Article July 19, 1941 Issue

How Do We Love Enemies?

Nellie B. Mace

In the fifty-fifth Psalm, in his heartfelt outpouring of his sorrows, and of his trust in God, the Psalmist might well have been describing the experience of many another troubled one. He mourned in his complaint "because of the voice of the enemy, because of the oppression of the wicked" who hated him. He longed for "wings like a dove," for then he would fly away and be at rest. And as he more closely scanned his sorrows, he said that it was not an enemy that reproached him, for then he could have borne it; "but it was thou," he said, "a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance." He recalled mournfully how they had taken counsel and walked into the house of God together. Yet he determined constantly to call upon God, for God alone could deliver him from the battle that was against him. And then came to him the comforting assurance, "Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved."

Is not this experience similar to the struggle with fear and grief which, for many, has darkened the heart and the outlook? Indeed, woven into the belief of existence as material is this false sense of enmity. And, as the Psalmist found, the certain release from this oppressive condition is in casting one's burden on the Lord, in trusting in Him, in confiding all one's experience to the sustaining, all-conquering Love which is Life. It would seem that goodness and purity, entertained in one's thinking and living, should protect one from having so-called enemies, but on another occasion the Psalmist prayed, "Remember, Lord, the reproach of thy servants; . . . wherewith thine enemies have reproached . . . the footsteps of thine anointed."

Here, then, is the explanation of enmity. In whatever phase it may appear, in personal strife or opposition, or in its more ghastly forms of warfare, enmity is primarily resistance to good, to God and His idea, man. Christ Jesus encountered this material enmity, knew its unreal nature, and triumphed over it through the understanding of God as the only Mind. So great was his certainty of the supremacy of Love which is God, that he said to his followers, to all who accept the Christ which he revealed and manifested, "Behold, I give unto you power . . . over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you." To have power over the sense of enmity, to release oneself from this stultifying fear of being opposed by evil, one must in his own consciousness abide in the Christ, and must realize the Christly affection which loves because God is Love, the infinite divine Mind.

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