The “I” In “Love”
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Over the last couple of weeks (except yesterday) I’ve been exploring the words of Jesus in Mark 12:30 where he tells us the two most important commands are to love God and love your neighbor. If we want to live out the most important things in life, then we must pay attention to these words and take them seriously. We must Live the Important.
Today, however, I have a problem with Jesus’ words, particularly those related to loving your neighbor. He says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The difficulty with this is that I often don’t love myself. In fact, there are times when I loathe myself. I reflect on my attitudes or personal selfishness and hate what I see. On those days, if I love my neighbor the way I love myself, then I will be hypercritical and unpleasant. Surely, that’s not what Jesus had in mind here.
At other times, I am deeply in love with who I am in a narcissistic sort of way. That is, I mistakenly think I hung the moon and that all the world revolves around me. On those days everything is about me, about what I want, and about my needs regardless of how it affects others. On those days, I want everything to go my way. If I love my neighbor in this fashion, then I would be prone to over-indulgence, excessive flattery, and blindness to faults. I can’t imagine Jesus had that in mind either.
Maybe it’s because I currently work in the mental health field that I’ve come to believe that most of us (not just the mentally ill) don’t know how to love ourselves. Rather than love, we live in self-condemnation or self-indulgence. We simultaneously burden ourselves with guilt and self-promotion. What does it really mean to love oneself? Does it mean pampering ourselves like advertising executives would have us believe? Does it mean constant self-condemnation in order to make ourselves better?
We don’t know how to love our neighbor because we don’t know how to love ourselves. Therefore, to live out the most important things in life–loving God and loving neighbor–I think it’s important for us to figure out how to love who we are and who God created us to be. I’ll take a look at some of these issues in the next few days.
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