"My faith has been so challenged because I feel such a deep hatred and sense of betrayal as an American by the Bush administration, and yet Jesus said about four things that are absolutely the core of Christianity, and one of them is you really don't get to hate anyone.
It doesn't say you don't get to hate anybody unless it's Dick Cheney. It's absolute that you break through this thing inside of yourself that thinks somebody is not welcomed at the table because you consider their behavior so reprehensible, so brutal.
There's a piece in PLAN B called "Loving Bush, Day 2." I went to church on a Sunday in this state of such discouragement and such rage, and we had a beautiful, beautiful sermon, and Martin Luther King was brought up and how he was adamant that you love the sinner as we ourselves are loved, and that you can hate the sin, and do everything you can to overturn the people in charge of things if you believe their behavior is destructive, but you have to love them.
That Sunday I happened to have a very spiritually evolved day, and I just felt like I could see who he [President Bush] was as a young boy and as a man -- he's been a total screwup as everything -- a first-term president, and I had this feeling of tenderness for him. Maybe "tenderness" is stretching it a bit, but I had this feeling of not-hate for him, of softening, let's say. But the piece is really about Day 2, when I woke up and I was okay more or less, and I had a cup of coffee, still fine, and then read the paper and just went "God! What are we doing?" Or, rather, "What are we going to do?"
--Anne Lamott
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