by
Rev. Kathy Switzer, Th.B.
Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord. Leviticus 19:18
Love your neighbor as yourself.
Some would give us the impression that loving ourselves is wrong. We are supposed to do away with the self, smash the ego, and only be concerned with the other person. This is an attitude you would find in some of the religious order of the Catholic Church and also of Puritanism. We have been taught that we are really ugly, nasty, despicable creatures who need to be kept under such tight controls just to be kept from being carried off to hell. John Calvin himself once wrote that left love was a pest.
Did you know: how we look at ourselves will determine, to a large part, the way we treat other people. If you and I view human beings as nothing more than a pattern of conditional responses, then we will go and select one or two goals and try to shape people toward those goals. Some of us view the government as doing just that. If parents see their children as little monsters, then they will try to tame that beast in one way or another. But if we see children as conscious, thinking, human beings, we are going to try to give them the right ideas. Now isn't that what education is all about?
Our task, if you will, as Christians, is to enable others, as well as ourselves, to come to wholeness and to grow to our full potential. Now, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the idea of wholeness here. But for me, wholeness is the function of not only my rational self or the conscious self, but the emotional self as well, having all my parts of my being coming together and working together as a harmonious whole. In the depth of me there is the bright and beautiful part alongside the dark and ugly side of myself. In other words, I function with all the various parts of me as one unit, instead of having one or the other take control of me.
As Meyeroff points out in his writings so clearly, there is no consistent love where there is no responsibility. When we experience the love of God in our lives, where that love is allowed to move through us, we are transformed or changed, if you will, to unbelievable potential as children of God. Loving other people means trying to make conditions by which the people reach their true potential as human beings. Loving ourselves has that same meaning.
Now some of us are going to confuse self-love with selfishness. Now they are very different because self-love is a genuine caring for ourselves, whereas selfishness is a morbid preoccupation with ourselves. Those people who are selfish can't seem to find joy or happiness in someone else's blessing or growth. Truly selfish people not only have difficulty in loving others, but they seldom love themselves either.
Meister Eckhart puts it this way, "If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than you love yourself, you will not truly succeed in loving yourself, but if you love all alike, including yourself, you will love them as one person and the person is both God and man. Thus he is a great and righteous person who loving himself, loves all others equally."
When we begin to love ourselves and value what we are in spite of ourselves, then we are free to like other people and treat them with loving concern.
But how do we begin to love ourselves? How do we begin to love the good as well as the ugliness that dwells within ourselves?
To truly love, I am going to have to look at all of me. The past as well as the present. The good as well as the bad. That way I can control the negative parts of myself without giving way to despair and hopelessness. Now I know this may sound easy to some, but it isn't at all. It takes time to examine the very depths of our souls. I would like to thank the people of AA, because in step 4 of the twelve steps, we are to take an inventory of our lives, good as well as bad, and take a cold, hard look at them. I am very grateful for the people who have come into my life to get me a sense of purpose and love that has made this task a little easier for me to bear. I have found that during these times, friends have become a very important part of my life, because of their constant love for me. But in loving myself, I have learned that I can't do this without learning how to develop a sense of discipline and courage; and that means taking responsibility of my own life.
Now: how do we go about loving ourselves? These are three steps:
The first step is a simple one.
We need to make up our minds we are going to do it. Look at ourselves through another set of eyes: they eyes of God. I have found that keeping a journal has helped me to keep track of the progress. It also gives me time to examine my value system with which I judge myself.
The second step is to realize that everyone else, in their walk with God, will have the same hard time in doing this.
In other words, I am not unique. Now this is where church can play a very important part. The church is where we are to find a sense of acceptance, and a place where we find strength, as well as a sense of direction for our lives. A place we can come without judgment or condemnation. So, if we come to church with a sense of judgment and condemnation toward ourselves, it will be picked up by the others around us. We cannot change things unless we accept them. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses. I am the oppressor of the person I condemn, not his friend or fellow sufferer. When I look at myself, I find it so easy to judge and condemn myself, because I know myself far better than the other people in my life. It is just as morally wrong to dislike, despise, and devalue ourselves as it is to have these attitudes toward others.
The third and last step is to learn to accept forgiveness from others.
I tell you that it is easier to forgive the people who offend you than it is to accept forgiveness from the one you offend. In Matthew 5:23-24, Jesus tells us that if our brother has something against us, we are to seek forgiveness from them before we present our gifts before the altar of God.
In order to accept forgiveness, we need to value ourselves. In accepting forgiveness, we come to value ourselves as people. The Christian church was built on those people who accepted forgiveness and loved God more for it. Peter, who denied Jesus; John, who fled from him; Paul who persecuted the risen Christ and tried to destroy the church. All accepted the forgiveness of God and became the founders of the church.
When we work through these steps, we are taking a chance in relating to God and people just as Jesus did. We cannot love ourselves unless we let others love us. Nothing is sadder than the person who is loved and can't feel it.
Kathy Switzer, Th.B Pastor, United Community Church, Jackson MS
