The writer Anthony de Mello offers a simple story:
A man who took great pride in his lawn found himself with a large crop of dandelions. He tried every method he knew to get rid of them. Still, they plagued him. Finally he wrote to the Department of Agriculture. He enumerated all the things he had tried and closed his letter with the question “what shall I do now?” In due course, the reply came: “We suggest you learn to love them.”
De Mello continues:
I too had a lawn I prided myself on and I too was plagued with dandelions that I fought with every means in my power. So learning to love them was no easy matter. I began by talking to them each day. Cordial. Friendly. They maintained a sullen silence. They were smarting from the war I had waged against them and were suspicious of my motives. But it wasn’t long before they smiled back. And relaxed. Soon we were good friends.
My lawn, of course, was ruined. But how attractive my garden became!
(“Dandelions,” in The Song of the Bird)
We’re all familiar with businesses or individuals who put significant time, money, and energy into eliminating dandelions. They seem to challenge our desires for conformity, control, and neighborhood status or approval. But despite rigorous efforts the little buggers persist. Unless, of course, we poison the soil over and over again.
An orderly, “acceptable,” dandelion-free lawn doesn’t serve the thriving of life very well, though. Pollinators need dandelions early in the spring; that means we all need them to help produce food. And pouring poisons into the earth ultimately harms us all through the air we breathe and the waters we depend upon. It’s also true that if we took the time we could be well-served by harvesting dandelions wisely.
So…learn to love the dandelion.
I don’t know who the “dandelions” are in your life. I don’t know whose presence challenges your sense of control or order or knowing you’re right about how things ought to be. I do know that I’ve had—and continue to have—such people in my own life. People that anger or frustrate me. People who seem diametrically opposed to my values or positions. People who feel utterly alien and incomprehensible to me. “Enemies,” if you will. People Jesus tells us to love and pray for so that we may be “perfect,” as God is perfect.
It’s worth offering a couple other translations of that verse. The Complete Gospels translates the Greek as “be as liberal in your love” as God is. The New Jerusalem Bible translates it to mean, “You must set no bounds to your love” as God sets no bounds to theirs.
The point, as always with Jesus, is to love without hesitation or condition. To imitate God’s love. Or at least grow into doing so more fully.
I’d like to suggest that aspiring to this transformational love asks some of the same things of us as loving dandelions does for a lot of people:
- We need to set aside our sense of merit, our sense of knowing who deserves what, our sense of life as a series of punishments and rewards based on worth or morals. It rains and shines on all…equally. (And how irritating is that?)
- We need to jettison our concern and compliance with what is normal or acceptable or what others think. Unconditional, God-aligned love rarely suits conventional standards; the notion of loving enemies remains utterly outrageous. Actual acts of loving the enemy disturb all kinds of expectations and orders.
- We need to be humble enough to surrender our efforts to control others, to judge them, to tell them how to be. Such efforts never actually change those we disagree with anyway. I’m guessing that I am not the only person here who gets attached to my own sense of being right on many occasions; we may even get a tad self-righteous on occasion. That’s just how egos work. But Jesus tells us to give that up, let our hearts be converted to love and compassion.
The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh makes clear that we must seek to understand those we oppose. “Even if our enemy is cruel, even if [they] are crushing us, sowing terror or injustice, we have to love [them]. This is the message of Jesus….We have to understand why [they are] that way, why [they] do not see things the way we do. Understanding a person brings us the power to love and accept [them]. And the moment we accept [them], [they] cease to be our enemy” (Living Buddha, Living Christ, 84-5). When we seek to understand, a sense of enmity becomes compassion. “Our anger transforms itself into the energy of compassion,” he says. “suddenly the one we have been calling our enemy becomes our brother or sister” (83).
When we hate others, when we cultivate alienation, when we fail to understand, we ultimately hurt ourselves. We deny the deep interrelationships of reality, sort of like a dandelion-hater forgets natural interdependence. Hurting the enemy, the “other,” also hurts ourselves. Richard Rohr declares that according to Jesus “Loving and greeting only those who love you… is simply a mechanism of bondage. It’s keeping you in a small world of warm fuzzies, but actually inoculating you from the often dark and daring world of real love. [Loving only those who love you] actually protects and perpetuates the world of scapegoats, victimization, and projection…Until there is love for enemies, there is no real transformation” (Jesus’ Plan for a New World Order: The Sermon on the Mount, 157).
We say we know that the transformation of our relationships and the transformation of our world is the aim of discipleship. The aim of opening ourselves always more fully to the presence of Christ. The aim of becoming as liberal in our love as God is. Jesus does not offer this process of transformation as an option of discipleship; it’s an imperative.
And it’s not easy. And it takes a long time.
Part of my own growth (I hope) in the direction Jesus speaks of in today’s gospel occurred almost twenty years ago. I was spending a lot of time among a group of people who shared my political opinions, my theological commitments, my biases about all sorts of things. But I found myself increasingly distressed by how much they disparaged the intelligence and humanity of those they disagreed with; it became clear that their sense of self-righteousness was spiritually unfruitful. And I struggled with that. And I prayed about that. Then came a moment when I was washing dishes. Just running water and watching suds flow all over the place. All of a sudden, for no apparent reason, a word came to me: it’s more important to be compassionate than to be right. More important to be compassionate than to be right.
That moment has stuck with me. That’s a word I find hard to live. Because, like anyone else, I like to be right. But I must be compassionate. Regardless of the values at stake, regardless of the disagreements under debate, I must seek to understand. That does not mean surrendering a commitment to pursuing love-rooted justice. That doesn’t mean capitulating to destructive and hateful agendas. It does mean I must remember the humanity of the folks I’m dealing with.
They are my kin. And God loves them as much as me. Life rains and shines on us all, equally. We are all in relationship.
And we poison the ground of life when we act otherwise, just as seeking to get rid of dandelions poisons the earth (and ourselves).
May we all learn to love our dandelions, even as we grow the beautiful garden of God’s reign.
Scripture: Matthew 5: 43-48
-Rev. Ruth Moerdyk