It’s odd, but watching a documentary about the Westboro Baptist Church, (who own the God Hates America website among other credits), got me thinking about the role of hatred and resistance in my life. Normally I watch things like that, and have this gut wrenching hatred and anger that swells up at the harm that they are causing, not only to themselves, but to the unnamed population of kids and adults who don’t fit the straight christian lifestyle. It only gets worse when they throw in the word ‘fag’, one of a few slurs that make my body cringe every time they’re used. But I sat there, sometimes with my eyes closed because it was too hard to look at the main guy’s face, and it wasn’t making me angry. Rather, I was feeling compassion toward these people. Something that was incredibly odd to begin with, but especially of people that I view as abusing and twisting religion to suit their own selfish desires.
Thus, I took a moment to study what was happening to me, and this one incident began to place some other things in perspective. I found out recently about another in a longer chain of backstabbing abuses commited by some former colleagues of mine. I left my position as Sales Manager because I wasn’t able to mix with these two people, and at the time was very angry at having to do so. I wanted to blame them for all of it, of course. But as time went on, I began to first not care, and then to work through what had happened, and try to glean from it what I could; to grow in whatever areas I had been deficient. Still, to discover that even after I had quit, they persisted in maligning my character was too much at first. I kind of went numb all over. Afterward, as I began to face what I was feeling, I realized I wanted so badly to hate them. I wanted so badly to revile them, but I couldn’t.
In truth, I felt bad for them, and not in a superior way. Both of them had to make a very similar choice to the one I made a year ago; to leave the company and seek employment somewhere better suited for them. One of them has children to feed and cloth, and the other a long history of sorrow and pain. So in the midst of my simple desire to hate them, I instead found myself feeling almost love for them. If I had to name it, then compassion, universal human compassion. Suddenly the Buddhist teachings made so much more sense to me. In my desire to be angry I found instead the realization that I couldn’t hate, I had to love them. Not to make me sound wonderful, just that I actually tried, and failed in my task of hatred.
At some point in the weekend the idea of peaceful resistance came and went through my mind. It was the contradiction in the words themselves that caught my attention. I grew up Mennonite, and therefore still have very strong aversion to violence; yet I do not deny it’s place in the normal operation of society and the world. My ability to publish this is wholly dependent on the violent efforts of my ancestors, and even the contemporary efforts of my peers. But, the notion of resisting without violence had always been a nice idea, something to balance the need for the other. As the news of my maltreatment lingered, this was the belief that somehow came to be challenged. The link still escapes me, but I followed the thread to see where it would go.
Nowhere. At least, not initially. I don’t even remember being able to make anymore sense of it until I sat down to the program today and the numbness didn’t’ come. The anger wasn’t there, and this compassion that I thought was singular, seemed to have become more universal all of the sudden. I can’t cry, that ability seems to have left my emotional reach. But I do tear up just slightly on a few occasions. When someone sacrifices themselves for another, fictional or otherwise, especially if it’s a soldier; but also during these kinds of documentaries. I just feel so overpowered by the injustice of it, by the horribly monstrous attempts to vilify and invalidate another human beings existence. Those are angry tears, and they didn’t come.
This was it; the final piece in the burgeoning puzzle created by my uncharacteristic reactions. As I watched them protest all sorts of odd and honestly perplexing things, I wondered how I might ‘get back’ at them. Nothing. In fact, there is only acceptance and peace. Not acceptance as in turning away and ignoring it; the secular definition useful for the peaceable co-existence of conflicting viewpoints. This is an inclusive, supportive, acceptance that finds not a viewpoint, but a human being; and in finding that human being, loves them without condition. There was nothing to be done, not in resistance to them. I had to simply let my heart go and seek out the individual beyond the hate filled words and angry masks.
I suppose then, on a larger scale, this leads me to rethink a lot of those peaceful ideas I had clung to in childhood. Resisting is violent, it’s against the flow of things. I discovered a certain pleasure and success in doing so this weekend as well. As a kind of counter-weight to the path I’ve just explained, I also had some problems with a friend and finally just plainly addressed it, not exactly confrontationally, but very much direct; definitely not in the water flowing downhill way that I normally use. Also for a job that wasn’t getting back to me, I sent a direct and strongly worded email, getting an almost immediate response. Thus these two conflicting things were floating around my head at the same time.
I’ve not reached some amazing realization about all of it yet, but I do see some interesting things that I had ignored or failed to see before. Where I had assumed that these horrors wrought by religion required resistance, I find instead that they require compassion and acceptance. Yet, there is this piece to action that requires violent resistance, even in my own life. And all the while I hate doing it. My very being rejects the idea of it. But my being can’t eat if I don’t get a job. Hence the conflict between ideas and hungry reality. Where I had viewed myself as being peaceful, it was really just passive. Even going all the way back to my job, it wasn’t a peaceful existence that I responded with, it was passive. Realizing that I would have to move into an aggressive, violent role in order to renegotiate my work environment, I quit. It wasn’t a line that I was willing to cross into. But it wasn’t peaceful, it wasn’t the water way; at least not on it’s own.
Things are reversed at the moment. It’s a little odd, and definitely unbalanced for the time being. Yet peace seems to come out of it. I’ve released the violence where it was needed, and at the same time removed the need or desire to unleash it in other places. I’m sure some master ought to slap me with a stick about now. I do feel good; like something important has begun to emerge in my mind. In this moment, as I write, I am able to understand the master and his stick for the first time. How a purveyor of peace could use violent means to enlighten. I probably won’t take such a path myself, but the paradigm shifts of the weekend have at least given me some different ways to view my water metaphor.