Loving Those Who Don't Deserve It

One of our graduates told us she was having trouble with the “non-judgmental” part of the lovingkindness prayer. This graduate said:

"How can you show compassion for everybody? How is that even possible? What about someone who intentionally harms other people? It’s one thing to feel lovingkindness for my friends and family, or even people you don’t know, but how does it make sense to feel lovingkindness for someone who has done or is doing great harm? Instead of lovingkindness, what I want to do is make them pay for what they've done."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once said:

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."

This is not suggesting that we roll over and allow someone to harm us or others; rather that we can protect ourselves and others from harm, while at the same time see that even the perpetrator is a fellow human being. As Jack Kornfield says:

"it might be too high a bar to expect that you feel lovingkindness for people who hurt others, so maybe the place to start is to see if you can not hate them"

At the end of the "Supplemental Resources" list below is Thich Nhat Hanh's poem, Please Call Me by My True Name. In it, In it, he talks about to our deepest identity, which is nameless, and which, even if we don’t know it, is shared by all of us, without exception. The poem is even a little shocking because he suggests, all in two short sentences in a single stanza, that this deepest identity is shared not only by a 12-year-old girl who is raped by a sea pirate, but by the sea pirate himself. Included with the text of the poem is a beautiful recording of the poem, read by Thich Nhat Hanh himself.

In Jack's talk, Loving Those Who Don't Deserve It, at about four minutes in, he talks about "the only public monument that I know in the US to a mystical experience is downtown Louisville, Kentucky, on the corner of Walnut and Fourth Street". He's describing the plaque that marks the spot where Thomas Merton, the Trappist Catholic monk, had a mystical experience while running errands for his monastery. You can see the actual plaque and even a street view of that corner in Louisville through the link below describing the Thomas Merton Plaque in Louisville.

Videos and Readings for this module

Supplementary Resources

Excerpts related to this topic



Imagine walking along a sidewalk with your arms full of groceries, and someone roughly bumps into you so that you fall and your groceries are strewn over the ground. As you rise up from the puddle of broken eggs and tomato juice, you are ready to shout out, "You idiot! What's wrong with you? Are you blind?" But just before you can catch your breath to speak, you see that the person who bumped you is actually blind. He, too, is sprawled in the spilled groceries, and your anger vanishes in an instant, to be replaced by sympathetic concern: "Are you hurt? Can I help you up?"

Our situation is like that. When we clearly realize that the source of disharmony and misery in the world is ignorance, we can open the door of wisdom and compassion. Then we are in a position to heal ourselves and others.

- from Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground Up by B. Alan Wallace

An elderly monk found his way to Dharamsala in India after twenty years of imprisonment. Meeting with the Dalai Lama, he told his story, recounting the years of torture, brutality, and isolation. Then the Dalai Lama asked the monk, "Was there any time you felt that your life was truly in danger?" The old monk answered, "The only times I felt deeply endangered were the moments I felt in danger of losing my compassion for my jailers." This is a story of a profound commitment to compassion, a story of faith and forbearance that bears witness to a human being's dedication to keeping his heart and dignity intact in the face of the greatest adversity. The stooped, wrinkled old monk was a simple man without credentials, education, or sophistication. He was also a man with a remarkable heart, who had chosen to forsake the pathways of bitterness and rage, knowing that in following those ways he risked losing what was most precious to him - the home he had made in compassion.

- from Compassion: Listening to the Cries of the World by Christina Feldman

When people start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, they often think that somehow they're going to improve, which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are. It's a bit like saying,

"If I jog, I'll be a much better person."
"If I could only get a nicer house, I'd be a better person."
"If I could meditate and calm down, I'd be a better person."

Or the scenario may be that they find fault with others; they might say,

"If it weren't for my husband, I'd have a perfect marriage."
"If it weren't for the fact that my boss and I can't get on, my job would be just great."
And "If it weren't for my mind, my meditation would be excellent."

But loving-kindness – maitri - toward ourselves doesn't mean getting rid of anything. Maitri means that we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to change ourselves. Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That's the ground, that's what we study, that's what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest...

The point is that our true nature is not some ideal that we have to live up to. It's who we are right now, and that's what we can make friends with and celebrate.

- from The Wisdom of No Escape: and the Path of Loving-Kindness by Pema Chodron

© 2015 Palouse Mindfulness Inc.