Booker T. Washington said “I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate them.”

To my knowledge, I hate no one. I dislike a lot of people, judge some people too harshly, am intolerant of other people sometimes – often.

But I can’t think of a person that I hate. I consider this a profound spiritual evolution on my part. Hate is a poison, just look at the damage it is causing in our world.

I don’t meant to be a saint, I am not St. Francis or Mother Teresa or Thomas Merton. I am incomplete, flawed, broken in many ways at at  many times. I’m not looking for perfection, not in me.

But hate never feels good to me, I can tell, I see it all over the news every time I look.

It is easy to hate, I think. It is something flawed and broken people do.

In our culture, there are people who slaughter children and there are people who simply have different political views.

Hating either one  has not accomplished much, it is clearly not a deterrence  and it never eradicates loss or suffering, but hating people for thinking differently is a kind of poison, a corrosive acid, it just seems to deepen and spread.

It makes it impossible to accomplish anyone, help anyone, inspire anyone.

This is not the era of the individual, it is the era of the label, the left, the right, the “other.” Emerson  said that for every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

I lost years of my life.

He also said that “to be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

I am learning to be myself, this is my long-delayed graduate study, my revelation.

I learned some years ago to look on the margins, the edge of society, to find the people preach love rather than hate, good rather than bad. These people don’t make it to those panels on cable news, they aren’t profiled in the big newspapers.

Everywhere I go these days, I run into people trying to get me to hate other people – e-mails, phone calls, lunches with friends, cable news channels, newspapers.

They are the new electric messengers, they carry grievances from far and wide, and alarms from just outside the door.

Every minute of the day someone is trying to alert me to an outrage committed by some person with a different label than I have. A person I am supposed to hate.

I believe my path is to reject these messages, irritation and fear are unavoidable, hatred is a choice.

This is all so easy to say, so hard to do. Frederick Buechner, the author and Presbyterian Minister,  put it this way: “And then there is the love for the enemy – love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God’s love. It conquers the world.”