2018-09-24
Brooke Strong
Scripture: Matthew 22:34-40
Phoenix Affirmations III
When he heard we were focusing this morning on the commandment to love ourselves, a church member, a few days ago, said to me, with downcast eyes, “How can I love something this weak?” When we’re aware, as I am and I know many of you are, of all the ways we let God and each other down, it can sometimes be hard to love ourselves. I forgot to call so-and-so this week; I walked right by the paper cup that I should have picked up from the sidewalk; or, more seriously, I’ve let my spouse down or paid way too little attention to my children. When we’re honest and we’re keenly aware of our failings—failings we all have—it can be damnably hard to love ourselves. What’s there to love? we may think—we haven’t been worth loving.
That’s not the only problem with this commandment, either. I got a note this week from a church member who said she was looking forward to today’s focus on love of self and what that entails. “When so many people do not have any love for themselves,” she wrote, “what does that commandment [to love our neighbors as ourselves] really mean? If we do not love ourselves, are we totally incapable of loving others?” She said she had been wondering about the meaning of that commandment for years.
My guess is many of us have. When Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is, he says it’s that we’re to love God with everything we have. Then he says, “And a second [commandment] is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Matthew 22:39).
And here’s the question: Do you love yourself? Do you love yourself even with all your flaws and blemishes? Do you love the self that’s overweight or that’s been demoted or that’s in bankruptcy or that’s been abusive to a co-worker? Do you look in the mirror and thrill to the person you are, or do you instead cringe at some real or imagined failing?
I venture to say that we may struggle more with love of self than we do with love of others. In our more honest moments, we may well agonize at our own failings, and stare down the barrel of our shame, and wonder if we’re really lovable: “How can I love something this weak?” Those of you who were here last Sunday may remember Mary Senechal talking in a Faith Witness about a patient she had seen in her hospice work, a man who, when she touched his arm, recoiled in horror, told her that he didn’t deserve such tenderness, and said that if she ever showed him kindness again, he would punch her in the mouth. Love of self? Hardly!
And while for most of us it may not be that dramatic, nevertheless, when it comes to how and whether to love ourselves, there is in many of us an unnerving sense of self-doubt. Somewhere below the surface, there may lurk a persistent and gnawing worry: with all my shortcomings, and aside from my accomplishments, am I lovable? Am I loved without having to do anything? Can I truly love myself?
So let’s explore this a little bit, and begin with Jesus’ words. After the command to love God, Jesus tells us there’s a second commandment that is “like it,” that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. So when we look carefully at the words, we see that Jesus’ command is actually a two-part love, not a three-part love. The command is to love God, and to love neighbor. Despite the common perception, Jesus doesn’t actually command us to love ourselves. He doesn’t say, “Love God, love others, love self.” The command is to love God and others. And when the question is asked about how we’re to love others, the answer is: we’re to love others as we love ourselves.
Jesus isn’t saying “Do love yourself,” nor is he saying, “Don’t love yourself.” He’s focused instead on our neighbors and telling us to love them in the same way that we love ourselves. As we already love ourselves, is the way it reads. He doesn’t command self-love; he doesn’t forbid self-love. He just assumes self-love is something we already do.
And in one sense he’s right. We are much more attuned to our own lives than we are to any other life, including our parents or our spouses or our children. I think much more about who I am and what I desire and what my plans are than I do about you and your desires and plans—I wonder what I’ll have for lunch; or whether to take a nap and bask in Browns’ and Buckeyes’ and Indians’ wins; or what I’ll do tomorrow. The stuff in my head is mostly about me! It reminds me of the story about the woman sitting on a plane talking to the stranger sitting next to her. She regales him with tale after tale about her life, showing him endless pictures. And finally she pauses and says, “Well, enough about me! What do you think of my family?”
So in one sense, most of us are extremely focused on ourselves. And I think Jesus is trying to broaden our horizons and enlarge the scope of what we’re concerned about. What would the world be like if we spent as much time thinking about the lives of our parents and partners and children and the cashier at the grocery store and the destitute person panhandling on the Cleveland street corner and the refugee from Mexico as we spent thinking about ourselves? What if I entered into their lives as much as I inhabit my own? We’ll look more fully at love of neighbors next Sunday, but for today, Jesus’ assumption seems to be that we spend a lot of energy immersed in our own struggles and resentments and thrills. Or to use his language, we love ourselves—a lot! And Jesus wants us to love others that much.
So we do focus a lot on ourselves. On the other hand, as much time as we spend immersed in our own issues and realities, it’s also true, as we said earlier, that so many of us simply do not experience ourselves as loved. We feel, in fact, distinctly unloved and unworthy. Why should I be loved? we may think: I haven’t lived up to my potential; I’m not as good as my mother or father or sister or brother; I never really accomplish what I set out to do. Maybe you always feel like a zero at parties. Maybe your mother or father was incapable of loving you. Maybe you’ve made a haunting mistake and you never really get away from that feeling of being mired in guilt. There’s endless pressure to get into the right college, to get a good job, to succeed, to save enough for retirement, to love spouses when they’re challenging, and on and on. Do we ever do enough of these things right? Are we ever really good enough?
So it’s sometimes really difficult to get the sense that we are loved. And if we don’t feel that love, how in the world are we ever going to muster the wherewithal to love others? If I don’t live from that place of being loved, I am not going to have anything to offer to anyone else. My tank will be empty and there will be nothing to give. Remember the woman who wrote me this week: “If we do not love ourselves, are we totally incapable of loving others?” Probably, yes.
So even if Jesus doesn’t command it, love of ourselves is crucial in this whole equation. The only way I’m able to love anybody else is because I have been loved myself. One of the intriguing and thorny questions, though, is: what, in truth, is the source of the love with which I have been loved? Is it because I have loved myself that I am able to love other people? Or does the love that sustains and teaches and fills me come from somewhere else?
We’ve all heard the expression a thousand times: “You have to love yourself.” And the part of this that we all resonate with is: yes, we all have to take care of ourselves; we can’t burn ourselves out; we have to do the things that are restorative—to pray, to have a satisfying hobby, to eat lunch with friends, to nap, to see enjoyable movies. Each of us has habits and practices that fill us and nourish us—what today’s third Phoenix Affirmation describes as caring for our bodies and taking time for prayer, reflection, worship, and recreation. And we should do those.
At the same time, though, while we may all agree that the experience of being loved is crucial if I’m to love anyone else, I’m going to quibble with the popular notion that I have to love myself. I can and should do all the things that fill me and energize me—no question. But my suspicion is that, when I feel loved, it’s not myself who’s doing the loving. It’s really someone else who is loving me.
Let me say it baldly: I honestly don’t think I can manufacture love for myself. Think about all those examples we gave earlier of people who feel worthless because of failure or inadequacy or searingly bad parents. Do we really think it’s possible, with a snap of our fingers, to will that doubt and pain away by loving ourselves?
My own impression is that real love always involves at least two people, or two entities. Your friend may love you and your parents may love you and your dog may love you. But what can it possibly mean to say you and I love ourselves? Love always reaches beyond itself. It’s a force that crosses distances and breaks down barriers and makes connections across divides. Love only operates when two are brought together, and when giving is involved. That’s what love is.
I can’t really give myself anything, though, can I? It’s easy, for example, to see the absurdity of giving myself a gift. “Oh, new shoes for me!” I say to myself? Or, “Self, thank you for listening to me and giving me such undivided time.” Or, “Thank you, Self, for that great hug.” Right? Giving things or attention or affection to ourselves isn’t really possible, is it? In a similar vein, Frederick Buechner says that forgiving yourself is like sitting on your own lap. You can’t do it. If it were that easy, we’d just make it happen. We would bathe in our own love for ourselves. And it would be so nice, wouldn’t it?
No, I think real love, the love that grounds us and changes lives, is always given by one to another. I, for example, have a mother and had a father who treasured me as a child. I know I am loved because they went to my baseball games and helped me with my homework and baked me chocolate chip cookies. They tucked me in at night and scratched my back and read me Madeline and Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. I cannot imagine anything I could have done for myself that would have let me know I was as loved as what my parents conveyed to me in a zillion different ways. That love has only continued and deepened in my marriage and with our children and now with our grandchild. I know love, not because I have magically willed it for myself, but because others have wrapped me in their embrace.
Almost twenty years ago, I badly broke my leg and ankle bones in a running accident, and, as a consequence, developed a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in my lung. While I recovered, I had to sleep for a month on a recliner in our den. And what I will always remember is that every night, that entire month, Mary slept right next to me on the world’s most uncomfortable couch. I could not possibly have shown myself the same love Mary showed me in being so present in that difficult time. The love I knew was not mine for myself; it was Mary’s for me.
Mary knew love from her parents, and they knew love from their parents, and back and back it goes. And if we do that infinite regression, eventually we come to the source of all our loves. All love begins in God. It begins with the One who created us and never lets us go. That’s the love that holds you and me close at every moment. In the words of the apostle Paul, “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). Even if your parents were Attila and Matilda Hun, you can still know love. Because God has loved you and me with a fierce and relentless affection and delight. It’s that love that makes all other loves possible. It’s that love that holds us close always.
So here’s what we’re going to do. We are going to take a moment now to absorb the love that God showers on all of us. Just close your eyes if you’d like. Call to mind a doubt, or a worry, or a feeling of failure. . . Maybe you feel trapped or scared or alone. . . And now into that space comes Jesus, the Spirit of love. . . And those kindly eyes search you, and smile at you. . . and that gentle, accepting, affectionate Voice calls out your name. . . You are loved more than you will ever know. . . You are held and treasured and adored. Bask in it. . . And now you may open your eyes.
God is shining light into your life and mine at this very moment. Revel in it. Find your life in it. And in that light, be freed to love and serve God and each other. We are God’s light. And that light fills us now and always.