There are many advantages to being a Sicilian. The great genes from being from a land conquered by just about every nation that ever lived, the food, but the biggest one is that people tend to leave you alone and not mess with you as articulated by Don Corleone in the opening scene of the Godfather

But one of the disadvantages, at least to me, is the instinct to take revenge.

Sicilians don’t just take revenge like other people they take generational revenge. When one harms a Sicilian that person puts their grandchildren and great grandchildren at risk. I’ve known of people worried about vengeance for actions done a century and a half previous and acting accordingly It’s one of the reasons why you never see rioters cross over into certain neighborhoods in certain cities.

Now most people and communities don’t have that instinct toward revenge squared but the reaction by the left that I mentioned yesterday concerning the shooting up of a Christian School and the killing of kids there is just the type of thing to bring out the Sicilian in a lot of people, and frankly the Trump indictment which implicit ally says “If we can do this to him we can do this to you” makes it worse.

All of this brings out the normal human instinct to start putting such people up against walls, particularly when they are making open threats or celebrating violence against you and yours

It’s then, when you are being driven toward that instinct that, if you are any sort of the Christian, Catholic or Protestant that these words of Christ slap you across your face

The direct admonition of Christ to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you is one of the most basic non-optional doctrines of the Christian faith. It is completely opposed to basic human instinct to strike back. It’s the most non-Sicilian thing in the world and is, in my opinion, even harder than the admonitions against lust and sex outside of marriage in the faith.

But it is the thing that prevents us from entering into a self destructive cycle because nothing makes a person more worthy to be put up against the wall then to start putting their foes there first.

Loving your enemies prevents all the horrors of Communism and Nazism because it forces you to see the person in front of you as a child of God, loved by him and whose sins have been paid for by the sacrifice of Christ. It reminds you that said enemy is only one good confession away from turning away from the pit.

That’s why it’s so important to practice in life.

Or to put it another way Heaven will be no less glorious and hell no less unbearable if you find someone you didn’t expect next to you there.