Overcoming Hatred - Building Community

In the context of the current public debates on health care reform, immigration reform, economic recovery, war and terror (among others), it seems that one of the risks that we face is that of objectifying these debates to the point where they become impersonal and dehumanizing. In fact, these are issues that affect the lives of real people. Among the potential by-products of such impersonalization and de-humanization is a breeding of hatred among us that will serve to hinder real compassion, shared concern and true community.

Howard Thurman, in his 1953 book "Jesus and the Disinherited," wrote of the need to overcome hatred as a prerequisite for building community. His construct for understanding hatred begins in a situation where there is contact without fellowship. This is contact that is devoid of any of the primary overtures of warmth and fellow-feelings and genuineness. Secondly, Thurman points out that contacts without fellowship tend to express themselves in the kind of understanding that is strikingly unsympathetic. There is understanding of a kind, but it is without healing and reinforcement of personality. Thirdly, Thurman points out that unsympathetic understanding tends to express itself in the active functioning of ill-will.

To make this point, Thurman shared the story of once traveling from Chicago to Memphis, Tennessee. He found his seat on the train across from an elderly lady, who took immediate cognizance of his presence. When the conductor came along for the tickets, she said to him, pointing in Thurman’s direction, “What is that doing in this car?”

The conductor answered, with a touch of creative humor, “That has a ticket.”

For the next fifty miles, this lady talked for five or ten minutes to all who were seated in that coach, setting forth her philosophy of human relationships and the basis of her objection to Thurman’s presence in the car. Thurman said that he was able to see the atmosphere of the entire car shift from common indifference to active recognition of and, to some extent positive resentment of his presence in the car. He said, “An ill will spreading is like a contagious virus.”

Fourth, Thurman suggests that active ill-will, when dramatized in a human being, becomes hatred walking on earth.