Proverbs 25:21 Meaning If Your Enemy Is Hungry

The one the mind calls an enemy is the figure onto which it has projected its own guilt, and to feed him is to withdraw that projection and answer the fear with love instead. What is given here is not a strategy for winning but a correction of sight, for the moment a mind offers bread to the one it feared, it stops believing that anyone stands outside its own peace.

The hunger and thirst are real, but they are shared, the same lack that lives in every mind that thinks itself separate. To meet another's need is to remember there is no other, and the enemy dissolves into a brother the instant he is no longer met with attack.

Thine enemy: the brother the mind has made a stranger, the figure it has burdened with its own guilt and fear. Bread, water: the love and recognition every mind hungers for, offered to the one the ego said should be denied.

Vera: Enmity Enmity is a rope pulled from both ends. Enemy names your grip on it rather than anything inside the man at your gate; the rival who would gladly watch you fall still has a stomach that growls like yours. Setting bread in front of him is one hand opening, and the rope goes slack whatever he does with his end.

Mettā: Loving-kindness Mettā is the wish that someone be well, and it gets proved only on the person you would rather see go without. Wishing your enemy fed while the cupboard stays shut costs nothing; the wish has to walk to the shelf and come back with a loaf in it. You can tell it has turned into mettā when you would rather he ate than that he learned his lesson.

Karuṇā: Compassion Compassion is the heart moving toward suffering wherever it turns up. Thirst never asks whose mouth it is drying; it works the same in a friend and in the man who has been spreading stories about you all season. Once his dry mouth is the thing in front of you, the water is halfway to his hands, and the label has quietly come off him.

Dāna: Giving Giving is the practice carried out by the hands. Food and water, the plainest things one person can pass to another, are the whole instruction, and nothing is asked about how warmly you feel while you carry them across; a cup that arrives at the hour of thirst weighs more than the same cup offered at your convenience. Hand a hungry man a meal and you hand him another day of living, and the heart gets trained by whatever the hands keep repeating.

Khanti: Patient endurance Patience is the strength to take a sting and send none back. A man who drinks your water can set the cup down and go on hating you just as before, and holding steady through that is harder than parting with the water was. Fill the cup anyway, without standing over him to watch his face for a change of heart.