where there is hatred…

Hate: an intense dislike; an intense feeling of ill-will.

Sometimes it starts with a thoughtless comment, a word taken the wrong way. Maybe it is an intentional slur or a calculated action taken that causes pain. Something triggers hate. Something pokes the sleeping monster and it growls back.

Francis recognized that the antidote to hatred is love, but that most of the time, love needed time to put down some roots and grow into the hatred. Like sowing seeds; they don’t come up overnight. Love planted needs tending, maybe for a long time, but the seeds of love finally blossom.

Francis knew also that love has to be planted in the midst of intense dislike, where it lives and flourishes. Seeds of love don’t do much if they are contained in journals or literary publications. Love has to look hate in the eye, stand in the place where hate appears to be winning, live in hate’s neighborhood if it is to transform. I once knew a man who said we ought to love “promiscuously.” Lavish love, sown in hate’s backyard, will eventually produce the inevitable transformation. Nobody said living like this is easy. There’s a precedent.