As you know, we once were told “You are to love your neighbor” and you are to hate your enemy”. But I tell you: love your enemies and pray for you persecutors.
Jesus, Matthew 5:38-44

Whenever you are confronted with an opponent. Conquer him with love.
Mahatma Gandhi

Watching the movie “The Color of Fear” was very painful for me, but at the same time, an eye-opening experience. I could “hear” my own arguments in many of the white man’s, but I was also able to identify the pain of the oppressed Mexican Indians in the cries of the African-American and the Chicanos in the movie.

I guess the hardest part was not to hate the white man and turn him into the “other”. I felt so tempted to think “I can’t believe that he just doesn’t get it!” It is easy to think, “I am better than…” just as the Pharisee in the Bible’s parable: “Two people went up to the temple area to pray; one was a Pharisee and the other was a tax collector. The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself, ‘O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity–greedy, dishonest, adulterous–or even like this tax collector…” (Luke 18:10-11) But the fact is that I am not different, I am just a human being just equal in my humanity to the most racist human being living on earth. The fact that I have had a difference upbringing, nationality, skin color and life experiences had nothing to with me. I did not ask for them, did not earn them or chose them. They just happened. Had I had lived his/her life, I’d be thinking just like the person in front of me. This is something difficult to remember but fundamental for a therapist and ultimately for living among my fellow men and women.

As a therapist, I will do well in remembering this. It is so easy to fall into the “myth of psychotherapy” and believe that I know better or more than my client, the power differential in the therapy room makes it easy to believe so. However, in everyday life the temptation is not less. The fact that I have a better socio-economical position or more education than many, makes it easy to believe that I am more sophisticated, intelligent or just better than those not as lucky.

But the “trap” is even subtler than that! I guess I can emphasize with someone suffering, with the poor, with the oppressed, with the mentally ill, with those in pain; the real Pharisee “acid test” comes when I am dealing with the “evil” doers; those that commit the injustice, the corrupt politician, the blatant racist, the rapist, the killer, the batteror, the mother that abandons her children, the homophobic. Those are the “enemies” that Jesus and Gandhi are inviting me to love. There lies the challenge. The moment I think of me as any better, more evolved or nicer than the “other”, I am splitting, most probably projecting the part that I don’t accept in me onto that “other”. I am also promoting the illusion of separateness.

As hard as it sounds, there is no other way; hating or fighting the other is not going to help (darkness is not conquered by more darkness but by light). That does not mean that I have to be oblivious to their actions, or approve them. I can (or better said I want to learn to) fully condemn the action, while still loving the person. As Kabir said, “Do what you do with another human being, but never put them out of your heart.”

Quite a challenge indeed…

But then again, what do I know…