“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” – matthew 5:44
An enemy denies life.
Morality has nothing to do with this. The force that sustains life and the force that denies it – expansive or contractive. That’s all. We are all held in the same web – every living thing connected to every other living thing. Every step taken on it pulls the whole thing tighter or tears it. Feel the thread. Know which direction the force is moving.
There’s a sermon going around. It’s been going around for two thousand years in different clothes. A man behind a pulpit with a cloth around his neck and a bible in his hand. Same sermon. Same leash. New room.
I laid it on the rough table. I cut it open.
The blur. They always blur it. The bible says love your neighbor in one breath and love your enemy in the next until the words lose their edges and everything is one soft instruction – love it all, forgive it all, the person who annoys you and the person who wants you dead, same voice, same remedy.
That blur is the trick. It keeps you soft toward everything. So precious. So nice-nice. So accommodating. So delicate you could powder it and sell it in a jar.
Meanwhile they’re mining the seafloor. Stripping the forests. Driving species to extinction. Poisoning rivers so that nothing downstream can drink. Chopping the jungles that hold the lungs of the planet. And someone wants you to close your eyes and do the interior work of loving the people who did this.
they call it forgiveness
the river still poisoned
downstream, no one drinks
Those are enemy. It’s okay to say it. It’s okay to keep them there. No understanding required. No embrace. No interior renovation on their behalf. They are the force moving against life and naming them is not hatred. Naming them is clarity.
Your coworker who heats fish in the microwave is not your enemy. Your neighbor who mows the lawn too early is not your enemy. Know the difference.
An enemy is not uncomfortable. An enemy is the hand that holds a child underwater. The signed order that poisons a river. The policy that stands between a hungry woman and food. The bulldozer in the forest. The man with the gun on indigenous land telling the people who kept it alive for ten thousand years to leave. The doctor who won’t prescribe pain medication because of what you look like.
An enemy is not a feeling in your chest. An enemy is the clipboard between a hungry woman and food.
Before any sacred book told you to love your enemy, the people on this earth knew what the word meant. It was not abstract. The Diné call the enemy anaʼí – the one who comes against the people. The Lakota say toká – the stranger who threatens the camp. The Yoruba word ọ̀tá means the one whose presence ends life. Water. Food. Hunting ground. Children. The web that holds everything alive.
And the word for warrior – the Diné naabaahii, the Lakota akíčita, the Māori toa – translated to the same root across these languages. The one who guards. The one who protects the territory. Not the one who conquers. The one who keeps life going. A warrior does not sit in a room performing love toward the thing that came for the water.
Sometimes the response was war. Sometimes exile. Sometimes death. Sometimes restoration. The response matched the threat. It was not filtered through a spiritual ideal written on paper by someone who never lost a river.
And the decision was made by the community. On every landmass – before christianity and colonization tore it out – women held this authority. The Haudenosaunee Gantowisas could depose a sachem who failed the people. The Akan queen mother, the Ohemaa, named the king and could unname him. The Cherokee Ghigau – Beloved Woman – sat on the war council and held the deciding voice on whether a captive lived. Elders who held the thread of the web and could feel where it was torn. They looked at the damage. They looked at consequences. Not hearts. Consequences. Who went without food. What was cut. What died.
They didn’t write sermons about loving the enemy. They acted.
Then men with titles replaced them. Rome. The church. Empire. The women who held authority over justice were burned. Erased. And in their place – a man behind a pulpit selling interior renovation. Telling you the enemy is in your heart. That if you can’t love the thing that harmed you something in your soul needs fixing.
Two thousand years of that. Two thousand years of asking the wound to tend the knife.
I had a teacher once. meditation. She spent years in india. She told us we should find compassion for the child molester. Because even the molester was seeking love and comfort.
I was in my twenties. I knew then what I know now.
the teacher said love him
I was twenty / I knew
the deer does not love the arrow
You don’t ask the deer to love the arrow. You don’t ask the river to forgive the dam. You don’t ask a woman to rebuild her interior so the man who broke her fits comfortably inside her compassion.
That is not wisdom. That is the most elegant cruelty I have ever been asked to swallow.
Meanwhile the consequences are not interior. A woman in a red state goes to a food bank. She’s disabled. She’s indigenous. She got there at eight in the morning because she’s hungry. A woman with a clipboard asks for proof of employment.
She is turned away.
Tonight she doesn’t eat. Her medication can’t be taken without food. Her blood sugar drops. Her body weakens. Tomorrow she is weaker than today. This is not a disagreement. This is not a neighbor. This is a gatekeeper standing between a living body and food. And it has an address. And it was designed. Someone sat in a room with a spreadsheet and calculated the bare minimum a human body can survive on. They set the number just below dignity. They made the paperwork require documents they knew the hungriest people wouldn’t have. No car to get there. No ID because replacing it costs money you don’t have. No proof of employment because you’re not employed – that’s why you’re at the food bank. And the person who designed that system ate breakfast that morning, had a snack at ten, lunch at noon, and will have dinner tonight without proving to anyone that they deserve it.
The women I talk to – indigenous women, earth women, women who carry their medicine in their mouth and know what the word enemy means in their own language – we don’t talk about loving our enemies. We talk about naming them. We talk about consequences. We talk about who is denying life and what is required.
The enemy is not a moral category. The enemy is a direction. A force moving against life. You don’t have to hate it. You don’t have to love it. You have to name it and you have to respond. That’s all that was ever asked.
The sermon says do the interior work. The man with the cloth around his neck says the real battle is in your heart.
The rough table says the interior was never broken.
The matriarch doesn’t write a sermon. She looks at what sustains and what destroys.
The warrior doesn’t perform love. The warrior guards the land.
the clan mother / the queen mother
named what was killing the people –
no sermon required
These are my notes. This is what I know. This is the lineage I come from – older than any pulpit, wider than any sermon. I’m not telling anyone how to live. I’m saying what I see. Makes no difference to the table.
It was never complicated. Roots people have always known what sustains life and what does not. The sermon made it complicated. The pulpit made it complicated. The cloth around the neck made it complicated.
The earth never asked you to love the thing that starves you. The earth asked you to live.
We don't have to forgive those who want to harm us.
We must protect ourselves.
Where I falter, is those who harm us thru ignorance, rather than malicious intent. That is the gap for me. Thanks for this beautifully written piece. 🦋
You said it for us. The opposite of live is evil.
Our Earth and those who need help come first.
What prevents that is evil.
We don't have to forgive those who want to harm us.
We must protect ourselves.
Where I falter, is those who harm us thru ignorance, rather than malicious intent. That is the gap for me. Thanks for this beautifully written piece. 🦋
Love this piece. „It was never that complicated” sums it up perfectly.