Faith leaders stress the value of loving your enemies

SANDI DOLBEE: FAITH LEADERS TALK ABOUT BUILDING BRIDGES AND EXTENDING OLIVE BRANCHES INSTEAD OF HOLDING GRUDGES

“You don’t have to love them like you love your parents or children or best friend. Just have loving feelings toward them — and if possible, express it through words, or by doing something nice, or with a smile.”

Leo Babauta • Zen Buddhist author and blogger

With Valentine’s Day well behind us, let’s turn to another kind of love. The hardest kind. A love of someone who’s not nice to you. Or, in another word, an enemy.

Faiths may say it differently, but the sentiment is similar. For example: love and pray for them (New Testament), be just and fair to them (Torah), treat them as a friend (Koran).

What might this look like today, in the real world?

A Christian minister reaches out in peace to the pastor who fired him after learning he was gay.

A Muslim imam listens patiently to a caller who rants at him about his religion before sharing his story and inviting him to visit.

A biracial Jewish woman treats comments about her not being Black enough or Jewish enough as another opportunity to build a bridge of understanding.

Leo Babauta, a Zen Buddhist author and blogger, offers this advice: “You don’t have to love them like you love your parents or children or best friend. Just have loving feelings toward them — and if possible, express it through words, or by doing something nice, or with a smile.”

Do it for yourself, because anger and resentment are destructive to happiness, adds Babauta, a former San Diego resident who now lives in Los Angeles. Do it for your family, because it sets a good example. Do it for your community, because hate “creates a more divisive and fractured and angry society.”

COVID olive branch

The pandemic shutdown was just beginning and the Rev. Dan Koeshall, senior pastor of the predominantly LGBTQ Metropolitan Community Church in San Diego, was feeling helpless. “There were just so many things in our lives that were out of control,” he remembers.

Koeshall thought about the unfinished business in his life. “I just felt compelled to write to the pastor and his wife of the church that kicked me out.”

In the late 1990s, Koeshall was an Assemblies of God minister in Escondido, when he was outed for being a homosexual, which that denomination considers a sin. The senior pastor dismissed him.

“It wasn’t a happy leaving,” he says. But he didn’t want that pain in his heart anymore. He sat down and wrote a letter.

“We had wonderful experiences,” Koeshall explains. “We just had a disagreement on me being me and staying within the organization.”

He wrote about how grateful he was for their time together and was sorry for how things ended. He apologized “on my part for anything that was hurtful.”

When he didn’t hear back, he found them on Facebook and sent them a message. The pastor’s wife responded. They had moved and hadn’t gotten the letter, so he sent it again and they began a dialogue that is continuing still.

“Sometimes, we harbor resentment toward someone and we hold on to that resentment,” Koeshall says. “I think when we can get beyond the harboring of resentment and let go of that, it’s easier to love. And love is so healing.”

He does not know if the other pastor has changed his stance on homosexuality. “And I’m OK with that, because our salvation is between us and God individually.” Besides, Koeshall doesn’t want to judge him — something else his Bible says not to do.

From foe to friend

Imam Taha Hassane was at work at the Islamic Center of San Diego when the phone rang and he picked it up.

The caller was an older man from another part of the state. “He started bombarding me with all types of accusations,” Hassane recounts. “Blaming me for everything going wrong in the world. You as Muslims have done this, you have done that, we are tired of you and we want you to go back home.”

Hassane didn’t interrupt him. “When he finished, I asked him, ‘Are you done?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ And then I started talking to him.”

He shared what Muslims believe and of his interfaith work here. “At the end of the conversation, the end of the call, he started apologizing. He said, ‘I had no idea about your faith and about the work you are doing to bring people together in the community.’ ”

It doesn’t always work. Three years ago, John Guandolo, an EX-FBI agent known for his controversial anti-muslim stands, came to San Diego to speak. Hassane decided to attend.

“He started saying lies and inaccurate information about the Muslim community, about how the Islamic Center of San Diego is the hub of jihadis here in San Diego, where extremists get trained and all that stuff.”

When Guandolo finished, the imam stood and tried to persuade him that this was not true. He ended up being escorted from the room.

Hassane was angry. And when he gets angry, he prays. “I pray for myself. I pray for those who made me angry, for those who hate me, asking God to guide all of us, to enlighten our minds and our hearts, and to help us see the truth.”

Why didn’t he just hang up on the caller or ignore the visiting speaker?

Because the Koran says to repel evil with good so that your enemy becomes like a friend. And because he believes it is how we maintain a healthy community.

“Unfortunately, we have seen in our nation, at this moment, what hate can do in terms of creating this division between people,” he adds. “When hatred becomes an action, then it destroys everything that we have in this society and in this nation.”

Bridges, not grudges

Jessica Sontag Lemoine was born to an African American father with a Christian heritage and a White mother with a Jewish heritage. As she grew up, she learned that trying to straddle the two worlds sometimes offended people, who would suggest she wasn’t Black enough or Jewish enough.

But the Hebrew Scriptures say that when you encounter your enemy’s ox wandering loose, you must take it back to him. You must be fair and just.

So Lemoine, who teaches in the mathematics department at San Diego Jewish Academy and serves on the board of Ohr Shalom Synagogue, responds by separating the person from the attack. “I can see this person and say: ‘I hurt for your pain, but I’m going to love you as a person. I’m going to do my best to work with you as a person.’ ”

She is a believer in the power of talking out differences over a cup of tea, of building bridges of understanding.

She tells a story about a woman in the synagogue who had stopped talking to her. Lemoine asked to meet her for tea, and the woman accepted. What followed, she says, was “an honest conversation where one has the courage to speak up and the other has the courage to listen openly.” They repaired their friendship.

Lemoine has another practice. “I really go out of my way not to hold hurt that others have inflicted on me.” The result: “I cannot off the top of my head think of somebody I hold any grudge with.”

Hers was the last interview for this column and the talk turned to the precepts each of these three faiths teach about treating your enemy. What would our society look like if we truly practiced these teachings?

“It would change society,” Lemoine admits. “But everybody would have to start with the fundamental idea that every human is valuable.”

A caveat

Last month, a San Diego Superior Court judge sentenced Jon David Guerrero to four consecutive life sentences in the murder of three homeless men and a woman. One of the victims attended Pastor Koeshall’s church.

Koeshall agreed with the sentence, which included an additional 143 years in prison for attacks on several other people. “I was in favor of justice,” he says. “I think there needs to be an accountability. Otherwise, actions don’t change if there isn’t accountability.”

For many religious people, this is one of the toughest challenges — to balance compassion and culpability, empathy and punishment. But practicing love toward enemies doesn’t mean allowing them to hurt people. And it doesn’t mean pretending it didn’t happen or just forgetting about it and moving on.

Koeshall explains: “I think we can still love our enemy and say: ‘Yup, there is a reaction to your action. This is it.’ ”

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