Feast of St. Stephen: Love your enemies

Stoning of St. Stephen, Rembrandt (1625)

Today, the day after Christmas, is the Feast of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr. As he was being stoned to death, he prayed for his attackers.

There is a video of the Christmas Eve dinner at Mar-A-Lago. Trump is sitting at a cordoned-off table, with his wife Melania and an unidentified man. Melania is talking to the man, Trump is alone, mostly ignored. It was sad.

In Buddhist traditions, we are asked to treat enemies as treasures and spiritual friends:

When I see ill-natured people,
Overwhelmed by wrong deeds and pain,
May I cherish them as something rare,
As though I had found a treasure-trove…

Even if someone whom I have helped
And in whom I have placed my hopes
Does great wrong by harming me,
May I see them as an excellent spiritual friend.

If you are one of the many affected directly or indirectly by what appears to be a one-man mission to carelessly hurt others and make things worse, it is beyond challenging to “love your enemy”—no matter that we have that advice on good authority.

A couple of things:

Empathy makes you stronger, not weaker.

Empathy does not mean giving up on trying to work against the worst and for the best, including opposition to those “ill-natured people, overwhelmed by wrong deeds and pain.”