"To Love and Hate Life at the Same Time"

I attended a Meeting for Worship recently at a Quaker school. The first message was given by a youth facing a serious, life-threatening medical condition. His message was powerful, but laced with humor as well. The more serious part of the message was what to do with the question of what it is like to live with a life-threatening condition. In his wisdom, he stated that it is not easy to understand this experience unless one has faced death him/herself - "to love and hate life at the same time."

For the rest of the Meeting and the rest of the day, that term "to love and hate life at the same time" flowed through me almost like fresh air. Since being told more than 20 years ago that I had perhaps 5 years to live and have greatly exceeded that expectation, my own journey has included explorations of mortality, life, soul, death and perhaps most importantly, fear of death. I have read and written much about these from academic, spiritual and experiential vantage points. I have seen lengthy theories and essays on the topic. But never have I heard it put so succinctly: "to love and hate life at the same time."

I think many of us walk around with lots of love and lots of fear which can come across as being in the vicinity of hate. People who preach against gay rights, for example, are often labeled as "haters" even though they could very well be fueled by love for their Bible, their faith and their fear that if they don't do what they can to bring rightness to the world, they too will suffer the consequences. Then we, in turn, perhaps channel some of our own hatred to them for other reasons. The point is that we spend a lot of time compartmentalizing the ways we objectify "love" and "hate" to somehow create a buffer zone of safety from dealing with the complexity of both of these emotions. Facing death, as this young man so clearly articulated, does not allow for us to compartmentalize; we are forced to confront how much we love life and how much we hate knowing that it will all come to an end someday, no matter what our circumstances are.

One of the Quaker testimonies is "Simplicity." For issues as complex as life and death, I don't know that there could be a more simple message to sum it up than to understand that our human condition is one where we have to learn to love and hate life at the same time. Trying to keep them separate only creates internal and external conditions. When we see that we can actually do both, perhaps we will all be better no matter what comes.