Brief Thoughts from Bren: But How?

Have you heard of Aikido? It’s a Japanese martial art. As I understand it, in Aikido, you learn to creatively absorb the aggressive energy of an adversary. You move with the energy, but you don’t become it. You channel it back. Over time, the aggressor grows confused, even exhausted, and begins to realize that fighting is useless.

“Love your enemies,” Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount. From the examples he gives, I don’t think he’s talking about a sweet or sentimental feeling. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, Jesus says, offer the left one, too. That is absorbing some aggressive energy, no doubt—maybe not in the way Aikido planned!

But fight or flight is such a basic instinct, isn’t it? Someone’s rude in the grocery store or cuts you off in traffic, and the first response is to give it right back. Someone slaps you on the right cheek? Break his nose. And yet—have you noticed?—when we return aggression with more aggression, it rarely leads anywhere good.

Is Jesus inviting us to respond another way? If someone forces you to walk one mile, walk two. If someone sues you for your shirt, give your cloak as well. Meet insult with a compliment. And mean it. It might confuse the one coming at you. It might even disarm them. But have we ever consistently tried it?

And if we did, does it work?

Sometimes. I’ve seen it. And sometimes it doesn’t. You offer the other cheek, and the blows just keep coming.

And even if it works in one-on-one situations, what about crowds? Nations? Gandhi met hatred with love. So did Martin Luther King, Jr. So did Jesus. He was beaten to a pulp and hung on a tree. Gandhi and King fell to assassins’ bullets.

No, meeting hatred with love doesn’t always “work.” But maybe when it does, the results reach deeper. Maybe they last longer.

What if we just kept practicing this way of responding—on a small scale, every day? Compliment instead of insult. Listen instead of lash out. Walk the second mile. Maybe enough small acts of this other way could tip something that badly needs tipping. Could shape the world into something closer to the good it was meant to be.

It’s slow. It’s uncertain. But is it worth trying—again and again, day after day?

Violence hasn’t changed anything. Maybe—just maybe—this is that other way worth not giving up on. Even if it doesn’t change much. Outwardly. But inwardly …