Today in my silent hour, I read from Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation as the sky grew dark. It was riveting; I put my mystery down.

The chapter I read was called “Hell as Hatred,” and it said much about the times we live in. In the 1960s, equating hatred with hell was genius, and the idea was more prescient than Merton could have imagined.

“Hell is where no one has anything in common with anybody else except the fact that they all hate one another and cannot get away from one another and from themselves,” he wrote, getting me to whistle softly and sit up in my chair rousing Zinnia.

Merton once again opened me up to an essential and surprising truth.

Nothing is interesting about hatred, vengeance, or evil.

They are both profoundly dull and uninteresting.

They suggest the absence of natural feeling, not feeling. Hate cannot be argued out of existence; it can only be smothered bit by bit by love and truth. That’s my plan for life, my policy.

Hatred wounds and kills. Love’s power is often invisible and indirect.

I’ve spent years mulling over the reality of God and the power of the great religions. Religion was the first powerful morality force in the western world, its ideas spread over the planet.

It’s difficult to not connect the rise of hatred and rage and selfishness with religion’s weakening, its corruption,  demise, and loss of influence. The big idea of Christianity was to give of yourself to others. The big idea of Christianity today is political power and dominance.

With some notable exceptions, religion has lost its place as the shaper, enforcer, and definer of our common moral code, our compassion and empathy, and the meaning of morality and truth. It never encompassed everyone, but it was more powerful than anyone else.

Our new faith is hating our neighbors, not loving them. Our new church is social media.

We’ve traded truth and mercy for instant messaging and online shopping and conspiracy.

The Judeo-Christian ethic has lost much of its power to hypocrisy and moral fuzziness, even as social media spreads more lies and grievance all the time.

Loving thy neighbor is out of fashion; look at the news or see Congress.

Our once proud elected government has become a cesspool of lies and rage. Lying is a new religion, so is self-pity and grievance, the Internet its willing enabler and chorus.

The Christian idea of love and mercy hangs on by its fingernails, pushed to the edge of life, almost out of sight. The haters roll their eyes.

The Internet is not doing much to replace that moral code, nor are the people who call themselves progressives or conservatives, or red and blue (or hatred and rage).

Our civic life is like a boxing match between two ferocious fighters in a fight that never ends,  there are no knockout punches, just one blow after another. Christianity is invoked as a political shield, not as a moral force.

I’m not pessimistic. Lies travel quickly, but they don’t live nearly as long as the truth.

It is painful to watch our democracy evolve from the Greeks’ noble visions to Jefferson’s brilliance to Lincoln’s compassion and courage to the United States Congress in 2021. I am moved to avoid hopelessness and define hope in a new way.

I refuse to be a hater; I just won’t spend the rest of my days in that way.

The reason why so many people want to be free of one another isn’t so much that they hate what they see in others, as that they know others hate what they see in them.

In our divided culture, we all recognize what we detest in ourselves: selfishness and impotence, agony, terror, and despair. We don’t listen to one another, we fear one another.

It feels like a whirlpool to me, one of those terrible twisters that spin and spin and tear our lives and communities apart. I’m not jumping in.

My semi-public position challenges me almost every day to decide what I want to be and who I want to be when it comes to hate. I am getting there. I am learning about myself.

Hatred can be a powerful force and stimulus for good; if it doesn’t swallow me up, as it sometimes has.

St. Paul triggered the rise of compassion in our once brutal and impoverished world by defining the Christian position on redemption and resurrection.

Salvation came not from conquest but grace and truth.

Redemption meant liberation from hatred and sin rather than the Old Testament embrace of the struggle for freedom from slavery and oppression.

Jesus’s message, he said, was love and forgiveness. That was also the message of Judaism and the Muslim faith.

All of them called for a righteous life, a moral life.

Since then, the world and humanity seem to lurch back and forth between morality, greed, and domination. But if you know history, you know hatred is not the most powerful force, just the most destructive and tragic.

In his time, Merton argued that the world is not yet hell, no matter how much hatred there is. That seems so important and so very true to me.  It’s not yet hell now either.

For me, history has a much deeper meaning. The evil of the past – and modern life – is profound, but there is also and always the City of love, those who love one another are drawn and fused to one another  and in what Merton called the “heroism of charity under suffering.”

That opened my eyes this afternoon reading this chapter. The heroism of charity under suffering. That is the opposite of hell and the most effective antidote to hatred. I’m going to put that up on my wall.

Throughout history, the armies of those who hate everything are inevitably scattered and dispersed, its citizens and warriors cast out in every direction, like sparks on a woodpile bonfire.

The real sinners, wrote Merton, are those who hate everything because their world is full of betrayal, lies, delusion, and deception.  It is what they know.

But for all that, and oddly, the most fanatic haters seem dull and empty to me, they also seem the most bored, their lives tedious and unfulfilled. Hatred is not something to cuddle up with at night, it doesn’t inspire or uplift.

I loved Merton’s big idea that evil and hatred are not positive, tangible things but the absence of feelings and values.

Hatred is a weakness, a hole, the lack of something that could appeal to people’s hearts, souls, and minds.

We don’t go to houses of worship much anymore, but almost all of us have little choice but to be online. Forbes magazine reported that in 2020, Americans spent on average more than 1,300 hours on social media.

Small wonder we have come to hate one another. For me, silence is a full cup, not arguing online.

The culture of hatred makes me look at going to church or temple in a completely different way. My silent hour is precious, my time and place of worship, my church.

My idea is to build a life based on good and empathy, that is all I can do, but it is a lot. There is heroism to me in the beautiful idea of charity under suffering.