Roberta Grimes

Hatred

Posted by Roberta Grimes • July 27, 2024 • 22 Comments
Human Nature, Jesus

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword!
His truth is marching on.
Glory, Glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

 I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps.
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps.
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps.
His day is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His day is marching on.
– Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) & John William Steffe (1830-1890), from “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862).

My beloved Thomas and I are still trying to figure out which one of us has won our bet of last week, or even if in fact there ever was a bet that was formally entered between us. Thomas thought it was important that we write a blog post about the flat-out, beyond-amazing moment when God intervened just as someone tried to assassinate one of the American presidential candidates. Thomas wanted to use that horrifying incident as a teaching moment about some of the very rare times when God actually does in fact play an active role in human events, and he wanted to talk about why and how God might ever want to intervene. Thomas was pretty pumped about our using God’s saving of Donald Trump’s life as a teaching moment. But I, on the contrary, was sure that if we wrote about that when things in this country are at such a fever pitch of negativity as they are right now, all that we were going to get would be a whole lot of vitriol thrown at us. No one was going to want to learn from that event anything nuanced about how God might work in the world.

So, who was right? I think that I was more right in this case than he was. Actually, those commenters who read our blog post last week before commenting did try to do what we had requested, and they viewed this as an exercise in better understanding how God sometimes works in the world, rather than just voicing their personal animosity for the candidate who had been shot and only wounded. And we do so very much appreciate those honest commenters who spoke so wisely and so well! There were other people, though, who ferreted out even from a distance the possibility that here was yet another spot where they might have a chance to voice their hatred for Donald Trump, and they attempted to pile on and do that. Fortunately, I get to approve first-time commenters, so I spared you all their loathsome bile. And as I was doing that, Thomas said, “Well, we’ve got a great topic for next week’s blog post, if nothing else.”

Wow, was he ever right about that! I don’t think that we ever have talked about hatred as a blog topic here, not once in our more than ten years of writing these weekly posts. How can we have missed such an obvious topic? Hatred is both sadly almost universal and currently highly topical. It is something that those who fall victim to it tend so often to see as even actually a virtue. Surely some of those who were in the grips of hatred and commented on our post of last week felt virtuous about their hatred. Which fact astonished me.

I was about to begin by telling you that hatred is useless, and then to go on and tell you how spiritually damaging hatred is to the hater. But no, there is indeed one situation in which hatred can be useful, so let’s first just mention that. The only situation in which hatred can be useful is in the case of an all-out war meant to end in the civilizational death of one set of combatants. Yes, I will indeed cede to you that point. So that is the topic of our frame-verse today, and a lovely frame-verse it is indeed, even if we all hope that we never will have to sing it! Killing another human being is not a natural thing, so if you have to go to war for real, then by all means, gin up in yourself some hatred so you can become a sure-enough killer. But is there an all-out war at that level going on for you at this moment? No? Then no one has any justification for hating anyone else, nor for assuming that God hates anyone at all!

 Never having talked about nor written about hatred, I am not sure how even to begin to write about it now. In fact, in peacetime there is nothing that is good or useful about hatred on any level. Not for the hater, not for the one being hated, and not for the world at large. So, let’s begin there:

• What we experience as human consciousness is the only thing that actually exists. All the rest of what seems to exist is imagined by our minds. Our minds are all part of that one great scale of human consciousness, and like all forms of energy, consciousness vibrates. Its vibration is in the key of human emotion, so at its highest vibration, consciousness vibrates as perfect love; while at its lowest emotion, consciousness vibrates as seething hatred, rage, and terror. Consciousness is what we are.
• The reason why we choose to be born on earth is so we can learn how to raise our own consciousness vibration more firmly toward love. There are a few other reasons, but for nearly all of us, that is pretty much the sole reason why we are here. We are going through all that we go through on earth as exercises to move ourselves away from all the lowest and ishiest emotions, and ever closer to ever more perfect love. So, if rather than zealously doing all that we can to raise our personal consciousness vibration toward ever more perfect love, we are instead encouraging in ourselves ever more hatred and anger toward, say, certain politicians or other public figures who aren’t even directly in our own lives, we will be severely lowering our personal consciousness vibration, rather than raising it. And that can result in our complete waste of this entire lifetime!
• The people that we hate in public life don’t care that we hate them. Sadly, politicians assume that being hated by a certain number of people goes with the territory, and they really don’t care. Your hatred and rage doesn’t harm them at all. There you are, seething with your mighty rage at Biden or Kamala or Trump, or indeed at whomever you might have decided is worth your spending all your rage and hate on this person, your bile, your sour stomach acid and your poor head aching; and the object of all your rage will just go happily on, perhaps even hitting a hole-in-one at the seventh hole. He or she neither knows nor cares how you feel.
• Hating even one person, no matter how justified your hatred in that single case might feel to you, establishes in your mind a pathway for a hatred habit that makes your future hatreds of individual people, and then of groups of people, very much easier. And it forever destroys your personal peace. As more and more negative energy accumulates in your mind, you also are looking more closely at each new person that you meet, and even at each new person that you see, to determine whether this is someone else that you feel is worthy of your hatred. I kid you not! This is really what happens. Not to Donald Trump or Kamala, of course. It is what happens to you, if you allow yourself to actively hate even one person.

We in the northern American states watched in amazement during the nineteen-fifties and -sixties as the schools in some of our southeastern states had to be racially integrated by armed police. And all because some light-skinned American southerners had taught themselves over time to hate dark-skinned people. Do you see how this works? Once hatred gains a foothold in people’s minds, it is incredibly so easily self-reinforcing. And it ends altogether even the possibility of any spiritual growth in those who espouse it, which is why some southern churches even to this day are sadly full of whole congregations that are oddly insular and permanently angry.

Ginned-up hatred of an opposition leader is sometimes used by politicians as a tool to rile up their bases. It is now being used pretty forcefully by some Democrats against Mr. Trump, probably because, as I remarked last week, I think it is easy to see Trump as a highly distasteful public figure. He has a huge ego, he makes up nasty names for people, he insists on always being right, he loves to show off his wealth, and he was a big womanizer when he was young: what is there not to dislike about this man? But you cannot give in to the temptation to hate Donald Trump without risking the complete destruction of your own spiritual progress for this lifetime. For my own part, I have successfully resisted the temptation to hate him by looking at his children, all of whom seem by every account to be happy and successful drug- and vice-free adults who all remain close to and idolize their father. There must be something good in Donald Trump, because a loving fatherhood of five adult children when three mothers are involved is a difficult trick to pull off, and it does not happen by chance. I also consider the fact that Trump’s presidential term was much better for his country than was Joe Biden’s term that followed it, from the Abraham Accords and no foreign wars to a decent economy with low inflation and a surplus of oil right down to the efficiently closed southern border. I also have received a couple of emails during this past week from people who told me about some surprising private kindnesses from Donald Trump that he never has wanted to make public. So I focus on just these good things. I ignore the things that I always have disliked about the man.

What does our beloved Jesus say about hate? He says very little, actually. “Hate” is such a strongly negative word that Jesus seldom uses it. But only consider this string of statements in the Gospel of John that comes toward the end of the Lord’s earthly life as He is preparing His disciples to go out into the world and teach the Lord’s Way:

“For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed” (JN 3:20).

“The world cannot hate you, but it hates Me because I testify of it, that its deeds are evil” (JN 7:7). 

“If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you” (JN 15:18-19).

“He who hates Me hates My Father also. If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would not have sin; but now they have both seen and hated Me and My Father as well. But they have done this to fulfill the word that is written in their Law, ‘They hated Me without a cause’” (JN 15: 23-25).

So, the Christianity which should have been rooted in the love-based teachings of Jesus alone, was instead founded by the Roman Emperor Constantine some three hundred years after Jesus’s resurrection and ascension. And it was based not on anything that Jesus taught, but instead it was based on the Emperor Constantine’s own fear-based ideas about Jesus’s having died for our sins. To ensure his false Christianity’s success, Constantine massacred or drove off into the deep desert every follower of Jesus who would not convert to His own fear- and hatred-based religion.

As we now contemplate the evils of a political system that uses the ginning-up of hatred in us of one politician against another, we must never forget one crucial fact. We come to earth to raise our personal spiritual vibration more toward love! That is the whole reason why we even are here in the first place. But if we submit to these hatred-filled political games, even for a moment, we might well be rendering useless and wasted our entire lifetime that is now being lived upon this earth!  

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal.”
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Since God is marching on!

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat!
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Our God is marching on!

 In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free!
While God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! While God is marching on.
– Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) & John William Steffe (1830-1890), from “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862).