The following report, of the vigil on November 5, 2000, was written by John Gallery:
As I stood on the mall today I continued to ponder the messages I heard in Meeting at Chestnut Hill this morning. The first was an expression of appreciation from one woman to another for having given her support and nurture during a recent illness. It was a simple expression of love for love given. Another woman expressed her difficulty with the word God and her relief at having found that Quakers talked primarily of the inner light, a concept she could identify with more easily. She also expressed diffculty with the word love, for she couldn't see what good love could do in a world as filled with violence and hate as our current world seemed to be. She asked for help in understanding both these words. I left meeting wondering if any subsequent messages had spoken to her need. I was most drawn to her inability to see what love could do in our current world (a despair I often feel myself) and I wondered on my own what was the relationship, if any, between love and peace. If love was not a key to peace, what then was?
Jesus instructs us to love our enemies. When I have heard people talk about this concept I have often heard it said that the way to learn to love someone different from yourself is to look for the things you have in common. In the movie Three Kings, Mark Wahlberg is an American soldier who gets captured by an Iranian member of Saddam Hussein's army. While he is being tortured, he discovers that his torturer and he have some things in common. They are, or were, both fathers — the Iranian's child having been killed by American bombing. As he sees the things they have in common as men, fathers, human beings, Wahlberg's character changes. Later, when he is freed and given a gun with which to kill his Iranian torturer, he fires the gun into the stone wall instead. Having glimpsed their mutual humanity, he cannot kill him and in fact becomes intensively focused on helping everyone he meets, including more Iranians, even at the expense of his own gain.
Positive as this is, I'm not sure this is exactly what Jesus meant when he said love your enemies. Anyone can love their friends, he says, and so it is also true that its relatively easy to love the evidence of similar humanity in another. But what Jesus asks us to do is love our enemies in their entirety — in all the fullness of those characteristics and qualities that make them our enemies, in all their differences, without expectation of change, not just in their similarities.
At one point, in the movie Gandhi, Hindus and Muslims are fighting in an Indian city. Gandhi declares that he will fast until they stop. He is shown lying on a bed outside on the roof of a house while fighting wages in the streets around him. At one point a man comes to him frantically and tells him to stop fasting. The man — a Hindu — admits to having killed Muslims because they killed his son. Gandhi says there is a way out of this madness and when the man asks — pleads — for this information, Gandhi gives him this advice. "Find a Muslim child that has lost his father and take him into your family. Treat him as your own son, but raise him as Muslim." (Perhaps if Arafat and Barak each took this advice, there would be peace.)
Love for Gandhi, for Jesus, is the ability to see the differences — not pretend they don't exist — to understand the differences, to accept those differences and still see beyond them. And then to act out of that place.
As these thoughts went through my head during the vigil, they were often interrupted by the roar of motorcycles in the background. Motorcycles — all Harley Davidsons — zoomed noisely up 5th Street, zoomed past on Market Street throughout the hour. Their riders wore blue jeans and leather jackets, the traditional garb of Harley motorcycle gangs or clubs, the word depending on your perspective. They were the residue of thousands of riders who come through Philadelphia each year at this time bringing toys to donate for children at Christmas. I was struck by what a wonderful example of love in action this was — the longhaired, bearded, supposedly tough motorcyle gangmembers carrying soft cuddly teddy bears and other toys on the backs of their machines for children they didn't even know.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON THE
Independence Mall Vigil for PeacePlease join us at our weekly prayer vigils for peace in the world, held in front of the Liberty Bell on Market St. between 5th and 6th, every Sunday from 4 to 5 PM. For more information, contact cityquake@aol.com.
In our reports, participants share their experiences of the prayer vigils and explore beliefs related to their participation. Reports reflect the experience of each author and do not necessarily represent the beliefs or practice of all vigil participants. We welcome your responses, which are forwarded to the individual authors (when possible). We sometimes include part of a response in a future report, unless you ask us not to.
It is meaningful to us that you share in the vigils by reading these reports and in other ways, such as joining us in prayer.
Last modified: Wednesday, February 18, 2004 at 08:18 AM