"Love your enemies."
Why?
Why should we care about people who seek our demise? Why should we love those who would do us harm? Why should we concern ourselves with their well-being?
When we love those who oppose us, we are recognizing that even though we are separate and in conflict here and now, we are also inextricably one in the divine. When we love our enemies, we are loving ourselves. When we protect ourselves from our enemies, we are also helping to protect our enemies from the destructiveness of their own fears.
Why should we love our enemies? Because it is another way to love and respect ourselves.
Go figure.
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Neon
Neon hated his Christian God. He replaced Him with the dustbin of History and grew a moustache. When armies of mankind turned on their own brothers in ruthless slaughter, Neon grew a Van Dyke and joined the Turks. Now a devout Muslim, he followed Atatürk’s command for discrete impartiality, straddling Western and Eastern cultures like Atlas.
He married his enemy’s soulless daughter, a rare perfumed beauty behind many silk veils. She never spoke against her father, nor would she reveal her husband’s business dealings. Tortured by her conflicting sense of duty, she gave birth to seven children, pleasing her father with grandsons and her husband with sons. The children, however, took sides, and a terrible family quarrel led to fratricides.
One girl, born out of the daughter’s incest with her father and passed off as belonging to her husband, remained to care for her ailing mother. Neon decided to betroth this girl to a wealthy spice merchant in town, the better to increase the estate of a family now destroyed by internal squabbles. The mother fed poisoned figs to her husband, who thereby developed a tolerance to arsenic. After this wedding took place, the mother, unattended by her caring but deformed daughter, died.
Both fathers wept shamelessly at the funeral, and the daughter, now married to the merchant, spread incense over her mother’s grave before giving birth to a golden calf. This calf had flaxen hair and a human face, but also hooves for feet and a scruffy, serpentine tail. When it brayed, hummingbirds hovered around it, nipping and pecking as if at some dainty honeysuckle. The merchant drove this malignant woman out of the Casbar with whips. Abandoned in the marketplace, cradling her moonless child, she wailed. Neon, feeling sorry for her, took both in, and was instantly condemned by the mullahs as an infidel. The elderly patriarch whose daughter Neon had long ago married was now obligated to hunt down and slaughter his son-in-law. A cruel war ensued that left many bones in the desert.
Only the merchant, shamed by selling arms to both sides, survived to record the tale in his last will and testament.
[Disposable Prose February 12, 2010]
Dr. Mike
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