Loving Our Enemies
Readings from various religious traditions at Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA.
BY MARY ALICE PROFFITT
“Nobody cares what you think!” my housemate snapped after seeing an essay I wrote in response to a reading our professor assigned in the required peace and justice course we were both taking in our year together at Harvard Divinity School (HDS). It was mid-October 2023 and the essay was based on wisdom passed down by prophets like Jesus and Buddha. It was entitled Loving Our Enemies.
My writing was intended as a positive offering based on my personal lived experience, but I guessed from my housemate’s response it hadn’t been well-received by others in my Religion & Public Life cohort either. Turns out, my ideas were actually heretical in that space: I believe power comes from within and they believed power comes from external forces. Coincidentally, our class was being held in Divinity Hall – the very building where transcendentalist and Harvard Divinity School alumnus Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his historic Divinity School Address on July 15, 1838.
Emerson’s speech would later ostracize him from the school because he called on that community to build their spiritual foundation on individual experience and personal insight rather than group think. This turning inward to look for the divine was a philosophy he gleaned from Eastern religious teachings and it ran counter to the traditional Christian institutions’ view of where spiritual power resided. His movement toward radical individualism rattled his audience, and he was reportedly not invited back for ten years. Emerson’s evolving views on spirituality prompted him to publicly reject Harvard Divinity School’s culture of normative thinking by placing value on progeny (the flow of wisdom directly to individuals rather than through hierarchies) and calling for personal agency to affect change in society.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call to spiritual self-reliance took place some 185 years before my meager philosophical offering landed in the same space with a similar result. The angry responses to my essay, my other questions and my very presence in the group drove me into an intimate and timely conversation with Emerson across time, looking for understanding and guidance. Last fall while students at HDS busily organized protests and encampments in response to the October 7th attack and the start of the war between Israel and Palestine, I spent the time between classes alone in Divinity Hall in quiet reflection, meditation, prayer and contemplation with Emerson’s words and his spirit as my good company.
Today Harvard Divinity proudly claims the alumnus once shunned for directly and publicly criticizing their culture.
Regardless of his intentions, Emerson’s speech threatened the prevailing Christian theologians and academics in power at HDS, and his words were taken as a criticism of their culture. He was considered insolent, discourteous, impertinent, and out of line. I considered this carefully as I meditated on the true intentions of my heart in composing an essay for my seminar class on how loving our enemies helps make peace in ourselves and in the world. This essay was not received by my fellow students or our teacher as inspirational. Rather, my words were taken as a critique of them and of HDS’s prevailing social justice ideology: a shared vision, purpose and meaning built on a foundation of fighting a common enemy. This was an ideology that I hadn’t intentionally signed up for when I enrolled at Harvard Divinity School, and it was especially surprising to me after an engaging experience in a 2022 summer program there called Making Change. Yet I had been plopped down right in the middle of it. Ironically and now I understand, gratefully, in my attempt to just go back to school to study religion, I had gotten caught up in social complexities that ended up helping me get clearer on my life’s calling and my next career move. Seeing this all up close and living through it further inspired my lifelong quest to engage in life’s big, and sometimes tough, questions.
“A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Then he is instructed in what is above him. ”
But back in Divinity Hall, Emerson helped me see how this conundrum actually wasn’t that difficult to understand: I had hurt their feelings by saying what I felt was true. They had taken my words as judgmental critique. I was in a moral dilemma: How do I live in a world where I see things differently but also remain kind? When is it appropriate to share my own “capital T ‘Truth’” and when is sharing it just plain rude? I hadn’t acted in good form. And my housemate was correctly saying, however difficult it was for me to hear, that nobody there at that time in that space was interested in hearing my opinion.
Despite being someone who was born into the world with a high Emotional Quotient and related natural social skills, that blundering wasn’t the first time I’d ever misread a room. I’m an extremely passionate person. When I’m in, I’m all in. And for many years, especially through years of single parenting while recovering from my divorce, I’d noticed that my passionate nature was leading me to misunderstanding and confusion with those I cared about. It could have been my children’s father, my employees, a man I was dating or neighbors serving alongside me on the town’s historic commission. Why did this keep happening when I felt I was trying so hard to do what was right—aspiring for veritas and a life of Truth?
After my brief time in that seminar class, the school’s administration moved me to an independent study, allowing me to spend my time learning from the wisdom of international monastics. South Asian religious scholars became my companions, and with their help, I dug into processing the difference between me perceiving myself to be right and me actually doing what was right ethically in a particular situation under particular conditions. The ethical questions that arose from my time in the social justice seminar were greeted by career scholars and spiritual leaders with abundant clarity and calm. The monks and swamis, now my close friends, returned again and again to Buddhist and Hindu teachings that guide us on how to treat others and that articulate the way in which we can actually live out our values in our daily lives.
Light streams into darkness in concentric circles last October 27, 2023 while I sat alone in meditation inside Divinity Hall. (Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA)
That spiritual and academic deep dive with the monastics helped me uncover the question—the question of how to live in better relationship—for Americans today. That time also led me to my current belief that now, in November 2024, the most spiritual task before us is to begin the process of learning how to be humans together again.
Our conversations allowed self-reflection and awareness that my habitual desire to be right was based more on my judgement of others than it was on me holding myself to a higher standard; elevating myself to a place of compassion and grace. Instead of writing an essay about “loving our enemies” in a cohort of social justice warriors fighting passionately against a common enemy, the polite thing to do would have been to more quickly excuse myself and move on without engaging. I could have taken more time to read the room and notice that I just wasn’t a great fit for this space, or the people and philosophies within it.
“Mysterious lessons come in all kinds of shapes and sizes when we look. And often, I’ve noticed, the best lessons come when I fall down; they come through my failures. ”
That did happen eventually, but the damage was done by not making those choices initially. Reflecting on the way I engaged in that space was the lesson that brought me, thank goodness, to my current work. Mysterious lessons come in all kinds of shapes and sizes when we look. And often, I’ve noticed, the best lessons come when I fall down; they come through my failures. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s speech has now been reclaimed and embraced in Harvard Divinity’s community as a seed that sprouted its currently stated embrace of religious pluralism. No longer is he an outcast.
Life is about fit, and the fit for each space and the context of its people changes so much depending on where we are. Likewise, etiquette is not about judgement and absolutism. It’s not a rigid list of manners that we memorize and act upon in a rote way in order to follow protocol and conform ourselves to outdated practices or old-fashioned ways of thinking. Rather, etiquette is the unique combination of consideration, respect, honesty, that little spark of warmth and humanity that makes each of us uniquely who we are, and a keen application of what is appropriate in any given room or situation. Thankfully these tools can be taught. And gaining this ethical skillset helps us slow down and use our discernment, even in the trickiest of situations with people who don’t understand us or don’t care to. When we are well practiced in these skills, we are able to view with precision how to engage with others while holding ourselves to a higher standard.
But within these conditions, wouldn’t it be smarter for me to keep my blunders, naive essays on peace and love and other dumb mishaps to myself? Why begin this conversation about modern etiquette and civility with a story of me falling on my face and inadvertently doing harm to myself, my housemate and the others in that seminar?
Amplifying this story and my mistakes refutes what I view as a false narrative that etiquette is about perfection. In this moment of change, I get excited by how much I’m learning in conversation about the ways others are navigating daily choices, especially when we all fall down and have to get back up. I’m inspired by the creativity, compassion and collaboration that individuals are using to try to figure out a modern version of how to be a good human. After coming through COVID and decades of technological advances in which analog human connected plummeted, we are in a moment of growing digital connection across diverse human cultures and backgrounds that demands a reimagining of social norms and new tools to engage. Modern etiquette can do just that, while engaging our inner knowing, self-reliance and agency.
“Etiquette is not about judgement and absolutism. It is, in fact, the unique combination of consideration, respect, honesty, that little spark of warmth and humanity that makes each of us uniquely who we are, and a keen understanding of what is appropriate in any given room or situation. ”
It’s very possible that no one cares what I think. I’m not a celebrity, a famous person or an Instagram influencer. I’m a single mom of three teenagers who, until recently, has been living on a dirt road in rural Vermont. My idea of a good time is dance parties in the kitchen with my daughters and walks in the woods with my son. I love chit-chatting with old folks and dairy farmers at our town’s general store while getting coffee and hugging my girlfriends at the start of our weekly dance class. I’m way into writing thank you cards, planning a fabulous dinner party and showing up at the local Select Board meeting when there’s an important topic being discussed like elementary school consolidation or how our road crew is keeping up with repair from recent floods. The power I assert in the world is through the small particulars: the choices I make every day in community to model, however imperfectly, my care for those around me. And this power, though it may appear insignificant, can really add up to something great when I’m acting in concert with others in society.
So my housemate was right—nobody cared what I thought about loving enemies in that social justice seminar class. To them, I was just being rude. But through practicing the art and science of etiquette in my daily life and embodying the wisdom of my monastic friends, I’m making better choices. I keep looking for the visible signs of the invisible good all around me and the way individuals are already practicing incredible care and treating each other well. They say that research is “me-search” and that’s certainly my experience and truth these days working in the field of modern etiquette.
Sharing these ideas through this platform so that the conversation is genuine, alive and natural only works if this space remains in the “radical center” of right and wrong—emphasizing learning, curiosity and openness instead of absolutism. The sentiments about loving our enemies in that essay are still true to my heart, my life and my experience. I’m hoping they can now find a more appropriate setting for cultural conversations in this post-election season.
2023 marked the 150th anniversary of Horatio Spafford’s “It is Well with My Soul,” shared the world over by Christians as a hymn of faith. Singing it in Divinity Hall last year at the very podium where Emerson delivered his address inspired me to transform my challenges into trust in God.
Yours truly,
