To Turn The Other Cheek

So, since it's the season of "loving neighbors/enemies" and such (as if there should be a season where we don't do this, but I guess we have to take what we can get), I've been thinking a lot about this idea of "acceptance". And how, if we really do "accept" our brothers and sisters as they are, how do we navigate the evil things that they/we do? How do we "accept" a situation and still show our disapproval? In other words, how to we fight without having to fight? Since I'm not really an expert on this, I thought I'd let one of them speak for me, so am posting this section in full: "There are two classical responses to evil: fight or flight. When confronted with injustice or violence, we can answer in kind--and sometimes in our sinful world that is all that we can reasonably do. But as every playground bully and every geopolitical aggressor knows, this usually leads to an act of counterviolence, and then still another retaliation until the opponents are locked in an endless round of fighting. Ghandi expressed it this way: 'an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind'. The other typical responses to aggression are running away or submitting--and sometimes, given our finite, sinful situation, that is all we can do. But, finally, we all know that ceding to violence tends only to justify the aggressor and encourage even more injustice. And therefore it appears as though, in regard to solving the problem of violence, we are locked in a no-win situation, compelled to oscillate back and forth between two deeply unsatisfactory strategies. In his instruction on nonviolence Jesus is giving us a way out, and we will grasp this if we attend carefully to the famous example he uses: 'to the person who strikes you on the one cheek, offer the other one as well.' (Lk 6:29). In the society of the time, one would never have used one's left hand for any form of social interaction, since it was considered unclean. Thus, if someone strikes you on the right cheek, he is hitting you with the back of his hand, and this was the manner in which one would strike a slave or a child or a social inferior. In the face of this kind of violence, Jesus is recommending neither fighting back nor fleeing, but rather standing one's ground. To turn the other cheek is to prevent him from hitting you the same way again. It is not to run or to acquiesce, but rather to signal to the aggressor that you refuse to accept the set of assumptions that have made his aggression possible. It is to show that you are occupying a different moral space. It is also, consequently, a manner of mirroring back to the violent person the deep injustice of what he is doing. The great promise of this approach is that it might not only stop the violence but also transform the perpetrator of it." --Robert Barron's "Catholicism: a journey to the heart of the faith"