Yesterday I went to the People’s Co-Op Bookstore on Commercial Drive and purchased a copy of Five Ring Circus, the extraordinary 2007 documentary about the economic, ecological, and social costs of the 2010 Olympics. After watching it, I thought a great deal about Harriet Nahanee, the sickly 71-year-old Native elder who died after being sent to jail for refusing to apologize for her contempt of court in the Eagleridge Bluffs matter. Her example reminded me of something Terry Eagleton wrote in an article for the London Review of Books: “The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love, you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you.” (Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching, October 19, 2006) What is love?

Popular culture would have us believe that love is essentially an emotion. In the case of family members, love is portrayed as an intense affection. In romantic love, this intense affection is mingled with erotic desire. Because we identify love with emotion, too often we confuse familial love with tribal selfishness and romantic love with addiction.

While love certainly involves affection and, at times, desire, I don’t believe that love is primarily a matter of emotion. Instead, I think it’s a heightened form of perception. Love exposes depths of existence that we’re normally blind to. To love another is to apprehend the multidimensionality of that person’s being. Love reveals with exquisite intimacy people’s struggles towards wholeness and integrity, with all of the tragedies and triumphs and all the suffering and happiness those struggles entail. Similarly, when we love the natural world, we behold its beauty and intricacy, its needs and its blessings, with unblemished clarity. To love is to see a three-dimensional world of colour where others can only see two dimensions in shades of black and white. Love is the “third eye” that illuminates the sacred within the profane.

And this is why love always challenges hierarchies of domination. In order to dominate, in order to exploit and oppress, we have to close our third eye, to blind ourselves to everything but the world’s most superficial behavioural surface. Such blindness is demonic, a point made rather clearly in certain Islamic portrayals of the Shaitan, or Satan. As Karen Armstrong writes in The Battle for God (Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), “In popular Shiism, the Shaitan, the Tempter, is a rather ludicrous creature, chronically incapable of appreciating the spiritual values of the unseen world. In one story, he is said to have complained to God about the privileges given to humans, but was easily fobbed off with inferior gifts. Instead of prophets, the Shaitan was quite happy with fortune-tellers, his mosque was the bazaar, he was most at home in the public baths, and instead of seeking God, his quest was for wine and women. He was, in fact, incurably trivial, trapped forever in the realm of the exterior (zahir) world and unable to see that there was a deeper and more important dimension of existence.”

Those who love cannot abide the violence committed by those who don’t. Because love reveals to them the glory of the infinite and the eternal within the finite and temporal, when they take action they aren’t as bound to cost-benefit calculations as the rest of us. Though their power is as nothing before the Shaitan’s, and though they have little hope of victory, still they will sacrifice much for the sake of their beloved. Sometimes they sacrifice their lives.

This brings me back to Harriet Nahanee, but also to Betty Krawczyk, David Cunningham, and the various activists with groups like the Downtown Eastside Residents Association, the Anti-Poverty Committee, the Pivot Legal Society, and the Coalition to Save Eagleridge Bluffs, as well as all the others who’ve either risked or endured imprisonment, police harassment, media vilification, and career-destroying stigma to defend Vancouver’s poor and British Columbia’s ecosystems from the Olympics juggernaut. Regardless of their personal and organizational flaws, these people are hatchetmen in the army of love, and they are desperately needed.

These activists know better than to believe the spokespeople for the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) who brazenly proclaim that Vancouver’s Olympics will be both green and socially responsible. The activists are aware that pristine forests are being torn up to make way for multi-lane highways, and that countless tons of resources are being consumed to construct the infrastructure the games demand. They’re also familiar with the frightening findings of the September 2006 Pivot Legal Society report, Cracks in the Foundation: Solving the Housing Crisis in Canada’s Poorest Neighbourhood. This report shows that “Between 2003 and 2005, Vancouver lost 514 low-income housing units” due to Olympics-related conversions, rent increases, and closures. “During that same period, the number of homeless people rose by 663. Based on projected rates of low-income housing unit loss and construction, rising rental rates and immigration, authors of this report predict that by 2010, Vancouver will see its street homeless population triple to over three thousand.” And, of course, they’re aware of the colossal debt British Columbians will be saddled with for the sake of this three-week fiasco, and how this will ravage our province’s meagre social support systems.

Knowledge that can be put into words such as these, however, is only the smallest part of their awareness. Their love for the wounded and the wild reveals virtues that can’t be named and dignities too subtle for language. Though they may not be able to articulate their revelation, the truth is that they are witnesses to the divine fire, and are unable to tolerate the violence being committed against its bearers.

The same can’t be said for VANOC and its co-conspirators in our corporate boardrooms and our municipal and provincial governments. When they look upon our ecosystems and our poor, they look with the eyes of the Shaitan. To them, the wild is only a pile of resources awaiting consumption, and the wounded are but Untermenschen deserving of nothing more than deportation to parts unknown.

The clumsy and sometimes farcical conflict between Vancouver’s activists and our Olympics powerbrokers is a mortal shadow of the archetypal conflict between vision and blindness, love and domination. That same conflict rages endlessly within each of us. Whenever love gains the upper hand, we experience life in all its majesty, and we’re capable of acts of heroism and noble sacrifice. On the days that domination masters us, darkness descends and we commit cruelties whose consequences and significance we cannot perceive.

The activists I’ve talked about have inspired and shamed a man whose third eye is so weak he sometimes wonders if it’s coated in a cataract. With such examples as theirs, however, perhaps someday I’ll finally learn how to see.