On Loving The Russians

Leaders of the nuclear freeze campaign are quick to concede that their effort is but a first step toward the ultimate goal of nuclear disarmament; a freeze would maintain nuclear weapons at an intolerable level of destructiveness. Everyone seems to agree that in the long run the solution to our nuclear madness requires a change of heart, a conversion, a turning away from force and violence and a turning toward some form of global dispute settlement. An indispensable prerequisite to any such conversion is a change in the way the Americans and Russians perceive each other. We must begin to see each other in a new light, freed from the fear and mistrust that have clouded our vision for so long.

Christians, of course, have grown up with exhortations to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek, to be peacemakers. Christ challenged us in words frequently unheeded but never quite forgotten: "You have heard the commandment, 'You shall love your neighbor but hate your enemy.' My command to you is: love your enemies, pray for your persecutors. This will show that you are children of your heavenly Father, for his sun rises on the bad and the good, he rains on the just and the unjust" (Matthew 5:43-44).

There is nothing praiseworthy in merely loving our own kind, our own family or friends or citizens. As Jesus says, anyone can love those who will love in return. But a follower of Christ is called to be made perfect, as God is perfect. Consequently, we are called to love not merely those on our street, in our workplace, or in our country, but even those whom we fear and distrust. Even those who will hate us in return. We must walk through life as Samaritans willing to stop and help even the injured Jew.

Christians have grown up with these teachings. We have heard and prayed them a thousand times. Yet we do not act as we know we should. What is needed is not another abstract homily on love of neighbor, or a modern retelling of the Good Samaritan story, but a willingness to confront the central and most difficult question: how am I to go about loving my neighbor, my enemy, the Russians?

It is important, of course, to support efforts to limit and eliminate nuclear arms. But if a conversion is needed, then mere technical solutions are inadequate. A world without nuclear arms is still a world rent by hate and burdened by weapons of incalculable destruction. A world without nuclear arms is still a world threatened by great power rivalries. The problem must be dealt with at the deeper, fundamental level. Are there things we can do as followers of Christ to begin the necessary transformation of ourselves?

I think there are several simple, modest steps we could begin taking today. We need not wait for the Russians before beginning to transform ourselves. In the world of the mind and heart and spirit, we cannot wait, because we have been commanded by Christ to reach out to those who hate us. This is a unilateral and not a reciprocal obligation.

One way we can begin this conversion is to begin to know and understand the Russians. We must learn about Russia and its people. The statement may not be profound, but it is accurate: ignorance breeds distrust. We cannot love what we do not know. Just as we must spend time with our God if we wish our love to grow and our relationship to deepen, so we must spend time with Russian history, art, and literature if we are to forge a relationship of love.

Knowledge for its own sake is not the goal. We could all declaim learnedly on Turgenev and Chekov and still hate and fear the Russians. What we seek is to separate the Soviet system of government, which we distrust, from the Russian people. We need to love the latter, not the former. Learning about the Russians is a way to pierce the Communist veil and see the human faces behind. People love and hate and work and play in Russia--people who are not very much different from us; people with dreams of a good life, peace, prosperity, and a better life for their children. These are the people we must love. These are the people who will die if war comes--not goose-stepping, red-dressed soldiers or vodka-drinking, bear-like commissars.

We should seize upon any opportunities that arise to learn more about Russia and to identify with the Russian people. Writing letters to dissidents, asking emigres to speak to our church groups, even watching a Russian movie if it comes to town--all these are ways to come to know our neighbors, our enemies, our brothers and sisters.

I hope it is clear that we are called to love the Russians, not to love communism or to stifle our criticism of the Soviet government. Our call to love the Russians does not require us to avert our eyes from their failings and transgressions. We are free to maintain our belief that the Soviet government has been a force for evil in many parts of the world.

But Christ came to call the sinner and to heal the sick. Christ ate and drank with tax collectors and prostitutes. Pharisaical self-righteousness brought his harshest condemnation. We are all sinners. America, too, has been a force for evil. We are all a mix of good and bad, light and dark, needing the redemptive love of Christ.

So we need not like the Russians, but we must recognize that Christ loves each of them with absolute and unconditional love. Our conversion, then, is not to bring an unyielding submission to evil, but an unyielding insistence on God's love as a force greater than this world's evil. We must call the Russians as well as our own people to become more than they appear capable of being.

Thus, we must begin to know the Russians. But our initial steps toward conversion must include not only efforts to know them better. We must also begin to love them more.

We could begin by making Russia and its relations with America a church and parish focus. "Love your neighbor as yourself" should be made concrete. When was the last time you heard a homilist say that "love your neighbor" means love the Russians; that "turn the other cheek" applies not just to individuals but to international relations; that Christ came and died for each person in Leningrad as well as Chicago? In days gone by we prayed for Russia's conversion. It wouldn't be a bad idea to revive the practice of praying for Russia, its people who are persecuted and its people who persecute, its leaders, its problems, its relations with the United States. I've yet to hear among the prayers of the faithful: "That the Russian people will have a bountiful agricultural harvest, let us pray to the Lord."

Our goal must be to break down the vision of Russia as the exemplar of all that is evil and threatening in the world. Russia isn't a symbol, it's a community of men and women and children. Like us, each Russian is a mixture of good and evil. There is hardly any risk that we will minimize the evil side of the Russian personality, but there is a great danger that we will ignore the forces for good in the Russian people and in their state. Every Russian measure for good, no matter how halting and feeble, should be encouraged and applauded. We need to see the Russians as fellow sinners called by and saved by Christ. The self-righteous begin wars, not the humble.

These are admittedly minor steps toward loving the Russians and changing our view of them and the world. Isn't there something more we can do, something simple and dramatic, which will transform us and help us love the Russians as our brothers and sisters in Christ?

There is, I believe, one central and indispensable step we must take if we are truly committed to following Christ's call to love. Alas, it is not as dramatic or arresting as most of us would wish. It is, unfortunately, difficult and unattractive and not likely to beget immediate results. It is also something many of us have never considered. To love the Russians we must first love ourselves, truly, not in the shallow sense of our spiritless society, but in the deep and profound sense which will relieve us of our fear and guilt and hatred that propels us toward war.

Christ commanded us to love God and to love "your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22:36-39). Most of us when we hear these words immediately focus on our twin obligations--to love God and each other. Of course we must love God and our neighbor. Indeed, there cannot be one without the other. But the commandment is not merely to love God and our neighbor; it is to love our neighbors as ourselves. We are to show the same concern and love to those around us as we show ourselves.

Although it is never easy to love another, at least we can test our lives against Christ's words and judge how well we are following his commandment. We ask ourselves: Are we doing for others what we do for ourselves? Do we speak well of others, share with them, forgive them, help them, comfort them? Do we follow the Golden Rule? But it becomes impossible to follow Christ's words, or even to know how to follow them, if we do not begin from a foundation of self-love. There is no way we can love our neighbor if we fear and despise ourselves.

Of course, it is not pleasant to admit that I am bad as well as good, that I am capable of hurting others and taking pleasure from it, that I wish to gorge myself on money and things at the expense of others. I do not want to confront my darker side which yearns for what is selfish and cruel. Rather than accept this, it is far easier and comforting to find someone else on whom to project my darker yearnings. We externalize what author John Sanford has called in his book The Kingdom Within our "inner enemy" or "inner adversary."

We are all familiar with this in everyday life. Each of us has, at some time or another, repressed something about ourselves that was unattractive and embarrassing. But this unwanted and threatening side of our personality won't go away. Instead, it reappears in those around us.

I may call my wife selfish, projecting my own desires to grasp and hold and dominate. As Sanford notes, a moralistic mother may project onto her daughter her own suppressed sensuality, treating her as a "whore in the making." Or a timid employee may refuse to acknowledge his feelings of anger, and instead find himself oppressed by a cruel and vindictive boss.

Dale Aukerman has detected this same tendency in our views of Adolf Hitler. In Darkening Valley he challenges the assumption that there is a sharp discontinuity between who we are and who Adolf Hitler was. Our attempt to see Hitler as the focal point of all the evil in the world is an effort to reject our common humanity and the dark side within each of us.

We project our evilness not only upon individuals but upon groups as well. It is interesting that both Sanford and Aukerman point to Nazi Germany as a prime example of this group projection. The Nazis, says Sanford, saw themselves as a super-race, and were therefore unable to accept their own weaknesses. They projected these upon the Jews, and then sought to exterminate their own dark side by exterminating the Jews.

But, as Aukerman suggests, we may be doing the same thing when we look at the Nazis today. Rather than admit our own dark side, and recognize our common humanity, we project the evil within our own society onto Nazi Germany. The Nazis are no longer people but a symbol of evil which comforts and reinforces us in our collective self-righteousness.

In the same way, we as Americans have collectively projected onto the Russian people and state our own darker side. We as individuals and as Americans have done evil, have hated, have stolen, have oppressed, have lusted. We do not accept this. We repress what is worst in ourselves and project it onto the Russians, the Reds, the godless Communists. Russians then cease to be people; they become a symbol, a representation of evil.

There are two inevitable results of this refusal to accept our "inner enemy." First, we unwittingly provoke a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, it is no surprise when the daughter of the sexually repressed woman becomes pregnant at 16. Sanford explains, "To the mother it was a corroboration of what she had known all along. For the daughter it was a fate forced upon her by the projection of her mother's own shadowy nature, which she had been forced to carry and to live out." Repeatedly tell a kid-gone-wrong he's worthless and you'll soon have a hardened criminal. We run the same risk with the Russians. Treat a people as evil, expect nothing but the worst from them, and you will get what you expect. It's a chilling thought.

The second result of this group projection is even more damaging. When we project our weaknesses onto others, they do not magically disappear from within us. We are not immediately healed and cleansed. We still feel self-hatred and guilt. Indeed, we are living a lie and sense it. As Sanford says: "The Jews had to carry for the Nazis what they would not see in themselves. They carried the burden of the hate and fear and loathing which, in fact, the Nazis had for themselves. The ensuing wholesale and horrible slaughter of the Jews was a futile attempt by the Nazis to exterminate their projected inner enemy."

We can see the same tendency at work in our relations with Russia. Our self-hatred is turned outward, but will not go away and leave us in peace. We struggle under the weight of our guilt and pain. How tempting to be done with it all, to end the anxiety by destroying the monster we have unconsciously created, as if then we would be freed from our darker side. We stand in our self-righteousness--thank God we're not like them! We might at any time succumb to the temptation and obliterate both our fantasy and the world as well.

Our hatred of Russia, then, is in large part self-hatred. We are not as good as we pretend nor is Russia as bad. If we are to love the Russians, to undergo a true conversion, we must begin within ourselves. We must come to know ourselves, admit our weaknesses, and accept God's healing forgiveness. Only then will we look at the world as it is, and see the Russians as people made in the image of God, not as horrific figures of death and destruction.

We are terrified that if we acknowledge our weaknesses and evil we will be overwhelmed. But the reverse is true. As long as we fail to accept the "inner enemy," we are in its grip.

What will happen if we acknowledge and accept our evil side, if we learn to love ourselves? We will be freed from our anxieties and the external projections we have created. Our self-righteousness will vanish. We will recognize our common humanity with all who live. We will not necessarily like the Russians, but we will be able to love them. It will be a safer world to live in.

It will not be easy to love ourselves, because it is not easy to confront our evil yearnings. But here, I believe, is a mission for peace which the church and all Christians can eagerly undertake. We can begin in our parishes to proclaim Christ's redemptive love, his gift of divine healing, his acceptance of who we are, his hatred of the sin but never the sinner.

Our goal is not a mindless "it feels good" self-love. We are seeking a realistic self-love, which admits our evilness and accepts that we are without the power to conquer that evil without help. But the Good News is that we do have that help in Jesus Christ, in his life and death for us.

If we love ourselves, we can love the Russians and make the world a safer place in which to live. As self-righteousness gets stripped away, leaving our common humanity, we can come face to face with our enemy and hear in Christ's words, "Let those who are without sin cast the first bomb."

Joseph Allegretti was associate professor of law at the Creighton University School of Law in Omaha, Nebraska when this article appeared.