I was in the midst of an intense reverie in my living room at home. I was sixteen years old, a junior in high school. The Tet offensive (February 1968) had just claimed the lives of hundreds of American troops in Vietnam. At the time I supported America’s war effort, but I wanted the violence to stop. In my daydream I imagined myself talking to Ho Chi Minh, the leader of North Vietnam, an American enemy. I was convinced that I could convince him of the error of Communism, get him to see the brutality of the North Vietnamese army, and require him to stop supporting the terrorist activity of the Vietcong.
I was inspired by my conviction of certainty. And my reverie brought me to a deeper appreciation of the power of love. And I now had that power, or so I thought, the evidence for which was my newly discovered commitment to non-violence.
Two years later I discovered a serious flaw in my daydream-driven prescription for ending the war. I couldn’t imagine that Ho Chi Minh would have a markedly different perspective on his country, its goals, and the prosecution of the war. America was right, I thought, had always been right. America wanted the best for the North Vietnamese people. Why couldn’t he see that?
Because his outlook was framed by a different geography, culture, religion, history, and race. I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see that. My sense of American exceptionalism got in the way.
I also discovered a profound limitation in my understanding of love. Love does not insist on its own way, according to St. Paul (1 Corinthians 13:5) I was resistant to not insisting. I was willfully blind to being able to see the world, and myself in that world, from a different vantage point.
I continue to struggle with that blindness. I continue to struggle to trust in love as a force. Yes, a force, more than a feeling, a force that does not insist on its own way. A love not in the service of protecting me from my grievances or giving me a security within my own affiliations. St. Paul also writes in his well-remembered poem (1 Corinthians 13) that love never ends. Yet so much that is claimed these days as love really isn’t, at least in the Pauline sense, because the love that is both proclaimed more often than not ends at the border of a country, a religion, a race, or a political position.
In the past several weeks, as the presidential race moves toward a spirit-numbing crescendo, former President Trump has — from my perspective — become more vengeful, irrational, confused and corrupt. Yet it doesn’t seem to be making much of a difference with his base, or even with undecided voters. The support for him seems to be holding. And I wonder — as I did as a daydreaming teenager — how can they not see all the flaws that he continues to demonstrate, and which have gotten much worse?
I think they do see all of that, and have also heard all of his lies and verbal brutality, but are holding on because the alternative seems so much worse. That the love is not so much given to Donald Trump (although for a small percentage it is), but is held for a vision of America that he represents. In this sense, love ends at the tribal border. For those of us who are supremely dismayed — and frightened —by all the threats and venal discourse, love ends at a different tribal border.
Trying to convince the other side of the error of its ways is tempting, but is probably not going to work. Love can. Not the love that is confined to a feeling, or a border — but a love that never ends, which transcends the personal to a universal claim. It embraces all, including the ones that we don’t want to embrace. Love is a power that can change hearts, including our own.
There is a fear of this love, so it often gets sentimentalized and infantilized. Love is fierce. It comes with requirements that we often want to ignore or discard. It demands that we learn to look beyond our perspectives, past our prejudices — and see and honor the other. Love is hard work.
We can’t give up on this love. We are continually invited to harness its power, which enables us to see beyond one another as strangers, and instead to honor each other as fellow travelers on life’s journey.
