First, let me make it clear that I believe Jesus was divine. But I also believe every human being on Earth is also divine, and that all creations in the infinite Cosmos are divine as well. Everything is divine, because the Supreme Being made everything, and in so doing, imbued everything with divinity. I have not been a member of an organized religion since I became an adult. I have not read the Bible. The Bible is about love. If it isn't, I don't want to read it; if it is, then I've already read it. Love is what matters. Chapters and verses are superfluous, and using them are supercilious. So what about Jesus' cheeks? Didn't he say something like if someone hits you in the cheek, then turn your face a bit and let that someone hit you in your other cheek. So what was Jesus' message? His message was about love and loving. Jesus knew that if one acts out his/her pain on another, it is because that person, in all likelihood, had not been loved enough, if at all, during the his/her earliest of years; consequently, that person was in a chasm of unconscious, unspeakable pain, which ineluctably manifests itself in acts ranging from unkindness to killing. One's behavior can be at the least rough and uncaring and at the worst murderous, if that person was never loved. His/her personhood, on the other hand, is always divine. Jesus was so prescient he understood this for what is was: a human being acting violently because that human being was in a miasma of unconscious pain for lack of love. So turn your other cheek. It is an act that signals the truth that that interaction, and all similar interactions, are different only by degree, not by kind. The only real antidote to violence is love. But to love, you must first be loved. The Supreme Being knows this. Jesus knew this. And it is way past time for humanity to know this.
Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks
A graduate of Andover and Columbia College, Columbia University, Tod Howard Hawks has been a poet, a novelist, and a human-rights advocate his entire adult life.
