By Celia Coates

Hating someone has become very easy. Especially here, in America, these are times of political turmoil and everyone is picking a side to line up with. Battle lines have formed and the strong feelings that rev us up to fight have taken over. It begins with fear and anger and then our opposition becomes hate.

I have felt great hate. It can fill my mind – and my body – and it feels terrible, really toxic. There is an easy target for my hate and I am far from alone in this hating. He is omnipresent and commands attention. There are people who so despise him that hearing his voice or seeing his image have become intolerable and they do their best to turn their backs on him. People let go, step back, stop watching the news, ignore what is happening, and believe that there is nothing they can do anyway. That might decrease the murderous poison of feeling the hate that is filling us and spreading in our world but it leaves us helpless. I myself haven’t been able tune out the news and I’ve been stuck with fear and anger and hate as well as the pain of feeling powerless.

Then, thank goodness, one of those coincidences happened that opened up another way when I read a page from Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography. He wrote this from his experiences of turmoil and political powerlessness that began in South Africa and then continued in India.

Gandhi had been dealing with the greed and corruption of some officials who were harming powerless immigrants. After he saw to it that the officials lost their jobs, he wrote,
“I must say that though these officers were so bad, I had nothing against them personally. They were aware of this themselves, and when in their straits they approached me, I helped them too.”… “Man and his deed are two distinct things. Whereas a good deed should call forth approbation  and a wicked deed disapprobation, the doer of the deed, whether good or wicked, always deserves respect or pity as the case may be. ‘Hate the sin and not the sinner’ is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practised, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world.”

 He went on to add,
“It is quite proper to resist and attack a system, but to resist and attack its author is tantamount to resisting and attacking oneself. For we are all tarred with the same brush and are children of one and the same Creator, and as such the divine powers within us are infinite. To slight a single human being is to slight those divine powers, and thus to harm not only that being but with him the whole world.”

 Attacking the “author” of our political turmoil (“hating the sinner”) has been what many of us have done, but choosing instead to “hate the sin” can give us power again. Instead of getting lost in diatribes against the devilish perpetrator, I can hate the sins of injustice and greed and look for remedies for the harm they cause. Hating the sin does not leave us powerless – it gives us a real focus for action.

As for that perpetrator, perhaps I could find some pity for him.
But first, I must take a clear, realistic look at who he is and how he has operated without the blur of fear that magnifies his reach and power. Also, it’s important to look without the modern sidestep that psychologizes him – removing his accountability with the diagnosis of narcissist and sociopath. We can instead take a good look at the sinner and then shift to concentrate on the sin that is spreading ruin.

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This quote is from THE STORY OF MY EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH, Mahatma Gandhi, An Autobiography, translated from the original Gujarati by Mahadev Desai, Fingerprint Classics, an imprint of Prakash Books India Pvt. Ltd., Reprint 2023, and it is found on page 250.

The image that leads this post is by GDJ on Pixabay.
It is “Fist Hearts” by Gordon Johnson, USA.

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