I love Sufi tales

I'm going out to lunch today with a professor friend of mine, who told me shortly after last year's election that she had a hard time not "hating the other side." (She's a liberal dem.) I didn't know what to say to her, because truthfully I was feeling a lot of the same emotions. But I came across another Sufi tale this morning that puts everything into perspective.

"Wisdom," the Master said, "is simply the ability to recognize."

"To recognize what?" the disciple asked.

"Spiritual wisdom," the Master said, "is the ability to recognize the butterfly in the caterpillar, the eagle in the egg, the saint in the sinner."

Good advice, in a world where we're taught to judge people by the bad things they may have done. A colleague of mine from England - an anti-death penalty activist who visits prisoners over here in the States every four months or so - gave a presentation a while back, and her tagline throughout was, "People are more than the worse things they've done."

I'm also reminded of a Booker T. Washington quote: "Don't ever let them pull you down so low as to hate them." That seems to get harder each and every day, but I'm convinced these are words to live by if we ourselves are to be happy.