler honor by imitation. To believe that some people do not deserve a wish of love, that they are only to be hated, is the belief that Hitler embraced and took to the extreme. We do not confront someone by joining him. Too often one person’s mindless hatred evokes our own hatred in response, our own inner evil. And rather than acknowledge the fact that we are succumbing to the very evil we oppose, we indulge the self-deception by insisting that the evil in us is the way to confront evil…

To decide that there are some who do not deserve love is the very seed of such evil. If nothing confronts the seed of evil, if nothing radically challenges it, it can grow to colossal proportions of destructiveness while always claiming to represent the good.

In contrast, the instant anyone, anywhere, makes a genuine wish of love for all beings – no matter who those beings think they are or what they think they are doing – in that instant the very seed of good is born in this world and the very source of evil has been decisively confronted. The choice is ours.