Hate

With all the love being celebrated last week it seems the news was full of hate.  Is hate the opposite of love?  On the contrary, I think they are more like cousins, offspring of a related human place but opposing each other – one a destroyer, one a creator.

Mirriam-webster.com states the following meanings for hate:

noun -

·         intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury

·         extreme dislike or antipathy

·         an object of hatred

verb –

·         to feel extreme enmity toward

·         to have a strong aversion to; find very distasteful

·         to express or feel extreme enmity or active hostility

Hate can be a sensation - a noun, or hate can be a verb - an action.  The first entry assumes what I think is necessary for feeling hate (or love), a relationship of some kind.  The relationship can be with a person, with one’s past, with a set of teachings or laws, a religion or government.  Fear, anger, and sense of injury all arise in situations where we are not alone.  We cannot hate what we do not experience in person or in philosophy.  Hate as an action can be as small as writing a scathing letter to the committal of a violent crime.   

I suppose we have all known hate in some form.  Felt it grow in our own bodies or felt it radiate toward us.  Words such as intense, extreme, and strong are present in the meaning of hate.  This is not a quiet thing.   

Hate is a thing to try to be rid of.  My personal experience of manifesting hate means my own body holds the feelings.  Hate as an internal emotion often doesn’t affect the receiver.  But it eats away at the person who incubates fear, anger, intense hostility or extreme enmity.  We have to examine our hate, work it out.  Sometimes that means a peaceful protest.  Sometimes it may mean turning to prayer or meditation for healing and forgiveness.  Sometimes it means approaching someone and letting them know their actions toward you are not acceptable.

We cannot always control the hate directed toward us.  Sometimes there is need to examine our own actions to see if we have created damage for which recompense is needed.  Other times ignorance creates hate that makes no sense and I would love to have some words to address that problem! 

In all cases, hate is a thing of destruction.  This is where hate’s cousin, love, comes into the picture.  The passion, the emotion, the intensity, the call to action is present in love, too.  But love strives to create, to restore, to nurture, and not destroy.  If examined some of what seems like hate may arise from love of something else – self, liberty, freedom?  When I find myself gnawing on hate I try to remember a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.  “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”