"Love your enemies." (Matthew 5:44)
In addition to the requirement to love our enemies, we are required to let our "bowels also be full of charity towards all men" (Doctrine and Covenants 121:45). As noted last week and the week before, having love or charity for another means that we genuinely seek for their own good, in the same sense that we wish for our own good. "Christian love (charity) is not an impulse from the feelings, it does not run with the natural inclinations, nor does it spend itself only upon those for whom some affinity is discovered" (Greek scholar W.E. Vine). While it is preferable that we like or have affection for one another, our love or charity for others is not to be conditioned upon such affection.
So, how can we love our enemies when our natural inclination is to hate them? Can our bowels really be full of charity to the person who cuts in front of us on the freeway or in fact does something more fundamentally hurtful to us?
The first principle to understand is that, overwhelmingly, our reaction to others is a function of habit. As I have written elsewhere, an important step in the change process is the awareness that our possession or lack of possession of moral virtues is habitual.
C.S. Lewis teaches that in order to develop a charitable response to all our brothers and sisters, "the rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Don't waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. Whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least dislike it less."
Elder Royden G. Derrick of the Presidency of the Seventy quoted the psychologist William James: "The greatest discovery of my age is that men can change their circumstances by changing the attitude of their minds." Elder Derrick continues, "We have our agency. It is the decision of each of us as to the character we play, as to what kind of person we are or will become. If we want to be a person of integrity, we act as if we have integrity and we will become a person of integrity. If we want to be a person of charity and love, we act as if we have that characteristic and we will be that person" (Ensign, May 1983).
Joseph A. Cannon is editor of the Deseret News.
e-mail: cannon@desnews.com