“An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.”

– Mahatma Ghandi

Have you ever heard the phrase, “blind rage?”  When I stop for a moment and think of the times I’ve heard people use these words, they are used to describe the hatred and anger that fuels the most hurtful and heinous acts of one human being against another.  ”He flew into a blind rage and beat the other man into unconsciousness.”  ”She was overtaken by a blind rage and killed her own child, not realizing until later what she had done.”  The kind of anger that blind rage describes results in violence against another person.  Vindictive people might plot to destroy property, but blind rage is a person-against-person thing that results in injury or even death.

“An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.”  What is it that drives human beings to the point of acting blindly in such fierce and horrible ways?  Ghandi also advises,  ”Whenever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love.” Love.  It is the Light of God that fills our hearts, that nourishes our souls, that allows us to see our fellow men and women as our brothers and sisters.  It is the common thread that connects us with the rest of humanity.  It is a gift — a birthright — that we neither earn nor deserve, and all we need to do is open ourselves to it and honor its Light.

As a child, I was taught about opposites.  Hot and cold.  Up and down.  In and out.  Love and Hate.  When I defined them by their outcomes, I saw Love and Hate as opposite emotions, ways that we felt in response to events in the world.  I saw them as things we created in response to life and used to express our views.  When I began to see the real nature of Love — its existence as a gift, not as something we create — my view changed.  Hatred is not the opposite of Love, it is the result of the absence of Love.  I believe Ghandi is right.  When we are met with hatred, when we are met with blind rage, we only make it worse by returning hate for hate.  If our attacker is blind; we need to heal his blindness, not allow our own anger to blind us as well.

When we hate, we build barriers against the Love — against the Light.  Only Love can break down the walls.  When we hate, it is as though we throw bricks at the other person, who then picks them up and adds them to the wall that divides us.  Love reaches out and removes the wall, piece by piece, and allows us to see the hurting human being who hides behind it.  Let us practice tolerance for others and keep ourselves filled with the kind of Love that allows us to see the emptiness behind the hatred we encounter.  Let us take the bricks from the walls that divide and drop them behind us as we walk.  The more we can fill the emptiness, the more we can return clarity and vision to a world blinded by anger.  Let’s be the change we want to see in the world.