A friend read my post – God Is Present, and he reminded me that the whiskey priest in Greene’s novel, thought to himself, “ One mustn’t have human affections – or rather one must love every soul as if it were one’s own child,” as he says goodbye to his own daughter in The Power and The Glory. I believe a lot of our difficulty in seeing God in our enemies or in those we deem unworthy is a lack of understanding. The great Indian poet Tulsidas said “ Everyone says and does as much as he has understood.” So who can blame us for our failing to see God in our enemies or those who inflict us with pain, if we fail to understand them. Our mission must be to seek out understanding of our enemies, to walk in their shoes, and to find the cause that produces their anxiety. We all struggle with our lives and to understand the struggles of our friends and foes alike we identify three basic struggles that we all face. We struggle with our self, we struggle with others, and we struggle with circumstances. In seeking understanding of others, we may discover that our adversary’s struggle is with his circumstance and not with us, for example. As we gain understanding of ourselves we may discover that our inability to see God in our enemies is not with our enemy, but with a part of ourselves that lies undiscovered. The more we seek understanding, the more we see God in ourselves, in others, and in our circumstances.
A Place To Meditate, Think, and Pray
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