“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your friends and hate your enemies.’ “But now I tell you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become the children of your Father in heaven” (Mt 5:43-48).
This precept contains an untiring pardon that continually restores the circle of life flowing between three points: God, Me, Brother. It extends a work of peace with a view to unity wherever it has been interrupted.
Peace is established with enemies, not friends. This would appear obvious, but usually it is misunderstood in a way that makes you fear war and fear peace as well. While love unites, fear isolates.
The first is centrifugal and generates the community by removing roadblocks and limits; the second is centripetal and predetermines the occlusion of communicating vessels. One illumines, the other darkens. One is a regime of freedom, the other, a terrifying tyranny.
Where there is love, you deal in reason; where there is fear, you do not understand reasons, you act instinctively: you see ghosts and shoot.
Social organizations that rescind the law of charity no longer see brothers and sisters, but mammals to be exploited and killed. They behave much worse than some ancient societies did towards slaves. Where charity is lacking, people must be detained by the police and locked up in concentration camps. . .
Jesus instead comes to set back man on his feet, in freedom; and his followers should continue to apply the strength of his ideas, continually finding solutions for man in God. If not, existence will unfold as a deadly search through a strenuous fabrication of hateful motives: a progressive hypothermia that gives the illusion of a vital process.
Love drives out fear. Those who love are unafraid: their Self – the possible subject of fear – no longer exists. The Other exists, the Other with whom our Self has identified, for the Other dressed as a brother, is Jesus himself.
In this way, especially now, the greatest barrier of all is removed: fear. Under the influence of fear, the Self fears that it is alone: alone in the darkness, boxed in, a box that soon comes to resemble the walls of a tomb. If one steps out of that solitude, one is free. One encounters the brother, and with him, he places himself in God.
Igino Giordani
Il fratello, (Rome: Città Nuova, 2011 [1954]), p. 85
