The above picture is a Pinhole photograph. I like it.

A former member of a creative group I started online, a friend and someone I much admired, hates me with a vengeance now, I am not entirely sure why. She won’t speak to me about it.

She says some truly dreadful and bone-chilling things about me, some of which are true and some of which are not. I am aware of nothing I could possibly have done to warrant that level of loathing, but there it is.

The world doesn’t ask my permission for the things that happen.

I’ve tried to reach out to her several times, but to no good effect,  I have seen this kind of rage before. It is not something that can be discussed or talked about. That is someone I just have to let go of, although her comments certainly wound.

I’ve come to see that in our culture, this kind of disconnected adversary is only too common, from e-mail to the news. Like the people who rage online, she doesn’t wish to face me or talk to me directly.

I don’t really hate anyone on the earth at this moment, and I’m sorry there are people who hate me. It seems life is much too short for that.  There are also people who love me, and I think that’s how life balances itself out.

Sometimes, I have found that people get strong ideas about me into their consciousness, and it doesn’t matter what I do or say or have done or said.

It is just part of being me.

In her lovely book Almost Everything: Notes On Hope, the writer Anne Lamott, she writes about the challenge of living with anger and hatred.

“Something that helps,” she writes in her book, “is to look at adversaries as people who are  helping you do a kind of emotional weight training. Nautilus for your character. They may have been assigned to annoy or exhaust you. They are actually caseworkers.”

One pastor Lamott knows calls the people who annoy her the most  her”grace-builders.” I think it takes the truly devout to fully internalize that idea. I am not there yet.

This is a wonderful idea that I have unconsciously begun to embrace in recent years. When I read the especially hateful comment of my former friend, and before I read Lamott’s passage, I decided to take this hatred as a gift, as a calling, as a spiritual challenge.

If you do what I do in this world, and if you are who I am in this world, there will be people who dislike  you, even hate you. This has been a part of my life as long as I have been writing and living as an adult, and writing online, even before.

I do not live in the shadows, and it is my calling to put myself out there, sometimes with a big  red bull’s eye on my back. Alexander Solzhenitsyn knew better, he holed up on a Vermont hilltop along with his family for seventeen year and didn’t talk to anybody. But then he won the Nobel Prize.

It is just who I am, for better or worse, and sometimes it is one, sometimes the other.

I know what the past means though.

Adversaries challenge me to be patient, to move through anger to a better place, to consider my behavior and often unconscious or unknowing provocations.

They offer me spiritual growth, in that sometimes they are right, they are sometimes pointing to behaviors and traits and mistakes I need to understand and correct. They help me to be stronger, because I reject hatred in every form, even when I practice it,  and they help me commit to a better way of being.

They give me the chance to be better, to rise above cruelty and find a better way.

It is curiously true that every adversary, from my friend to the people on the news, has made me stronger. They remind me again and again that a meaningful life is not granted by others, only by me. They force me to look in the mirror and respect what I see. If I don’t, I know I am  wrong.

Moral conduct for me is not a matter of course, but moral knowledge. No one wants to be wicked, we all think we are doing right, that God shines on us,  so those who act wickedly fall into what the philosophers call an absurdum morale – moral obscurity and confusion.

This is what I think of when I see all those desperate tweets pouring out of Washington every day. Absurdum morale.  I feel pity.

Yet even this has made me better, has inspired me to change my life and join the Army Of Good and commit small acts of great kindness daily.  I am grateful for that. Someone else’s rage has served me well.

He who does this, I see, is in contradiction with himself (just like my angry friend), and therefore, he must despise him and he deserves our compassion, not just our contempt.

In the Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri K asks the Starov, “What must I do to win salvation?,” and the Starov replies, “Above all, never lie to yourself.”

I think the people who lie to themselves, especially those who do so publicly and every day, live in their own version of Hell.

Frederick Buechner (and Jesus and Gandhi and Mandela) say this:

“and then there is love for the enemy – love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer.”

This is what the spiritualists call “God’s Love,” it seems that he is the only one who can really pull it off, it seems far beyond the range of most mortal human beings.

All of this reminds me that I have been endowed with a great gift, the epiphany is like a flashing light:

I never surrender hope. I never give it up.

When I was wheeled into open heart surgery, I couldn’t wait to wake up and start walking. At my lowest points in life, I have never given up hope, even watching our awful news, I never feel hope is gone, or that our better angels will be defeated, or the we cannot save Mother Earth, or create a world that is less horrific for the  refugees, the old ones at the edge of live, the children and the poor.

As long as we care, as long as we try, we are good.

And I have learned Dmitri K’s lesson, a hard lesson for me,  well. Above all, I never, ever lie to myself.