Love your Enemies
I ask you faithful people who listen to me with love and devotion
to pardon me for saying this,
but it gives me more pleasure that my enemies listen to me.
I know that the reason they listen to me is that I bear them a message of love.
I don’t hate them.
I don’t want revenge.
I wish them no harm.
I beg them to be converted,
to come to be happy with the happiness that you have.
If I have the joy of possessing heaven,
I would not mind being in that heaven
near to those who today declare themselves my enemies,
because there we will not be enemies.
I am never anyone’s enemy.
But let those who without cause want to be my enemies
be converted to love,
and in love we shall meet in the blessedness of God….
Those who do not understand transcendence
cannot understand us. When we speak of injustice here below
and denounce it, they think we are playing politics.
It is in the name of God’s just reign
that we denounce the injustices of the earth….
Let us be today’s Christians.
Let us not take fright
at the boldness of today’s church.
With Christ’s light let us illuminate
even the most hideous caverns of the human person:
torture, jail, plunder, want, chronic illness….
This hour of trial will pass
and the ideal so many Christians died for
will survive resplendent.
It is a black night that we are living,
but Christianity discerns that beyond the night
the dawn already glows.
The hope that does not fail is carried in the heart.
Christ goes with us!
From The Violence of Love (1988)
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