We live in a time of pain and division. Daily, in the world and in the church, hatred, anger, and bitterness are growing. It is even harder to live at peace with each other, to be calm, and to not alienate someone just by being. There is so much wound and division around. But the hatred Jesus speaks about today is the denial of love. It is even more than the denial of love; it is active anti-love. Very often, the one who hates wants to be hated himself. If you hate anyone, you are thereby throwing in the slogan to build a world without God. Because God is love, it happens to us that someone hates us, and our first impulse should be to check whether we are giving any reason for this hatred. Understudying someone else’s point of view, fixing what should be fixed, and yielding where it is allowed to yield, sometimes it dries up the sources of hatred. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that our call today is to reconcile by feeling the pain of all sides and by letting our pain and helplessness be a buffer that heals, the blood that helps wash the wound. As a simple start, we can test how open-minded we are on all of these issues by seeing how much pain we are in. Not to be in pain is not to be open-minded. It is a time of pain for the church, a time when we will all feel some hatred, a time when, above all, we must keep our peace of mind, our inner calm of spirit, and our outer charity.