Lectio Divina — “enemies”
Day 10 of the Season of Creation
Thursday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time
Lectio — enemies
> “Love your enemies.”
— Luke 6:27
There are few commands of Jesus easier to admire from a safe distance and harder to obey up close. “Love your enemies” sounds beautiful until I have an enemy.
Yet perhaps I should begin with a more unsettling question: Who decided who my enemies are?
Some I have chosen. Some have chosen me. And some, like the crabgrass growing around The Glenn, I simply inherited as enemies because somebody once told me they were.
Jesus does not merely tell me to tolerate my enemies. He tells me to love them. That means I must look again. Listen again. Perhaps even learn from what I had already condemned.
During this Season of Creation, I hear those words differently. Creation itself may be asking me whether some of the things I call enemies are actually neighbors I have never bothered to know.
Meditatio — enemies
I was always told that crabgrass was my enemy.
A respectable lawn was supposed to be rid of it. Kill it, spray it, prevent it—do whatever was necessary to preserve the appearance of the lawn. And if the chemicals required to defeat this enemy carried some cost for soil, insects or living water, that cost could easily become invisible beside the satisfaction of seeing a tidy patch of grass.
But becoming a pastoralist has changed the way I look at the same plant.
Now I harvest lawns and bar ditches around The Glenn as forage for my sheep. Suddenly the enemy looks remarkably like food. Crabgrass can provide abundant, digestible summer forage precisely when heat and dryness have caused other grasses to struggle. What I once wanted dead, I now gather. Better still, I collect its seed and the seed of other grasses from flourishing bar ditches and scatter them over bare places in the pasture.
The weed has not changed.
I have.
And that makes Jesus’ command rather uncomfortable.
If I actually get to know my enemies, will they remain my enemies?
Perhaps “love your enemies” begins before affection. Perhaps it begins with the humility to admit that my categories may be wrong. I can classify a plant as a weed, a creature as a pest, a person as a nuisance, or a group as a threat—and then permit the label to relieve me of the troublesome obligation of seeing what is actually before me.
The Season of Creation asks me to recover that sight. And its image of living water makes the question especially concrete. Whatever I spread, spray, pour or waste at The Glenn does not simply disappear when it leaves my sight. Water connects what I would prefer to keep separate. My pasture, my sheep, my weeds, my neighbors, the creatures beneath the soil, and people I will never meet belong to a common home.
Perhaps loving my enemies means refusing to poison the whole field simply because I dislike one thing growing in it.
And perhaps that lesson does not stop with crabgrass.
Oratio — enemies
Lord Jesus,
You tell me to love my enemies,
and I confess how quickly I decide who they are.
Teach me to look again
at the person I have dismissed,
the creature I have considered useless,
and even the plant I have called a weed.
During this Season of Creation,
give me reverence for the soil beneath my feet
and gratitude for every drop of living water.
Before I destroy something, teach me to understand it.
Before I condemn someone, teach me to know them.
Before I defend what is merely convenient or attractive,
teach me to ask what serves the common good.
Let the living water flowing from you
wash away the labels by which I excuse myself from love.
And when I discover that an enemy was partly of my own making,
give me the humility to change.
Amen.
Contemplatio — enemies
The crabgrass teaches me something surprisingly important about artificial intelligence.
An algorithm, like an herbicide, can be extraordinarily effective once I tell it what the enemy is.
That is precisely why discernment must come before efficiency.
Magnifica humanitas warns me that when AI participates in decisions affecting employment, credit, public services, reputation, rights and opportunities, I cannot pretend that those decisions are merely technical. A machine may classify extraordinarily well while remaining utterly incapable of doing what Jesus commands today: loving the person it has classified as an enemy.
AI does not know compassion. It cannot forgive. It cannot hope that a human being will repent tomorrow and become someone different from the person described by yesterday’s data. And if human prejudices enter its categories, enormous computational power can merely make an old injustice faster, quieter and more convincing.
The crabgrass at The Glenn offers me a wonderfully earthy parable.
For years the category was simple:
Crabgrass = weed = enemy.
Then my relationship with the land changed, and I discovered something the category had concealed. The “enemy” could feed my sheep, cover bare soil and contribute seed for tomorrow’s pasture.
So I must be cautious whenever technology promises to divide reality neatly into desirable and undesirable, useful and useless, safe and dangerous, friend and enemy.
The same moral discernment applies to my relationship with creation. I cannot declare war upon every inconvenient creature or plant and then allow technology to make my warfare increasingly efficient. Nor can I call water merely a resource for accomplishing my purposes. Living water is gift before it is commodity.
Jesus says, “Love your enemies.”
Perhaps one of the most radical consequences of that command is that I must never become so certain of my classifications that I cease looking at the reality—or the person—standing before me.
Today I will harvest some of yesterday’s enemy and feed it to my sheep.
And perhaps that is a tiny sign of the Kingdom: not merely defeating enemies, but discovering that through conversion, some enemies cease to be enemies at all.
Day 10 of the Season of Creation
