@CarlMcColman 2/ To the divided self, everything is an enemy. Edinger: "Whenever one falls into identification with the Self, a persecuting opposite or enemy automatically and necessarily appears." Catherine of Sienna: "Your neighbors are the channel by which all your virtues come to birth."
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Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island. ‘Whatever may be said in the following pages rests upon this foundation. Man is divided against himself and against God by his own selfishness, which divides him against his brother. This division cannot be healed by a love that places itself only on one side of the rift. Love must reach over to both sides and draw them together. 'We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. But a selfishlove of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others. The difficulty of this commandment lies in the paradox that it would have us love ourselves unselfishly, because even our love of ourselves is something we owe to others.
1/ @RichardRohrOFM "Almost two-third's of Jesus' teachings are directly or indirectly about forgiveness." Why? Did He realize forgiveness as the supernatural locus of a creative experience, in which the divided self returns the entire world, through us, to an essential wholeness?
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Art, with text fragment attached: "Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.” ― Hannah Arendt