Training a Heart's North.
If praying is what our preferred deliberate action is reduced to in the fight with terror or evil in this world, let’s all admit it - we are a long way off from winning.
Chances are, we would also resolve to doing other reactive things, such as spending less time in public places, being more suspicious of fellow citizens especially judging by their clothes or faces, and subscribing to one or another polarized media-driven rhetoric about what’s wrong in the world.
If you too have lost count of the times you were asked to pray in reaction to a horrific terrorist attack in the past year, perhaps it’s not hard to understand the latest hashtag #JeSuisÉpuisé (I am exhausted) trending since the Nice attack.
But is it really time to be already fatigued in the face of terror? Have we already fought enough to fully understand it, let alone to put a stop to it? Or have we in fact forgotten how to fight “the good fight”? The latter seems more likely. Especially while we have been feeling numb inside, most likely overpowered by fear and a knee-jerk reaction to reach for the remote control and check what else is on.
We must have forgotten to fight the good fight first and foremost at home. We must have forgotten to train our hearts in seeking to understand, to forgive, to persevere for truth, to strive for change. Some call it character, others philotimo. Stuff made of virtues and hard work.
Yet we are still only called upon as a community to pray.
It has been said that the war on terror, like every other war, will only be won when love overpowers hate. But how do you subjugate the powerful command of hate when you’ve never learned to arm your heart with love?
In the past year, we have witnessed more atrocities that hate put people up to than previously imaginable. Where is the counterforce? Where are the “how-to” manuals on how to train the dragon in your heart?
Are we to be merely content with ourselves in a world where love is expressed only five days a year, be it through a card or a box of chocolates if you’ re a lover, through a firework display if you call yourself a patriot, through your dictated CSR if you’re an executive, or through a series of hedonic random acts of kindness often reduced to a ‘like’ and a ‘retweet’ in between life as usual?
We must have been numb and absent for a very long time to believe so.
Long since we separated politics from ethics and subscribed to laws bereft of morals. Long since we lusted in the study of intelligence and neglected the wisdom of pure love itself. Long since we built Colosseums for our brains and bodies, all the while neglecting the humble ascetics of the heart and ending up with men like strong seaworthy ships without a compass.
You see, the heart needs to fill with purpose, with belonging, with a beat that escapes ‘the one, the here, the now’ and echoes in the ‘many, the elsewhere, the hereafter’. It’s just as if the heart desires to travel, to expand, to grow. Yet the heart will pump the blood you feed it and be consumed by it, be it in hate’s entropy or love’s enlightenment. One thing she knows is to never hesitate. Only carry on pumping, and pumping. Until life brings it to a halt.
Love prays, yes. And Love is Love is Love is Love, but
Love also resists, Love revolts, Love desires the good and demands justice in its absence.
Let us then for once stop praying for redemption, and start paying more attention. Closer attention to what and how and why Love is happening within and around us. Let’s study her more closely, more compassionately. Then and only then we can hope to overpower hate and apathy in the heart; love’s most lethal substitutes.