More than anything else these days, and for the past couple of years, I get messages from people who are caught in what I call the Trump Whirlpool. They are stuck in this cycle of anger, fear, outrage, and disgust, and it is eating a lot of people up.

And it isn’t just Trump.

The other side has a long list of hated demons, from James Comey To Hilary Clinton to Nancy Pelosi, public figures people they hate and who have also entered the dark sides of our souls.

I got a message this morning from Linda:

“I thank you for challenging me not to spend too much time hating, the thing is this Trump thing is consuming me, it’s in my head all of the time, I can’t stop watching the news and being angry and afraid. This must be eating my insides out.”

This year, the year of Donald Trump And The Pandemic From Hell, it seems to me to be more important than ever get out of this whirlpool and stay out. I know some people who might never come back.

One man, a college professor, wrote to me to say that because of Trump, he felt he was caught in an eddy, just spinning around and around. “I can’t get out of it,” he wrote. He is convinced he is damaging his mind and his body.

A college professor wrote to tell me watching the news, and the President’s press conferences were like walking in quicksand; she couldn’t get up and try to walk without getting stuck.

A blog reader from Montana – a kind and loving animal rescuer  – wrote to send me a photo of the Nancy Pelosi dartboard she hangs up on her wall tonight, to throw darts at before she does to sleep. “Something about that woman I just hate,” she wrote.

This is going to be a long year and on many levels, even before the Pandemic. I was afraid from the beginning of getting stuck in this whirlpool, and am lucky. So far, I’m not.

From the beginning –  this was the election in 2016 – I turned to early Christian theology that has helped me and guided me since childhood. In the age of the Crystal Cathedral, we sometimes forget the big idea behind Christianity that lit up the world.

I am not a Christian, Jesus Christ is not my god, and my spiritual life is pretty eclectic. Still, I drew a great deal from Thomas Merton and other Christian theologians, from Aquinas to St. Augustine to Henry Nouwen, and even Wendell Berry.

They all taught me the same thing – spirituality is what you give up, not what you get. That is the Christian ideal; it is certainly not the American political ideal. You give things up. For other people.

For me, selfishness was tied to hate; it was about what I wanted, what I needed.

It’s good to talk about this on a Sunday, a good day for reflection. I like the idea that spirituality – and peace of mind – is not about the self, but about giving up the self to others.

This was a new idea for me, I’d read about it for years, but it began to take hold when I began doing hospice work with Izzy and then Red, and then began working with the refugee children gathered in Albany, N.Y. There was something about doing this work that brought joy and meaning to my heart and my life, more than any other work.

The best way to stop disliking others and getting them out of my head was to learn to love myself. The more hate and anger, and grievance I keep for myself, the less love and connection there is for others.

The thing about these eddies and whirlpools is that they block life and keep us from doing what could make a difference. Once we climb out, or break out, we can begin to live.

I learned that by loving myself in the wrong way, I became incapable of loving anybody else. If I loved myself wrongly, I could not help but hate others.

This spiritual love enriches the soul and leaves little for hatred, grievance, obsession, and fear.  I know them all and still wrestle with them all. Without a spiritual other, I would be all rage and grievance.

The awful conceit that shrouded the spiritual life is the idea that I could or should become holy or saintly. Once I let that go, I was able to be better. And that was good enough.

I also learned that the truth would never become clear as long as I assumed that I was the center of the universe and existed for myself alone. The earth wasn’t there to agree with me or support my beliefs.

I shed my appetite (mostly) for hatred and anger when I began to understand the idea of loving myself properly.

First of all, there is desiring to live, accepting life as the greatest gift and the highest good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others.

This is the idea that got me out of the whirlpool and kept me out : raising money so suffering refugee children can go to school, giving the needy elderly warm clothes in the winter. I have never gone back or looked back, that world is just not for me.

Honestly, I have no time to sit up all night hating or throwing darts at anyone. No other human being, no matter who they are, is worth the cost of that. I am not worth the cost of that.

Thomas Merton wrote that “the modern world is beginning to discover, more and more, that the quality and vitality of a man’s life depend on his own secret will to go on living. There is a dark force for destruction within us…”

“It is therefore of supreme importance,” he wrote, “that we consent to live not for ourselves but for others. When we do this, we will be able first of all to face and accept our limitations.

I don’t expect other people to love me for this belief, or to love me at all. One of my awkward traits is that I don’t need the love and approval of other people.

I need it for me.

But I am slowly coming to love myself much too much to spend my life caught in a whirlpool, spinning around and around, perhaps for all eternity.