Victor Frankl (1905-1997), the Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, was treated in the most inhumane way conceivable by his thuggish and ill-educated Nazi captors.
Imprisoned for being a Jew in the dreaded concentration camp Auschwitz, he was stripped of every last vestige of personal dignity.
The guards would often beat him and strip him naked; they would delight in forcing him to serve them their meals naked and on his knees whilst all the time taunting and goading him.
Such treatment would have destroyed the strongest of men but he survived the Holocaust.
Frankl knew that if he succumbed to the anger and hatred boiling up inside him, it would destroy him.
So he refused to hate by an act of his will.
He simply chose to excuse his captors' behaviour, to try to understand it and to replace anger with pity and compassion.
He had determined that 'The one thing you can't take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one's freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any given circumstance.'
Well, let's get real: if a man subjected to such terrible treatment at the hand of his enemies was able to forgive them, shouldn't we also be able to?
The amazing thing about Victor Frankl is that he didn't have the gift of faith.
He wanted to believe in God but his experience in the concentration camp had destroyed his faith.
Nevertheless, he reached down deep into his humanity and discovered within the law of love, and - though he would not have recognized it as such - through God's power, for surely it was, he was able to do the impossible and love his enemy.
G K Chesterton famously said, 'It isn't that Christianity has been tried and been found wanting; it just hasn't been tried.'
In this area of loving our enemies, most of us are found wanting.
If we truly loved our enemies, we would transform the world, starting with ourselves, and not expect only those who torment us or oppress us or make our lives difficult to do it, but beginning with ourselves.
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