The one about loving your enemy
The greatest gift God can give you is a noble friend.
The second-greatest gift God can give you is a noble enemy.
—Adapted from C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle (1956)
It was only a matter of time before we ended up with Lewis, wasn’t it? The Last Battle is one of those books that caused a small nervous breakdown in child-me, and even in my old age, I still can’t read it without crying.
I have kept that quote in my memory for nigh on twenty-five years, and it has been part of my moral compass for a good portion of that time. I try to be both an excellent friend and an excellent enemy because my personality tends to attract all kinds of reactions. One of them is instantaneous, intense enmity towards me; another is instantaneous, intense friendship. Rarely do people find me irrelevant, and I can’t say I’m complaining. It makes life interesting, both when someone you barely know takes offensive action against you for apparently no reason and when, at 2 a.m., the doorman calls because a “friend” of yours has come over to hang out with you.
A couple of days ago, I posted a video of a guy standing in front of a car, yelling, “What are you gonna do? Run me over?!” at another driver, and instantly I got a reply from one of my closest friends saying:
“That’s something that you would definitely do.”
And I was like, “Yes, it’s kind of a 50/50.”
And she was like, “Yes, I can easily see you on either side.”
And, yeah, that’s probably correct.
But praising those good enemies—the ones who make the words of Christ so easy to follow because you love them even while you hate them—is easy, and we don’t go for easy, do we? Healthy rivalry, banter and superficial hatred grounded in respect have all been fun and games since duelling was banned. This piece is not about nice enemies.
“Love thy enemy” is incredibly wise advice—until we start pretending that love requires us to stop recognising the enemy. It should mean “Stop wishing harm upon those who hate you” or “Try to understand what makes your enemy tick.” But what about people who have their worst enemy within arm’s reach every day? What if this enemy has never declared their hatred? What if they are working from the shadows towards your destruction while smiling at you and professing friendship? How do you love those enemies? What if someone had the “instant enemy” reaction when they met you but, for whatever reason—a perceived opportunity to advance, loneliness, sadness or simply the need to be destructive—decided to pretend to be your friend? Now you have a burning fire inside your house, trying to bring it down.
Christ commanded us to love our enemies. He never commanded us to mistake them for friends. Loving your enemy is difficult. Recognising your enemy is harder, and that’s the tail we’re chasing this time.
In my short, incredibly long years on this planet, I have seen many enemies become friends in the wild. I have been on the receiving end of fake friendship from someone who wanted only to cause me as much damage as possible. I have spent five years waking up beside my absolute worst enemy, kissing her cheek good morning, making hate to her before breakfast, enjoying our dogs and having fun together, only to discover that she despised just about everything about me, couldn’t stand me, but was irrevocably attached to me.
Yes. I also fail to understand it.
And if you have read my piece about obsession, you are now getting another part of that story. The writing was on the wall, but, like Belshazzar before me, I could not understand it. Mene, mene, tekel, parsin. By the time the meaning became clear, the kingdom had already been lost.
There’s this movie, Sleeping with the Enemy. I recommend you watch it every time you have a date with someone new. Trust me. It’ll add that delicious aftertaste of fear to every gesture. Maybe don’t take advice from me, especially this week. Fuck this week.
Whenever we form a relationship, we exchange blank cheques. We do not know what will eventually be written on them: a night at the hospital, a place to sleep, a loan, a kidney—or unrestricted access to the machinery of our destruction. And this is the kind of enemy I want to talk about.
The cheque may be cashed by your best friend of twenty years, asking you to remain by his side until his wife’s water breaks and then drive them to the hospital. Or it may be cashed by someone you have cared for, supported financially, taught, mentored and accompanied through hell—only for you to discover that he has been bad-mouthing you to everyone in your life and quietly eroding every relationship within his reach.
And that’s the exciting part! You never know!
Human nature makes this very, very difficult. I could drop one of those cheesy lines here—hell, the one about wolves could be perfectly misinterpreted for the occasion—but really, what can be said?
What guidance exists for someone who goes to sleep beside their worst enemy and does not know it until it is too late? For someone who toasts their achievements with a person who would love nothing more than to ensure they never achieve anything again?
Or for someone who is involved in a business with someone who wants to milk it for everything they can on one side and is ensuring that it fails on the other? What can we do about the reckless hate some people feel for us for no specific reason? What do we do when someone projects themselves onto us and hates the portrait? Their insecurities? Their frustrations? Their worst defects? That’s a whole new kind of hate, and the worst part is that it’s a kind of hate that is easily disguised as love and fuelled by stubbornness, and it’s the kind of thing you can justify to yourself endlessly.
Do any of these phrases sound familiar?
She loves me, but she cannot stand seeing me succeed.
We’re great friends, but he humiliates me whenever other people are watching.
We get along amazingly, but I cannot safely tell her anything important.
Nothing that comes before the “but” matters. That kind of sentence is a fraction, and the denominator will destroy any value you put before it.
Every time I sit down to work on a piece like this, I fear that I am teaching people to fear people, but nobody needs help with that. The reality is that, statistically, you have a secret enemy in your life, be it in the shape of someone who actively hates you, someone who doesn’t know they do or someone who just doesn’t have your best interests at heart—and they may not even know it. Good and evil are relative, so people who are evil to you may think they are not. Hitler never danced around singing about how evil he was, probably. No really evil person thinks they are—not Vladimir Putin, nor that guy who runs FIFA, nor those Romanian guys who made that song you heard once in 2004 that is still playing in the background of your brain and will keep at it forever.
The lesson here is not “never love,” nor “don’t love your enemy,” not even “never trust,” nor “be careful whom you trust.” It’s deeper, and I think I’m finding some personal growth in these pieces because this is a new idea:
Pain is a sure thing, suffering is kind of optional and opening yourself up to others will always end up hurting. So, instead of turning the whole of humanity into a military parade of thousands of flags of different colours, or calling everything abuse, or calling nothing abuse, or making what should be personal political or what should be political personal, let yourself feel. Let yourself be dragged by your hand and your heart towards people. Find people you consider valuable and interesting and love them! Love is not something you feel; love is something you do, a decision you make. The only cure I’ve found for my love-related injuries is exactly that: be deliberate, be free, be there by choice. That way, you can own any pain that comes. You can say, like that priest said in Ivanhoe: “Genam meam dedi vapulatori”—“I have given my cheek to the smiter.”
And when an enemy finally reveals themselves, believe them. Withdraw your friendship, not your humanity. Love them if you must—but love them from beyond striking distance. Why? Because all the possible enemies we’ve discussed in this one are not worth much more consideration.
And never forget about revenge. I’ve heard glitter gets everywhere and bedbugs are forever.
Peace.