NO is So Easy to Say
I ran across this wonderful quote from the late Rev. William Sloan Coffin:
If you love the good, you must hate evil; or else you are sentimental. But if you hate evil more than you love the good, you become a damn good hater! And the world has enough of that kind of activist.
(hat tip to both David Schaub and Professor Bainbridge)
That is so very important for all of us to remember in almost any context or endeavor that we find ourselves passionately involved with. There is a fine line between love and hate many times that we can cross over the line without thinking about it. I think it is because both emotional responses to the world involve our choosing something as very important to us. If we focus on the benefits of this wonderfully important thing then we choose to live out of our passion. If we focus on the emptiness and the lack of the thing that is missed and important we can be lost in our anger and hate.
Too many people find it much easier to be motivated by hate and lack. It is too easy to see what is Not and to feel empty and lost and hurt. It is much easier to complain about something and to be filled with the fires of anger. Fear and pain sell. The person yelling in the street about the wrong is more easily noticed than the person working to change for the good. They both can be on the same side of things but can miss each other completely.
We must choose to remember what it is we love more than focusing on the emptiness and sense of lack of not having our love. We must do the hard work sometimes of digging behind our anger and pain and discover and then hold onto the good we love that spawns the fire.
Our lives are served much better by fulfilling the fires of our passions and our loves rather than just being satisfied with the dying ember of something lost which we can’t quite remember. And how much more good is done in our world when we are energized by our love of the good instead of simply dropping the bombs of our hate around us. Sadly, I don’t think I have to work hard to point out where the literal, metaphorical, and the rhetorical bombs have left lives, families, churches, synagogues, mosques, communities and nations in ruins.
For the good of our worlds (of all sizes) our focus needs to move away from simply looking at what must be torn down and needs to return to what must be built in place of the ruins.
April 26th, 2006 at 1:40 pm
That is a good quote. I’ve seen people and read far more whose primary motivation for some righteous cause was hate, rather than love. The results are never pretty.