I heard someone share recently in a recovery meeting where the topic was on “tolerance”, about how much they truly hated a small number of people in life, but loved mostly everyone else. As far as I’m concerned, hating anyone only condemns me to living a life that’s moving me in the exact opposite direction of where my recovery and spirituality is trying to send me.
I’m a firm believer that a life recovery and spirituality lead a person to love unconditionally. I also believe they lead a person to a life of peace and serenity as well. But when hate occupies any part of the mind, body, or soul, it’s impossible to be any of those things. I should know given that I spent a good chunk of my life hating so many people.
Today, I do my best to love everyone because I truly believe that a piece of God lives within each and every one of us. Unfortunately, some people block out this sunlight of their spirit through toxic behaviors and means. The more they continue to do this, the darker they become. And the darker they become, the more they fill themselves up with that feeling of hate. And the more they fill themselves up with that feeling of hate, the more they move themselves away from that life of recovery and spirituality. Thus anyone who’s still harboring hatred towards even a single soul on this planet says but one thing. It says they are blocking out God’s light within themselves in some way and moving in the completely wrong direction.
Thankfully, I’m not one of those people who are doing this anymore as I learned my lesson on how sick I became in life by doing so. But I have met many others who still do, and I keep my distance from all of them. While I still love them from afar because God still lives somewhere within each of them, I do not wish to subject myself to their hatred, or any of their other dark behaviors or mannerisms.
The only people I surround myself with these days are those who are doing everything they can to unconditionally love everyone around them. I find that those who do are usually filled with the same peace and serenity I seek in life. But anyone who is advocating hatred in any way, shape, or form is really just someone that’s shunning themselves from the love of God and getting nothing more out of it except growing sicker the more they do so.
The bottom line is this. Harboring hatred towards anyone isn’t healthy for someone who’s trying to live a life of recovery and spirituality. So if you happen to still have any hatred within yourself, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and do everything you can to free yourself from all of it. And know in doing so, that you’ll be heading in the right direction, which is towards God’s love and light.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
I don’t believe anyone wakes up and says, “Well, today I’m going to start hating this person or group of people.” Hate, in my own experience, is a product either of great harm done or social pressure by groups of people toward other groups who are different in some way.
To that extent, hate (for me) is something that must be grown out of – I’ve never been able to simply switch it off at will. To the extent that someone might be able to do that, my hat is off to them.
The Westboro “Baptist Church” is a group that I hated for a good long while. I hated their blind hatred, and I hated their self-righteous bigotry. I started off hating them, hating all the pain they had caused to people who they didn’t know, and all that they stood for. It took considerable spiritual work to move from that place to simply pitying them and their willful blindness to 95% of what is in the Bible that they so often misquote.
I know several young men who were victims of child sexual abuse. In many cases, the hatred they feel toward their abusers was not something that just stopped when they prayed, “God bless you, be at peace.” The journey from craving “justice” to wishing for “mercy” and “resolution” is often a long and painful one. I’ve never known anyone in those situations to be able to just say, “Gee, this is wrong, and it’s painful to me, I’ll just stop hating these bastards.”
The healing process for hate is often like the treatment for a severe burn. The burned and damaged flesh has to be debrided, to remove the damaged parts so that the underlying tissue can heal. In the same way, that which is hateful within me must be debrided by inventory and confession (and, in my case, not a small amount of very unwilling prayer).
Obviously you put a lot of great thought into this article and I can see how removing hate from yourself has been a long arduous journey. I’m glad that you see how unhealthy it is for yourself and yes, it’s generally not something that can just “poof” go away in an instant. I’ve had to do a tremendous amount of work on myself to be free of all hate. Sometimes thing still do arise that challenge me, like various people that are toxic in recovery, but in the long run, I’ve realized they all are part of God and that alone has helped me to be more compassionate than hateful.
This is another thing I have struggled with. I have to say, the hate I felt for my father has moved more towards indifference. The hate towards my former supervisor has lessened. I continue to pray for those people on my resentment list every day. I have faith that I will continue to get better. I’m not convinced I can get to loving those people, but your example makes me think it might some day be possible!
Bill, just know that all hate is of our own creation and can be removed. We just have to overcome our ego to get there. It’s our ego that says it’s justified. But truly the only person who really does suffer from harboring hate is ourselves.