August 29:

“We must, therefore, purge ourselves of hatred.”

–Gandhi (Quit India Speech, August 9, 1942)

In St. Francis of Assisi’s famous prayer he begs, “where there is hatred, let me sow love.” This comes immediately after his plea, “make me an instrument of thy Peace.”  Gandhi contextualizes this for us in nonviolent action and principle. Where violence and hatred seek to purge society of people, Gandhi takes a different approach: in nonviolence we must purge ourselves of hatred. Hatred drives violence in the same way that compassion underlies nonviolence.  The comparison (and contrast) is apt: compassion is fierce and potent, not passive in the least; it is impossible to hate someone in thought alone: the thought itself is an action because it has an effect on the thinker as well as the person or group of people toward whom it is directed. Likewise with compassion and love.  In his Search for a Nonviolent Future, Michael Nagler references a headline that he recently read: Anti-Asian Hate Groups on the Rise. If we are to understand this phenomenon from its root cause, we would not ask the question of who are they and who are they hating; we would be able to see this headline and read into it more deeply: hate itself is on the rise, so what do we do about that? Well, to begin with, we address it. We notice it is a problem; it is manufactured–something gave rise to it (and no, it was not the people toward whom their hatred is directed), and that seed, that something can be addressed.

It is not an insignificant detail that Gandhi would make this bold statement in 1942, after he had been experimenting with nonviolence over decades at that point. It demonstrated that his understanding of the dynamics of how nonviolence works grew only more refined. As he called for the British to “quit India,” he called on all Indians to “quit hatred,” as they resisted British colonialism. That was the secret of nonviolent power.

Experiment in Nonviolence:

Sow a seed of fierce love where there is hatred somewhere in your own mind.