Loving Our Enemies

How the Imagination Can Help

Dear friends,

After a summer hiatus (while spending time in Vancouver), The Empathetic Imagination is back! Starting next week, I will be sending these newsletters every other Wednesday morning. For today’s newsletter, I mainly just want to say hello, thank you for subscribing, and send a link to a recent lecture I gave at Regent Theological College in Vancouver called “The Sacred Function of Stories: How Imagination Discloses the Imago Dei”. (click title to watch)

I always enjoy spending time at Regent College, and it is especially a delight to speak there. This lecture was specifically focused on how the arts can help with difficult empathy–that seemingly impossible practice of loving our enemies. Of course, the intentional move to show love rather than hate to our enemies is at the heart of the Christian gospel. And any follower of Christ is called to have a “sanctified imagination” (Mako Fujimura) that chooses to be attentive to the imago Dei in all human beings.

Today’s newsletter is short–but I do want to send you some key quotes that I found when preparing for my lecture. I hope that these will help you to pause, to think, to imagine, to practice.

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” 

“Love for our neighbor, being made of creative attention, is analogous to genius.”–Simone Weil

 “Hate is just as injurious to the person who hates. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.”

“We recognize that this hate grows out of fear, pride, ignorance, prejudice, and misunderstanding, but in spite of this, we know that God’s image is ineffably etched in his being.”

–MLK, Strength to Love

“Men think that it is impossible for a human being to love his enemies, for enemies are hardly able to endure the sight of one another. Well, then, shut your eyes--and your enemy looks just like your neighbor.” –Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

Thank you for reading. And again, if you want to watch my lecture given at Regent College, you can find the video HERE. It was an especially meaningful night for me as Douglas Coupland, the author whose work I have written on for over twenty years, was in the audience. What an honor.

Thanks so much for reading! Watch this space next Wednesday!

Mary