This month I am sharing with you all my Library Notes. These weekly posts are a highlight of my own Library Notes for the week. Members receive these exclusive notes as a thank you for support.
Last week, as some of you may have caught on my YouTube channel, I hosted my good friend and professional wingsuit, base jumping, skydiver Braden Roseborough.
One of the hallmarks of our friendship over the past decade and more has been the ease at which our conversation can go deep with some evenings conversation healthily moving along for three to four hours.
One such topic was the inquiry of: Does God hate evil things or does God even hate evil people?
Simply the question is answered quite easily in Psalm 11:
The Lord examines the righteous But the wicked, those who love violence He hates with a passion -Psalm 11:5
The greater question may be what do we believe about love and hate?
As I sat in a coffee shop Monday morning reading Theodore Rex, the second book in Edmund Morris’ fantastic trilogy biography of Theodore Roosevelt, I overheard two men talking about love in a pontificating kind of way. One man said to the other he believed love was the opposite of fear. He did not look the part of a romantic and was far from Venice or Paris this deep in the Pacific Northwest. I held my tongue and continued my book.
Love, of course, is not the opposite of fear, or even hate. All fear is reverence and there is no logical contract by which any human is freed of fear. Fear, or reverence, can only be aligned, directed, concentrated. Fear is in fact born out of our love for someone or something. Clarity in our love brings a healthy clarity to our fear. Those who irrationally love, irrationally fear.
Hate is another emotion that seems to have eluded the English. For hate is but the sacrifice of love and thus can not be done without love. One can not sacrifice what one does not have.
What then would we anchor on the opposite end of love?
Indifference.
Recalling my time in the San Francisco Bay Area, as I watched society collapse in slow motion, I remember my shock at watching drug addicts delivering fiery incoherent speeches on the train while an audience of one hundred per car turned their gaze. The first week we moved to the Bay Area I remember riding past Fruitvale station, now made famous by Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan. In the backdrop was the burned ghost ship where thirty six people had recently died from a fire. In the foreground, two men on the platform were engaged in a brutal contest that looked as if it would go to the death. Not a soul appeared to be moved. Crowded lines had formed before the doors opened and I watched those two men continue to trade blows, incomprehensibly exchanging something one might register as vulgar. The train exchanged its passengers. The two men fought on as the ash heap of the ghost ship slipped out of view.
This will be, until the day I die, the portrait in my mind of indifference. And as I sit back and write this, it feels more like a landscape. An entire society unmoved in the moment, and yet convinced, somehow, their ever increasing taxes may solve the problem as if they could buy indulgences from their church to save others.
Consider your fears as reverence. What do you fear that isn’t worth revering? This continued practice has helped me live in such a difficult time as the one we’ve known over these past two years.
Consider what you hate as an expensive exercise in sacrificing love. What hate do you have that may be misplaced, fermenting bitterness? Bitterness, I have heard described as taking poison and then expecting the other person to die. Sacrificing both the love of ones self and the other, with no end in sight.
Where can my fears and hate be aligned to be light? They simply do not go away.
-Steven
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