Meet Nocciolina. Her name means “peanut” in Italian, as she has a tiny brown spot on top of her head, hence the name chosen by her foster mom. Nocci is one of our two family dogs; both are rescue animals. She’s almost two years old now.
The first dog we adopted, Mia, was born in a Roma settlement here in Rome. That meant from the first day of her life she was always around lots of people and other dogs. She came to us after local authorities cleared the camp and volunteers fostered the dogs to prevent them from being put into shelters.
Nocciolina is a different story. She was abandoned very early in life in front of a dumpster. She missed out on the crucial experience of the first couple months of life when puppies are supposed to be with their mom and littermates for nurturing and socialization. She was rescued and fostered by the same woman who fostered Mia, and we adopted her when she was about four months old.
Nocciolina came to us with lots of insecurity and fear around people and dogs. She expresses her fear with a deep, menacing growl and super-loud, aggressive barking and lurching, especially when anyone looks her in the eyes. She has scared the living daylights out of more than a handful of people on my block.
We did a puppy class and one-on-one training to help her learn to walk on a leash without this behavior. She’s pretty good now, but when she feels afraid, the old behaviors burst out unexpectedly.
Last night my ex-husband came for dinner with the kids and took the dogs for a walk around the block. When he got back he asked me “Who’s the tall guy in glasses who lives here? I don’t recognize him but I saw him coming out and Nocci barked at him and he said ‘Next time I’m going to kick you in the mouth.’”
Ruminating on retribution
Hearing that comment triggered me so much. The idea that someone would be so angry to threaten to kick my rescue dog, who has already had it pretty tough in life, just floored me. I felt this raging desire to figure out exactly which neighbor this was (my ex then started to posit “maybe it was just someone visiting the building”—ha!) and give him a piece of my mind. How dare he?!
I kept going around and around and around inside my head. Oooh, that comment burned me. No matter that the neighbor I think it was, based on a more thorough description, is likely the guy I’ve never met who moved in with his wife and toddler a couple years ago and just had a newborn. (So, to be charitable, I could imagine that he’s probably frazzled out of his mind and thus a short fuse.) Never mind that I honestly don’t even know who this person was because I wasn’t there. None of that mattered.
What mattered is that someone, who I personified and guessed was a particular neighbor, threatened my dog, and that pissed me off; therefore I needed some sort of justice or retribution. I honestly just couldn’t shake the feeling that this “wrong” needed to be “righted.” How, exactly, wasn’t even factoring into the equation. It was the simple fact that HOW DARE HE?!
The Maze
I’m sure you can think of something similar in your own life. Just call up a time when you feel like you were unjustly wronged. It can be as small and anonymous as my example, or something truly significant that requires restitution.
After you were wronged, did you fall into obsessive thinking about how you would rectify the situation, get revenge, retribution, or put the person in their place? Was it a feeling of going around and around and around in your head, but not really getting anywhere?
That’s what Phil Stutz and Barry Michels call “The Maze.”
We’re trapped because of a universal expectation that the world will treat us fairly.
—Phil Stutz, The Tools
The minute I became aware that I was stuck inside The Maze, I immediately thought of their tool called Active Love.
Practicing this tool is one of the most radical acts of lovingkindness I know. It is SO hard for me to try to send love to someone I think has wronged me. But if it’s hard for me to do this for some anonymous neighbor who made an offhand comment about my dog, imagine how hard it must be for people who experience true injustice.
The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth
Have you ever heard of the civil rights activist Fred Shuttlesworth? He was a pastor in Birmingham, Alabama, and I learned about him in this week’s New York Times newsletter by Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren.
Here’s an excerpt:
On Sept. 9, 1957, the very day President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act and lawyers sought injunctive relief to force Arkansas to integrate Central High in Little Rock, Shuttlesworth organized the integration of Phillips High School in Birmingham, driving his own two children to the school to enroll them.
He was met by a white mob that beat him with baseball bats, chains and brass knuckles. As he was beginning to lose consciousness, Shuttlesworth recounts that “something” said to him: “You can’t die here. Get up. I have a job for you to do.” In the hospital later that day, a reporter asked Shuttlesworth what he was working for in Birmingham. He responded: “For the day when the man who beat me and my family with chains at Phillips High School can sit down with us as a friend.”
Shuttlesworth wasn’t just paying lip service—he really meant it.
He was embodying Jesus’s teaching from the Sermon on the Mount, which was as radical 2,000 years ago as it is now:
Do not resist one who is evil. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you?
Matthew 5:39, 46
This approach is at the heart of the secular practice of Active Love, as well as the Buddhist practice of maitri or metta (lovingkindness) meditation. It’s easy to love people we already love and who love us already. It’s much more challenging to love those we feel active animosity towards. And yet that’s the radical, countercultural heart of these practices, whether secular, Christian, Buddhist, or any other tradition that teaches practicing love when the human desire is to retaliate or get revenge.
In the end, though, practicing love towards your neighbor—the mean neighbor who wants to kick your dog in the mouth—is really a way to free yourself. It’s a radical act that subverts human nature. It draws upon a force that’s bigger than you.
This force much greater than you is the force of love. Not the love of Valentine’s Day cards, but the love of a higher power. It’s a force that’s always available to you, one that you can tap into and share at any time.
When you share it, you always gain more than you give away. It’s a fact. Try it and see.
I know, my God, that “Love is repaid by love alone,” and so I have sought and found a way to ease my heart by giving love for love.
—St. Therese of Lisieux, Story of a Soul