Category: Visual Art

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May those whose hell it is
To hate and hurt
Be turned into lovers
Bringing flowers.

—Shantideva, eighth century

These lines are from chapter 10, stanza 9, of the Bodhicharyavatara (Way of the Bodhisattva), a Mahayana Buddhist text by the eighth-century Indian monk Shantideva. I first encountered this religious classic, originally written in Sanskrit, while working at Shambhala Publications. The excerpt above was adapted by author David Richo from a translation by the Padmakara Translation Group. Here’s 10.9 in full, as translated by PTG:

May the hail of lava, fiery stones, and weapons
Henceforth become a rain of blossom.
May those whose hell it is to fight and wound
Be turned to lovers offering their flowers. [source]

Other translations include those by Stephen Batchelor—

May the rains of lava, blazing stones, and weapons
From now on become a rain of flowers,
And may all battling with weapons
From now on be a playful exchange of flowers. [source]

—and Fedor Stracke:

May the rain of leafs, embers, and weapons
Become forthwith a rain of flowers.
May those cutting each other with knives
Forthwith throw flowers for fun. [source]

I am so struck by this short benediction that prays our hate be transformed into love, our hardness into softness, our cold, sterile weaponry into delicately petaled, fragrant blooms. Shantideva recognized that when we lash out in physical or verbal violence, we create a hell that’s all our own. We may intend to inflict suffering on another, but in doing so, we often wound ourselves—psychologically, spiritually. When we dehumanize others, we become less human.

Instead of hurling rocks, punches, bullets, or insults, what if we were to completely confound our enemies by offering them words or tokens of love? Love is the way of the bodhisattva, the “enlightened being.” It’s the way of Jesus—he who said, “Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you” (Luke 6:27–28).

Loving people doesn’t mean we can’t be angry at them—but we cannot allow our anger to fester into bitterness and ill will or to explode in harmful outbursts. It should be a productive anger.

How might we use an ethic of love to direct our anger or somebody else’s toward a good end, to defuse a contentious situation? Not taking the easy way out by simply ignoring or retreating from a problem, but confronting our opponent in peaceful, creative, and potentially transformative ways?

I’m reminded of the historic Pulitzer Prize–nominated photograph Flower Power, taken by Washington Star photojournalist Bernie Boston on October 21, 1967, when he was covering an antiwar march on the Pentagon. As the 503rd Military Police Battalion formed a semicircle around demonstrators to prevent them from climbing the Pentagon steps, Boston captured eighteen-year-old George Edgerly Harris III, aka Hibiscus, placing a carnation into the barrel of an M14 rifle held by one of the soldiers. What a powerful image!

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Two years earlier in his essay “How to Make a March/Spectacle,” Allen Ginsberg was the first to expound on the potency of flowers as a spectacle to simultaneously disarm opponents and influence thought. He said “masses of flowers” should be handed out on the front lines of protests to police, the press, and onlookers as a symbol of nonviolent advocacy. He also suggested candy bars and toys.

Artist Scott Erickson seems to have drawn on Boston’s Flower Power photograph in his visual interpretation of Isaiah 2:4, Swords into Plowshares, which shows a sprig of foliage growing out of the barrel of a pistol, oriented upward like a vase. Its deadly power mocked and reversed, the gun releases a benign projectile that attracts and nourishes rather than strikes fear.

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The evocative Bible verse on which this painting is based prophesies a day when all the nations “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks”—a poetic way of describing the cessation of violence, as tools of destruction are transformed into gardening tools.

Christian activist Shane Claiborne has been instrumental in helping me see the immense beauty of Isaiah’s visions of the eschaton—he has worked with RAWtools to decommission firearms and literally forge them into shovels, spades, and other life-giving implements!—along with the holy foolishness of the gospel and all that implies. Before becoming a leader of the new monasticism movement, Claiborne went to circus school, and he has often put that training to use on the streets of Philadelphia where he lives. In his first book, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical (2006), he writes,

Whenever there is a fight on our block, my first instinct is to run inside and grab our torches and begin juggling them, to upstage the drama of violent conflicts in our neighborhood. Perhaps the kids will lose interest in the noise of a good fight and move toward the other end of the block to watch the circus. I truly believe we can overwhelm the darkness of this world by shining something brighter and more beautiful. (285)

He has also written about Jesus’s “triumphal” entry into Jerusalem as a theatrical parody of power: he rode in on a dinky donkey instead of a warhorse, showing a much different alternative to the military might of empires. (“Imagine the president riding a unicycle in the Fourth of July parade”! Jesus for President, p. 122) And then on the cross, Jesus made a spectacle of human violence. In exchange for taunts and blows, he gave forgiveness, a metaphorical bouquet.

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The UK-based street artist Banksy draws on the association of flowers with love and peace and their playful ability to disrupt violence in his mural Rage, Flower Thrower, which debuted on the West Bank wall in Israel-Palestine. Nathan Mladin, a researcher for Theos think tank, wrote about this artwork for the Visual Commentary on Scripture’s Logics of Reversals exhibition:  

With a balaclava drawn over his face, the young protester is shown leaning back, as though braced to hurl a Molotov cocktail. But instead of a weapon, he wields a flower bouquet, the only coloured element in this otherwise monochrome work. We expect an act of aggression—all other elements of the mural suggest imminent violence—but instead we are offered a call to peace. . . . Theologically construed, the mural hints at the eschatological terminus of violence.

The absurd juxtaposition of flowers and violence is employed too by Lithuanian artist Severija Inčirauskaitė-Kriaunevičienė, who embroiders floral patterns onto antique soldiers’ helmets sourced from various countries, and Natalie Baxter of Lexington, Kentucky, whose Warm Gun series comprises over one hundred quilted stuffed guns, “droopy caricatures of assault weapons,” she says, “bringing ‘macho’ objects into a traditionally feminine sphere and questioning their potency.”

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Another artistic example of overcoming brutality with gentleness can be found in the climactic battle sequence from Disney’s animated classic Sleeping Beauty (1959). As Prince Phillip escapes from Maleficent’s dungeon with the aid of the three good fairies, Maleficent’s goons shoot arrows at him—but Flora transforms them by magic into flowers, which fall innocuously about his booted feet. (The animation is by Dan McManus.)

Flora’s other enchantments include turning launched boulders into soap bubbles and a curtain of boiling water, tipped from a cauldron over a doorway, into a rainbow. Each of these deflective maneuvers involves the transformation of something threatening into something whimsical. While they do not ultimately deter the villain from her murderous rampage, and alas, Phillip conquers evil with a sword (albeit the Sword of Truth—there’s metaphor at play here), Flora’s few creative interventions at the outset of the battle assert an attractive counterethic that we would do well to embrace.

I need the dreams of Isaiah and the prayers of Shantideva, I need the ridiculous street theater of Hibiscus and Shane Claiborne and the activist blacksmithing of RAWtools, I need Banksy’s murals in zones of conflict and other subversive art, I need fairy tales from writers and animation studios, to help me relinquish my hate and imagine wholesome new ways of engaging my enemies. Most of all, I need Christ’s vibrant, upending gospel embedded more deeply in my heart, and the Holy Spirit—renewer, transformer—to melt the disdain and loathing I feel for certain figures in the current US political landscape and reshape it into loving regard.

While I do not have an urge to enact physical violence on anyone, I often seethe and think unkindly thoughts toward those I deem morally odious. Sometimes I pray they get what’s coming to them. But then I am convicted by that un-Christlike posture. I crave the eyes and mind of Christ, who sees everyone as redeemable and worthy of love, bearers of the divine image, and who moves toward them with open arms instead of clenched fists.

“May those whose hell it is to hate and hurt be turned into lovers bringing flowers.”

I pray this, sincerely, for others (I have a few particular names in mind), and also for myself.

Amen.