“Profuse shower of love”–Daily Metta

December 24:

“It is a heavy downpour of rain which drenches the soil to fullness, likewise only a profuse shower of love overcomes hatred.”

–Gandhi (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. XIV, p. 402)

In Chapter Four of Search for a Nonviolent Future, Michael Nagler compares violence to the weather. “The weather,” he says, “is notoriously unpredictable. But something about it, as we know to our cost, is only too predictable: if we keep pouring fluorocarbons into the atmosphere, if we keep burning up the rain forests and all of the fossil fuel we can get our hands on, we will keep heating up the planet.” He continues the metaphor: we can’t predict when and where terrible storms will occur, but we can know that if we continue on the way we are, then we can be certain that such effects will take place. So it is for violence. In his words, “We cannot predict who will lose it and walk into which high school with what kind of weapon, but we know sure as anything that as generation after generation watches more violent TV and movies, plays more dehumanizing video games, there will be more suffering from violence.”

In other words, violence carries its own predictability. But so does nonviolence. The more we invest in greener technologies, better relationships and fewer tensions with those around us, the more we honor the dignity of all people, young and old (and in between), the more, in short, that we do for a nonviolent world, we can predict that it, too, will have an effect. But, as he points out, our nonviolence has to be proportional. The intensity of violence today means, as he says, that only a “profuse shower of love overcomes hatred,” not a trickle, not a sprinkle or a drizzle, but a full on, road-flooding, reservoir-filling storm of nonviolent energy!

Experiment in nonviolence:
Get your hands on a copy of Search for a Nonviolent Future and settle down for some powerful reading.