Love your enemy

Love your enemy
Tuesday May 19, 2009

Hi Alice,

I was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith and when I read what you wrote about the fourth commandment
and how we do not have to forgive our parents it was a great relief for me, mentally and physically.
Thank You.

I was never particularly religious and attended mass out of a sense of duty to my parents and then just “switched off” once the sermon
began, however, the belief that I should forgive my parents for the abuse they put me through was a strong unconscious belief that I held,
maybe even a conscious belief that I held for most of my life.

A belief that I would be punished if I dared to feel my justified anger at them and give up trying to forgive the unforgivable.
A part of me still fears that I will be punished but another part knows that I will be o.k.

I read the following quotation from Jesus of Nazareth in Matthew 5:

“But I say unto you, Love you enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them
which despitefully use you, and persecute you”

I understand from reading your book “The Body Never Lies” and from my own experience that this is an impossible task,
that the body does not lie and rebels against this kind of teaching.

As a child I had to accept abuse from my parents unfortunately with damaging consequences and sometimes I find myself repeating this pattern with parent substitutes/ authority figures in my life i.e. allowing people to “walk all over me”, just like my parents did.
This is something I am trying to change.
Actually this is something I am changing.
It is tragic to see this dictum at play two thousand years later in my present life.
It is never beneficial to love those that hate you, that persecute you and use you
in fact it is soul destroying and damaging.

It does beg the question for me though, how did this religion gather so many followers
in the beginning?
I do not see the appeal.
I would be interested to hear any thoughts you might have on this,

Thanks,

G.

AM Thank you very much for sending us this important quote. We don’t know if it was actually said by Jesus or invented by Mathiew. Both is possible. In any case, to me, it is a pure invitation to hypocrisy and lie, it flies in the face of the laws of life. If as adult you try to love a person who hates and hurt you you are betraying your body that will suffer because of this. Christianity adopted this demand that contradicts with the human nature but it was not invented by it. Since humanity exists children probably were used as poisonous containers. They had to bear whatever adults wanted from them, and, as nobody was allowed to rebel, the new generations repeated what has been done to them. And probably almost all religions helped to cover up this crime and this ignorance concerning the humann nature.. They do it still.