In talking to a friend about the Las Vegas murders, she told me that she was focusing on the stories of heroism and of people helping total strangers.  While she honestly wanted to celebrate the helpers as a way of coming to terms with the violence, she also stated that she had no choice but to look for those stories because she had no way to explain the hate in the world to her daughters.  That statement made me think about what there is we can learn from hate.

The answer is simple–from hate we learn love.  Hate reminds us that without transformative love, the world (and all of us) will fall into chaos.  The presence of hate keeps us from being complacent. Love drives s a level of self-sacrifice that can, at times, appear antithetical to self-preservation.  On the opposite end of the spectrum, hate often thrives on the notion of self-preservation above all else.  It can be easier to hate than to love.

But that’s where we are asked to rise above.  We are tasked with not taking the easy route, but looking for times and places where we need to put others first.  Hate shows us immediate destruction.  We need to train ourselves to be patient with the longer time that it takes for the benefits of love to be fully developed.

In Colossians, there is a very clear charge to all of us as members of God’s creation.  The author implores us to:

“…clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Make allowance for each other’s faults, and forgive anyone who offends you. Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds us all together in perfect harmony.”

It’s interesting to note the specific active nature of this charge.  We are not asked to let love envelop us, we are asked to put it on, every day, like a garment.  This is something we need to do deliberately do—no different than putting on the clothes that allow us to go out into the world in comfort.

The last sentence of the quote from Colossians is the most revealing about the reason for hate.  Love becomes the way for us to bind together…hate becomes the common enemy we can rally against.  But for love to be transformative it needs to be strong and universal.  Hate is like the bar-bells at a gym—we need to strain against it regularly to make each of us stronger.  Without the ongoing effort, our ability to love will not be fully developed.

Finally, hate is there to remind us that we are answering a higher call.  We can’t experience love if it wasn’t for an absence of love.  That absence alienates us, terrifying us that we will end up alone, forgotten, kept out of the light.  Just like we experience the day because of the presence of the night, we can appreciate love because we have actual fear of the impact of lack of love.  Hate keeps us human, while striving for love is what allows us to reach for our spiritual potential given to each of us by God.

There is one line from the musical Les Miserables which always resonates with me and often brings me to tears because it so clearly talks about why we all want love to conquer hate.  It summarizes the quote from Colossians in one sentence and gives us the clearest reason to push again hate.

“To love another person is to see the face of God”

Hate is the fog that makes the sunrise of love even more beautiful, even more unifying and even more enlightening.  We don’t ever want the fog, but we revel when it is over powered.