Can anybody find me somebody to love?

Originally posted at Unorthodoxology, part of the CCblogs network.

I have no enemies.

How am I to love them?

No
enemy curses me. No enemy raises fists at me. No enemy persecutes me.
No enemy hates me. I doubt anyone in the enemies of my state - Taliban
or Al-Qaeda - care much about a stay-at-home dad living in a suburb of
nothing in Texas. Frankly, I'm not important enough to have enemies in
this world, and I'm not doing anything important enough that might make
me any, either.

I
want so desperately to love my enemy, but I'll be damned if I can find
any. To love my enemies would require an exercise in delusional
imagination, the conjuring of ghosts to hate so that I might be able to
love them. To love an enemy I would have to envision conflict, create
it and exacerbate it to transform those with whom I disagree into
enemies.We do this more than we should, inventing scenarios in which we
play the maligned, the victim, the oppressed, all while we run to the
medicine cabinet for an ibuprofen every time a muscle aches, the faucet
to quench the slightest thirst, the grocery store for an ice cream
craving.

To
love an enemy would be daring, costly, painful. American lives are not
generally built on these characteristics, so all the martyrdom and
suffering Jesus tells his followers to expect at the hands of the
powerful have been bent in our world into pithy sentiments about
playing nice within pluralism. But Jesus rarely played nice with the
true enemies of humanity, those wild beasts that would stampede the
poor like weeds under foot and those that would drive love from
religion as if it were a demon hoard. To Jesus, loving an enemy did not
include ignoring injustice.

But where does one find an enemy of humanity to love? Where does one find someone who eats at perpetual banquet tables while the rest of the world starves for a handful of rice? Where does one find someone who sleeps softly while the world burns? Where does one find someone who steals birthrights from the poor and gives them pottage in return?

If I can find no enemies to love, perhaps I am
the enemy, and that my life - just in every day chores and errands -
consumes more of the Earth than one person should be able to lay claim.

And that even if I were to do all I could to live justly on this Earth, the privileged nature of my birth -
the system I am inextricably caught in - requires me to be an enemy of
humanity. And then it is I who must endure the love of an enemy, the
good done to the life that curses, the shame of having heaps of coal
burn blisters on my head.

But
if I am the enemy, all is not lost, but found, because in this, I fall
upon the knowledge - the grace - that I am loved as an enemy. And that
kind of love can be transformative, enough even to make enemies.

This is part of a synchronized blog organized by Tia at Abandon Image. More information on the blogs and on the Bless Those That Curse You Day can be found on the facebook page here.