Love & Hate
A man finds out what he is capable of hating by looking at the list of what he has loved.
He is a deacon, fifty-six, and he is sitting in his truck in the lot outside the plant where his son-in-law works, at two in the afternoon, with the engine off and a tire iron on the passenger seat that he does not remember moving from the bed. His daughter had said the bruise on her arm was a cabinet door. He had believed the cabinet for a month. That morning she had stopped bothering to invent the cabinet.
He has preached on the sentence that moves murder into the heart. He has it by memory in two translations. What he finds in his chest in that lot is not a strong dislike and not anger, which he knows the feel of. It is a clean, settled, almost restful verdict that the world would be improved by the subtraction of one man, and that he is the one with the tool. He has loved his daughter since the day she was put in his arms. The thing he is feeling for the boy who hurt her is the same size as that, exactly, pointed the other way.
He does not get out. What keeps him in the seat is not the sermon. It is a thing he said to his brother nine years ago, when their father died and the two of them had both learned what they were capable of: if either one ever calls with a certain voice, the other drops everything and comes, no questions. He makes the call. He says four words. His brother is there in twenty minutes and drives him home in the truck, and the tire iron goes back in the bed, and the daughter is in her father's house by dark, and the boy is alive, and the thing the deacon did about him afterward was done in a courtroom with a lawyer, slowly, the way a man does a thing he will have to live beside.
The climb ended at a summit no man holds, and the checkpoint after it told a man which way his love was pointed and warned him that the left column does not stay still. This is the far side of the mountain, and it is the last room in the column for one reason: the capacity a man spent eight rooms learning to aim is the same capacity, and it has two directions. The page above said the people a man can hate most are the ones he loved most, and the deacon in the lot found out that the sentence is not a figure of speech. The love and the hate were one size. One of them had been there for thirty years and the other had been there for a month, and from the inside they felt like the same organ.
Three other rooms in this hall stand near this ground and none of them is this one. The element's room on hate names the emotion and the verdict it enforces, and a man should read it; the doctrines hall holds the sin and the act, as works of the flesh, with their own anchors. This room is the edge seen from the climb: how a love turns over, what it costs the man it turns over in, what a people becomes when it deletes the word, and what a man who has walked the mountain does when he finds himself standing here in daylight with a tool on the seat.
Love & Hate
"O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!" — 2 Samuel 18:33
A king weeping for the son who had raised an army to kill him. That is the far side of the mountain in one sentence, and it is the right one to open the cliff with, because it is a man standing at the edge and not going over. Absalom had hated his brother for two years in perfect silence and then had him killed at a feast; he had stolen a nation's heart with a kiss; he had slept with his father's wives on a roof in daylight so the whole city could see the contempt. Every pathway on this page runs through that boy. And the father, who had every one of the deacon's reasons and a whole army's worth of tools, came back from the edge with the love intact and the grief total, and his own general had to tell him to stop. This room is about the king and the son both, because a man has to know which one he is becoming before the feeling decides for him.
The Same Capacity, Two Directions
Love and hate are not two feelings on a shelf. They are the two directions of one capacity, the deepest a man has: the capacity to care, with his whole weight, about something that is not himself. Love is that weight pointed toward the other's good. Hate is the same weight pointed against it, the settled will that another person be diminished, harmed, or gone. Both require investment. Both require caring enough to sustain an orientation across months. A man who truly hates has given the hated man a seat in his inner life and keeps it warm.
That is why the opposite of either is not the other. The opposite is the cold the page above named, the absence of any investment in any direction, which cares nothing what happens. Hate at least cares. And it is why the distance between the two is so much shorter than a man expects, and the crossing so much easier. Joab stood over a weeping king and named the inversion in one sentence, because he was the kind of man who could only see it as a tactical error: "you love those who hate you and hate those who love you" — 2 Samuel 19:6. He meant it as a rebuke. It is also a diagnosis of the whole human race, and of the deacon's afternoon. The two directions share a road, and traffic runs both ways on it.
Scripture reserves one direction for a hatred that is not a sin, and it is careful about the object. "You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness" — Hebrews 1:9, said of the Son, and the thing hated is a thing, not a face. A man is commanded to hate what destroys the innocent and corrupts the good. The moment the object changes from the wickedness to the man carrying it, from the bruise to the boy, the hatred has changed categories without telling him, and it feels identical from the inside. That is the first thing a man has to know at the edge. The righteous version and the murderous version use the same muscle.
Two Years of Silence
A love does not become a hate in an afternoon. It turns over along two pathways, and Scripture walks both of them in one family.
The first is betrayal. The depth of the hatred is proportional to the depth of the love it replaces, because betrayal reveals that the one loved was not who the lover believed, and the larger the investment the more total the conversion. A man who was never invested cannot be betrayed into hatred; only the committed are in range. Absalom loved his sister. "But Absalom spoke to Amnon neither good nor bad, for Absalom hated Amnon, because he had violated his sister Tamar" — 2 Samuel 13:22. Neither good nor bad. The silence is the tell. Hate that is going somewhere does not shout; it goes quiet and waits, and it waited two full years, and then: "Mark when Amnon's heart is merry with wine, and when I say to you, 'Strike Amnon,' then kill him" — 2 Samuel 13:28. The feast, the wine, the signal. Nothing about it was hot. The deacon's verdict in the lot was the same temperature, and it was a month old, and it was already planning.
The second pathway is idolatry, and it is the one a man least expects because it starts at the summit. A person set in the place only God can hold will fail, because no creature can bear the weight of being someone's god, and when the idol fails the worshiper does not feel disappointment. He feels the collapse of the whole structure the idol was holding up, and what comes next is hatred of the person for the crime of having been human. Esau's blessing was that structure. "Now Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing... and Esau said to himself, 'The days of mourning for my father are approaching; then I will kill my brother Jacob'" — Genesis 27:41. Said to himself. The days of mourning. A brother sitting at a deathbed scheduling a murder for after the funeral, and the hatred of one man at a graveside became, in time, the hatred of a nation; the prophet wrote a whole book to Esau's descendants about it, "Because of the violence done to your brother Jacob" — Obadiah 10, and the sin he named was not the killing. It was the watching. "do not gloat over the day of your brother in the day of his misfortune" — Obadiah 12. Gloat. The turned-over love had become a people's inheritance, and the people did not know they had inherited anything.
The City That Banned the Word
The Lord moved the statute against murder into the heart, and every serious reading of it since has drawn the same ladder: contempt, then the decision that the other is less than human, then hatred, then the act. No man arrives at the act without the stages. Which means a people that suppresses the act and leaves the stages alone has not become safe. It has become pressurized.
The name for the act in this room comes from a film, and the film is kept because it saw the pressure. In Demolition Man (1993) a killer named Simon Phoenix is thawed out of cryo-prison into the San Angeles of 2032, a city that engineered peace by outlawing everything: weapons, contact, contempt, harsh language. Crime has been extinct so long that when Phoenix starts killing, the system has no word for what is happening, and the police computer has to stack three together to log it. MurderDeathKill. A society that deleted the word had to reinvent it on the spot, and the officers standing there admit out loud that they are not equipped. They had banned the behavior for a generation and were helpless the first day it walked back in. The film's deeper cut is the reason it earns the page. The murders were commissioned from the top. Dr. Cocteau, the architect of the clean city, is the one who unfroze Phoenix and aimed him at the free men living outside his order. The engineered peace had not removed murder from the heart. It had removed the vocabulary, the vigilance, and the men able to face it, while the hatred itself put on a clean suit and started delegating.
That is the ladder at city scale, and history runs the same stairs every time it runs the mass version: a class of people made less than human, a story that makes their destruction feel necessary, the normalizing of smaller violations until the participants cannot feel them, the act, and then the story again, to justify it. The single man runs the same stairs in a smaller house. He does not kill without a story about what was done to him and what is owed, and the story is always wrong, even when the wrong done to him was real. The deacon had a true story. The tire iron was still the wrong end of it.
What Hate Costs Its Host
The man consumed by hatred is not pursuing his enemy. He is being occupied by him, and he has signed the lease himself.
The clearest picture of the cost is a man at the top of his world. Haman had the king's ring, the second chariot, the invitation to the queen's private banquet, and he walked home from it past one man who would not stand up, and told his wife and friends the whole inventory of his success, and then: "Yet all this is worth nothing to me, so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king's gate" — Esther 5:13. Worth nothing. The hatred had repriced everything he owned to zero and installed one man at the center of his interior where his own life used to be, and he built the gallows that night, seventy-five feet high, and the rest of the book is the gallows finding its owner. A man who hates has handed his enemy continuous occupancy of the one room he cannot evict him from, and the rent is everything else he could have been building there.
And it does not stay hidden, whatever a man tells himself. "though his hatred be covered with deception, his wickedness will be exposed in the assembly" — Proverbs 26:26. In the assembly. The wife can feel it in the house before the man has admitted it to himself; the sons can tell which name makes their father's jaw set. Hate is the one tenant that will not stay in its room, and a man who thinks he is keeping it privately is only the last person to know it has moved into his face.
Standing at the Edge
Every man meets hate in two places, in himself and aimed at him, and what he does in each is most of what he is.
When it is aimed at him, the man who cannot absorb hatred without being destroyed by it or converted into a copy of it has no defense except the hope that it stops. The man who has settled who he is and what he will not become is a man his enemies cannot determine. They can harm him. They cannot author him. Stephen, with the stones already landing, got the last word of his life out as a request on behalf of the men throwing them: "Lord, do not hold this sin against them" — Acts 7:60. The hatred aimed at him reached his body and did not get into his mouth.
When it is in him, a man does not pretend to be above it. He watches the stages, the contempt, the demotion of the other to something less than a face, the story compounding every night, and he goes after them at the root, before they have two years to set. Not because he was never wronged badly enough to earn the feeling. Because he knows what it costs its host, and because the repayment was never his to make. "Vengeance is mine, and recompense, for the time when their foot shall slip" — Deuteronomy 32:35. Mine. The sentence is not a counsel to indifference. It is a transfer of the account to a party who will actually collect, which is the only thing that makes putting the tool down an act rather than a surrender. Joseph's brothers found out what that looks like on the day they expected the bill. "It may be that Joseph will hate us and pay us back for all the evil that we did to him" — Genesis 50:15, they said, with the father dead and nothing left to shield them. And the man with every reason and all the power answered with a question that is the whole discipline of this room: "Do not fear, for am I in the place of God?" — Genesis 50:19. Am I in the place of God. Then he "comforted them and spoke kindly to them" — Genesis 50:21. The wrong was real. The account was transferred. What he did with the rest of his life was feed them.
So the response to being wronged is not indifference and it is not forgiveness performed over a wound that is still bleeding underneath. It is the honest processing of what happened, the honest assessment of what can lawfully be done about it, the transfer of what cannot to the one whose it is, and the return of a man's attention to what he is building. The deacon did all of it, in that order, with a lawyer. He did not do it alone, and that is the part most men skip.
How Men Go Over
The man who thinks he is not in range. He has never hated anyone and says so, and it is true, because he has never loved anyone with his whole weight. He is safe from the cliff the way a man with no legs is safe from falling.
The man who calls it righteous. He hated the wickedness for one week and the man for the next ten years, and he did not feel the object change. He is still quoting the verse about hating what God hates with a face in his mind.
The man who goes quiet. He has not raised his voice about it in two years and takes that as proof he is over it. Absalom spoke neither good nor bad.
The man whose god failed. He set a wife, a father, a mentor in the one chair no creature can sit in, and when the chair gave way he hated the person for being made of what people are made of.
The man who keeps the account himself. He has decided the transfer is weakness and the collecting is his, and he has spent a decade at a gate watching one man not stand up.
The deacon in the lot. He found the verdict in his chest and did not argue that it was there. He made the call he had arranged nine years earlier, before he had any idea what he would need it for, and he let another man drive.
Three Questions With the Engine Running
TRUTH: Whose name sets a man's jaw, and how long has it been quiet? Not who he dislikes. Who he has given a room to. If he cannot name one, he should ask his wife, who can.
LOVE: Is the thing he hates a wickedness or a face, and when did it change? A man can love his daughter and hate what was done to her and still be on the right side of the line. The line is crossed in the dark, without a sound, the first time the hatred has a name instead of an act.
LAW: Who has he told to come get him, and did he tell them before he needed it? He is answerable for what he does with the tool on the seat, and the moment of the verdict is the wrong moment to be deciding who to call. A man who has no such call arranged has decided, in advance, to go over alone.
Not a Man
Every pathway on this page is a human pathway. Betrayal turns love over in a man; a failed idol turns it over in a man; the stages climb in a man; the feast, the wine, the signal are all a man's. The turning over is so reliable that a man could be forgiven for thinking it is simply what the capacity does when it is wounded enough.
The prophet who had the most reason to think so, whose own wife had betrayed him and whose own people had betrayed God for centuries, wrote down the one place the turning does not happen. God had every pathway open. The betrayal was total; the idol had been replaced with actual idols. And the sentence he gives is not that the wound was small. "I will not execute my burning anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and not a man, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath" — Hosea 11:9. For I am God and not a man. The reason the love does not turn over is not that the wound did not land. It is who was wounded. In every man alive the capacity has two directions and the road runs both ways. In one place it runs one way, toward a people who had done everything Absalom did and more, and kept running that way through a betrayal that ended on a hill with a kiss. The deacon came back from the edge because his brother drove. A man who wonders what drove the brother should look at whose love does not have a far side.
Back From the Edge
A man who has stood here has seen both ends of the deepest capacity he carries, the summit where love holds without conditions and the cliff where the same capacity, turned over, goes down. He does not live at either one. He lives on the mountain between them, loving what is real in its proper weight, doing the daily work the climb trained into him, and knowing exactly where the edge is so that he never finds it in the dark. "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good" — Romans 12:21. Overcome. Not avoid, not suppress, not ban the word. Overcome, which is a verb for a man with a tool on the seat and his hand not on it.
And he should look once more at what actually kept the deacon in the truck, because it was not the sermon and it was not the love for his daughter, which was the very thing pointing him at the door. It was an agreement, made years before, with a man who would hold him to it, on a day when neither of them was feeling anything at all. The feeling in the lot was the hate, and it was total, and it had the better argument. Something older than the feeling held, and the next column is where a man finds out what that something is, and why it has to be set in place before it is needed, and who else is counting on it holding.