Everything was so sweet at church, the singing, the kindness, the plain old grief, and then the pastor had to go and ruin it all by giving the sermon -- on loving our enemies.

It was like being in the Twilight Zone. It was a nightmare. It was clear that the pastor, Veronica, was speaking directly to me. She said that Christians have a very bad reputation in the world, because we have earned it, with our hate and self-righteousness. We speak in reverent terms of grace, justice, equality, mercy, and then we despise people who were also created in God's image, who are Her children too. She said that if George Bush had been the only person on earth, Jesus would still have come down and died for him.

This drives me crazy. That God seems to have no taste, and no standards. Of course, by the same token, on most days, this is what gives some of us hope.

So I sat there in church working this through in my mind, tugging at it, yet hunkered down on the inside to protect myself from having to take it in, and then the pastor said the most stunning thing I've ever heard her say: "When someone is acting butt-ugly, God loves them just the same as God loves the innocent. They are still just as loved by God." I was shocked. I thought, Boy, are you going to get it when Mom finds out. Also, I thought she was talking about the White House, but then she kept on preaching, about Jesus, and Dr. King, and -- if you read between the lines -- the people in my church. All of us -- and there are some exquisitely good people in this church. It was outrageous. She said you don't have to support people's political agenda, but you did have to love them, if you want to follow Jesus. She said you could tell if people were following Jesus, instead of following the people who follow Jesus, because they are feeding the poor, sharing their wealth, and making sure everyone has medical insurance. Then I zoned out.

I saw Bush's face in my head, marching on the aircraft carrier with his little squinched up Yertle the Turtle mouth, like a 5-year-old whose dad owns the ship. But then I saw the photo ops where he's signing papers, and I stopped there. I didn't think about his legislation and tax cuts -- I just experimented with the idea that Bush is just as loved as the good people in my church, just as loved as my 8-month-old niece, Clara. I stuck with it. And there was the tiniest of all possible spaces in my knot, the lightest breath between stuck links. I saw the face of a boy I used to know, superimposed on Bush's face, a boy named John who liked the smartest girl in first grade. When she wrote at her desk, she squinched up her face fiercely, intently, and Johnny thought that expression was what helped her be so smart. So he did that, too, for years.

For a few moments, I could imagine Bush in first grade, doing this. Then I imagined him as one of the people in my own family, who failed at school or in life, who got lost or bitchy or drunk, all that innate beauty that had gotten so fucked up. Like mine did.

I still wasn't sure what Jesus meant when he said we must love our enemies. I still think the White House is dangerously close to fascism. But Jesus definitely kept harping on forgiveness and loving our enemies. I remembered Mario Cuomo talking about the death penalty. He said, "If my daughter was raped and decapitated, I would be for the death penalty, but that doesn't make the death penalty right."

The sermon ended; people were crying. My mind was boggled. Veronica asked if anyone wanted to come forward for special prayer. No one did. I struggled to keep myself in the chair, like a Jim Carrey character, but I found myself lurching forward. She asked me quietly what I needed, and I whispered that I so loathed George Bush that it was making me mentally ill. She put her arm around me, and the church prayed for me, although they did not know what was wrong. I felt a shift, a softening in my heart, an experience I've had often in church. The fly in the ointment is that at some point I have to walk back out the church door, and into the world, and that's when I usually get into trouble again.

But this time, I tried to live in what I'd heard that day, that to love your enemy meant trying to respect them, it meant identifying with their humanity and weaknesses. It didn't mean unconditional acceptance of their crazy behavior -- they were still accountable for the atrocities they'd perpetrated. But you were accountable for yours, and you worked at doing better, at loving them, because you were trying not to make things worse.

Day 1 went pretty well. I e-mailed Veronica that night, and I said that I'd heard her, way deep down; that I didn't know how it would change my behavior, but that I had heard. She wrote back that this was a powerful beginning, to hear the truth, and to tell the truth. She said that we don't transform ourselves, but that when we hear, the Spirit has access to our hearts.

I felt better. I lay in the dark and thought about this amazing moment I'd had in church. It had felt transforming at the time, like when I first converted, like when you stick a needle into another hole in the knot, and poke -- poke, tug, feel, and if you stay with it, you have something to show for yourself at the end -- gold! (Then you hang it up immediately, you don't put it back in a drawer, because the tangle is waiting to happen again.)

I have to admit, though, that Day 2 has been a bit of a disappointment.

It began well enough, and ended in beauty: a molten autumn sunrise, a silver moon. But the hours in between did not go nearly as well as I had been hoping. They went quite poorly, actually. I thought at one point I'd isolated the problem, however, the facts kept getting in the way. I was very loving, until I read the morning paper. I realized Veronica would not buy this. But Veronica says God honors the struggle. God is in the struggle with us. I sure hope this is true, or I am doomed. It also occurred to me, on the second day, that loving Bush would be the single most subversive position we could take. Bush and his people love to hear our hatred, because it so weakens us. It's their only hope.

I got the chain out of the drawer, and gave it another try but I didn't have any patience for it. It crossed my mind to take a hammer to the miserable gold chain and bust it up into tiny pieces; maybe it was a waste of time even to try to restore it. Still, I am going to try to not hate so much, just for today. And of course, I am also going to continue registering voters, sending money to the ACLU, and a few of the Democratic candidates. I have to believe that if I do this, it will cause change -- that there will be more give, and give means there is more light between the links. You never know exactly where the knot is going to release, but usually, if you keep working with it, it will.

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