Though I’m a Zen teacher now, I grew up sitting in the well-worn pews of Westminster Presbyterian Church in North Carolina, and it was there I remember our minister leading the congregation in prayer for the victims of violence and — this stuck with me — for the perpetrators of that violence. Praying for the victims made my heart ache; praying for the perpetrators softened it in a way that surprised me.
The victims and families in San Bernardino, California deserve our prayers and sympathy along with those who planned and executed the violence. In order to go as far as they did, their hearts must have been filled up with hate. In the last week, much of the debate has been about guns, and while I cannot see why any citizen of this country needs an assault weapon, I also believe our root problem is not guns, but hate.
In the Buddhist tradition, hatred is called one of the three poisons — along with its companions, greed and ignorance. We all have a capacity for hatred within us. When it takes over, it poisons the well of our life.
Hatred is anger that has become stuck. Though anger is a natural and useful emotion, it tends to cloud our judgment. It narrows our focus to only the bad, the evil in the other person or group, obscuring all other aspects. When this view becomes strong and stuck, it begins to poison us and leads, in some cases, to violent speech or actions.
When faced with yet another act of extreme violence, our instinct may be to retreat in fear, and lock the door. We may feel helpless or depressed. We tend to close the borders of our hearts.
There’s another possible response, one that runs counter to that: to do the work of keeping our hearts open. It may start with reaching out to loved ones and the community, reminding ourselves of the beauty around us or remembering to breathe.
The harder heart-opening work is to examine our own anger and hatred. How do I regard those who are not in my clan, The Other? Most of us have co-workers that we’ve hardened toward, neighbors we can’t stand or a family member we avoid. While not needing to invite them into our home, become their best friend or loosen our standards of behavior, it’s my belief that changing our view toward these people will make a change in our life and help move the world toward less violence.
Attempting to think differently about those whom we dislike takes practice. Rather than narrowly noticing only the things we hate about a person, can we widen our view and see other aspects?
As they came face to face with virulent racists, Martin Luther King encouraged his colleagues and followers to practice seeing them as more than that. “There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.”
I sometimes take the Dalai Lama’s suggestion and imagine an adversary as a child. It gives me a moment of a little more tenderness that allows me to relax my certain, rigid view.
There is a very old suggestion that I learned in the pews of my youth, a truly crazy one: Love your enemies. It is relatively easy to love our friends. Loving our enemies is where the scary, exciting work is. Can we step out of our own comfort zone? When we see someone we dislike, rather than ducking down another aisle at Thriftway, dare we say hello?
This is work. Work that the killers in San Bernardino were not willing to do. I’m reading Stephen Pinker’s excellent book, “The Better Angels of our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity.” In it he relates tests that show it is difficult to empathize with someone you dislike. He also asserts something that may sound strange right now — we humans are getting better at it. Our species is more empathetic and, per capita, more peaceful than we’ve ever been. The circle of human empathy is widening. Things are not good enough, but they’re better than they’ve been.
Just as hate tends to narrow our focus on the faults of the other, hateful events tend to narrow our focus on the bloody-minded cruelty of humans. We are bloody-minded, cruel and hateful, of course, but we’re also loving, kind and empathetic. Let us not forget that. And let’s get to work.
— Koshin Chris Cain is the abbot of the Puget Sound Zen Center.
