Vachon Imagined

People often say, “Love your enemy,” and we can almost anticipate the eye rolls.

It has become a perpetual story, a phrase repeated so often that it can lose its life. Just another free-flowing form of consciousness passing through us because no one is really listening. Really listening to themselves.

This flow of consciousness moving through us is, at its foundation, life. Take away the meaning. Take away the interpretation. Take away the story we have built around it, and what remains?

Life.

It doesn’t matter what you think or feel about life. Life keeps going.

We have been demanded, not encouraged, not suggested, but demanded, to love. Because love is the opening to the chasm between here and there, tomorrow and yesterday. And perhaps those places don’t exist, not really.

Love is what begins to show us this.

And love is highly personal. It speaks to you through your unique circumstances just as it speaks to me through mine. We may exist within the same field of consciousness, yet we experience life differently. I am not here to tell you how to experience it. That is part of the freedom you have: to be yourself, to make your own choices, to walk your own path.

But what I am writing to you today is a reminder.

No—a demand.

Love.

Love your enemy as yourself.

And to do this, you’re going to have to go through hell. You’re going to have to transcend it.

So how do we practically do this?

Imagine your enemy.

Don’t turn away.

Feel it. Experience it. Allow the image of them to be there for as long as you can bear it. Maybe that’s thirty minutes. Maybe it’s five seconds. It doesn’t matter how long you can bear it.

Bear it.

And then give it one more second.

Stay with the image. Stay with the feeling. Notice everything that arises in you without running from it, defending yourself against it, or turning it into another story.

I promise you, it will pass.

Life is passing, rapidly. But we have been given the strange and beautiful permission to slow it down—to let it be there, to hold the image, to feel what is there, and then to pray love into our enemy’s life.

Not because what they have done is acceptable.

Not because we must approve of them.

Not because judgment suddenly disappears.

But because love begins to break down the veil.

The veil between here and tomorrow.

Between them and you.

Between yesterday and today.

And perhaps, for one brief moment, you begin to see that the person you called your enemy is not outside of life.

Neither are you.