"Love Yourself"

"Love yourself" is a concept that is somewhat foreign to this blogger, but he is now trying to teach himself how it is done.  He has a long ways to go to know what loving oneself means and how love of oneself is supposed to feel like.

He had heard people talk about it before but rejected it because he knew better due to pride.  He believed that one does not exist to love oneself in this world but to give of oneself, otherwise it would be selfishness, that God does not like selfish people and that one needs to be like the self-sacrificial Christ.

Of course, he had never been able to be like Christ.  In that sense, he might know what self-love is due to his unwillingness to make sacrifices.  On second thought, one can make sacrifices without any love when sacrifices become routine obligations that need to be fulfilled, when consecrations of bread and wine are done without putting one's heart and faith into it because it has become repetitive and mechanical (not that this ever happens -- just a random thought).

Many a times posts in this blog included the two most important commandments, quoted again below in part without references [1]:

“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
He said to him, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Speaking subjectively, the first commandment above is easier to follow relative to the second, not that it alone by itself is easy to follow at all.  It is the second that is so hard to follow that makes the first one look easy.  This blogger had never truly understood the second greatest commandment until now, realizing that its operative words are not just to "love your neighbor" but to "love your neighbor as  yourself."  Thus, if one does not love or know how to love oneself, how is one able to love one's neighbor as oneself?

To read "self-sacrifice" into the second most important commandment is to re-write it this way: You shall sacrifice yourself for your neighbor.  If this is what Christ wants, He would have used the word "sacrifice" but He chose to use the word "love" instead.

While this is being composed, these thoughts came to mind: Christ had sacrificed Himself on the cross for the remission of sins.  This had to take place for God to show how much God loves man even though man had sinned and continues to sin.  Love therefore precedes sacrifice.

If love had been reciprocated in the Garden of Eden by Eve and Adam, then there would not have been the need for a sacrifice.   This is contradicted by a certain school of thought that Christ's sacrifice was not a plan B, but rather a plan A from the very beginning.  This blogger disagrees because plan A was perfect, with God giving man his Free Will.

With Free Will comes a risk, the risk of disobedience by refusing to resist temptation, by not choosing to love God but rather to be like God.  It was the perfect Plan A with Free Will formed out of love that had given rise to Plan B, also formed out of love, in order than man's sins can be be wiped clean.  Plan B was not a fix for Plan A that went awry: it was man who had gone astray, not God's mistake in Plan A, that Plan B had to come into existence.

Man's refusal to love God so pained God that God had to heal that pain through love, a love like no other, by incarnating His only Son so that God can be loved perfectly, and it is only this perfect love, through perfect obedience, tested by temptations and endured with sufferings, that can heal.

Love, therefore cannot be equated with sacrifice.  Love is greater than that.  Self-sacrifice is a part of love, not love in its entirety.  Love also embodies compassion, forgiveness and everything that is pure and good that comes from God.  Every person has the ability to love another but in order to give the gift of love, one has to know how to love and what it is like to be loved.

Loving purely is innate.  Some have been hurt when they were children, some even as adults.  Ironically, the withholding of love is not the antidote to pain; it is by loving purely (again) that reduces the hurt.

Therefore, this blogger thinks that this is what Christ wants all to do: to love God first, then love yourself, and then love your neighbor as yourself, in that order.



[1] http://www.usccb.org/bible/matthew/22, 36-39.