I start where God says love other people.

I love it and I hate it because
that's where my resistance is, to the truth
of love. I don't have a lot of resistance
to God, I don't know why.
Thomas Merton said something like the fact
that there are good people
in such a bad world is proof of God.
Right in the face of the absurdity of it,
I can love God in this unloving world, the world
of wars, suffering, screaming, somehow
I can look at it in a way where I follow it
through the thickets and the turns and come out
in the clearing, with a teepee and God's
in there smoking and I settle outside and wonder.

But people, loving people, thats where I resist,
so I like the commandment to love my neighbor
as myself, or as I love God, because otherwise
I don't know if I would, or would still be a hermit
sinking into myself, becoming a stranger
more and more to myself, torn by fear of going out
into the world among people ever again.

When I think of someone I don't love, of the need
to love him I don't love, can't stand, in order to be
who I am fully, I can feel parts of myself, mind,
body even being riven off by that need, by the way
my not loving and the call to love cut me
as they pass through in opposing directions,
taking planed curls of me away. How can I love
and become myself when I myself am being gouged away
by the need, the commandment to love when
I will not, cannot love. I resist my soul
and it is only the soul that passes through the eye of the needle.