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Tonight on the eve of the first anniversary of the attacks on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, the singer Sting will be on stage, reclaiming the historic venue in an act both of remembrance he says and of celebration of life and music. 130 people were killed a year ago in a night of attacks that terrorised France. Antoine Leiris’s wife Helene was murdered and just 2 days later, he posted an open letter to the killers. “You want me to be scared” he wrote, “to see my fellow citizens through suspicious eyes, to sacrifice my freedom for security. You have failed. I will not change.” In a direct challenge to the motivation of the killers, he concluded with a phrase that has become the title of his book: “you will not have my hate”. Hatred is not something we often admit to – in fact we often explicitly deny it. “I don’t hate anyone” we say. We’re more comfortable with admitting to disappointment or sadness. Perhaps somehow we can believe ourselves to be at the mercy of sadness. But to admit to hating will demand we take responsibility for what we do with it. But any consideration of our spiritual life will take our own capacity for hatred very seriously. The seed of hatred in the heart of a person is often tiny, beginning with a slight or a misunderstanding. From this tiny seed can grow a monstrous and overwhelming focus on the perceived fault of another person or group. Societies that are divided, where the actions and motivations of one group are simply inexplicable to another is a society that has not come to terms with the power of hate. In a peculiarly confessional age, it’s often seen to be a good thing that our feelings are given unlimited vent, whatever they are and however they come out, including hatred. But in Christian teaching, resisting hatred is not a sign of weakness, it is immensely strong. The resistance of Jesus before his accusers and terrorisers was a fierce and unyielding insistence on love in the face of hate. The Christian gospels acknowledge the power of hatred, and urge its dissolution by equally persistent, stubborn love. Resisting hatred means paradoxically that in everyday life, we have to accept our own capacity to feel it. And then stand up to it; wherever we find it. It means daring, as at the Bataclan tonight, to go back to the place we saw it begin, to face it down and to sing, perhaps something close to the lament written by Leonard Cohen who died yesterday; something like a holy and a broken Alleluia.