Each week during our fall pledge campaign [Sep 30-Nov 18] I reflect on a different aspect of love, guided by Scripture and quotations from literature or from prominent figures in history.

Jesus reminds us to love our neighbor as we do ourselves, and yet many of us focus on trying to fulfill the first part of that mandate without addressing the second part, which actually is a precursor to the first. Why? Because loving ourselves is often much harder work than loving others. I am a fan of “Madame Secretary,” a drama aired Sunday evenings on CBS, and two days ago part of the plot illustrated precisely this challenge. The oldest child of the secretary of state is named “Stevie”, and she’s bright, educated, hardworking, privileged…and like so many young people she is struggling to find her life’s calling. She works as a White House intern and was injured in a bomb blast that hit the building. In the moments before the blast, she said something unintentionally patronizing to an older woman with whom she worked. That older woman died in the blast, and Stevie was left with heaps of remorse and nowhere to channel it. In Sunday’s episode, Stevie sits in the family living room berating herself, not only for this but for seemingly all the problems of the world. Her mother gently but firmly calls her on it.

How easy it is to let remorse cover us like a damp old quilt, obliterating all that is good and loveable and light in us. Dr. Barbara Markway is a psychologist who writes about self-esteem. In a blog posting she offered reasons why it’s hard for us to love ourselves. It’s difficult to accept ourselves unconditionally, she writes, “because we must give up the fantasy that if we punish ourselves enough with negative thoughts, we'll change. It's as if we think we can whip ourselves into shape” through negative self-talk. [1]

In addition, “we don't believe we deserve self-acceptance. The messages we receive from our culture, others, and ourselves become deeply ingrained, in part due to sheer repetition. When we hear negative things about ourselves “over and over again from many different sources” they soak into us. Because these negative messages bombard us, and because we never stop to question whether they're true, we internalize the feeling that we are, indeed, defective.” [2]

Markway says that if we dare to love ourselves, and to accept ourselves as we are, “we believe we're giving up control. Another barrier to self-acceptance, and perhaps the most difficult to overcome, is the belief that we're exerting some sort of meaningful control when we fight against something [i.e., some real or perceived flaw in ourselves].” In reality, she writes, we are actually “giving away our power by letting other people determine our worth” and we should practice quiet self-acceptance as a way of gaining strength. [3]

Her words of advice feel counterintuitive and out of place in a culture that rewards us for striving relentlessly toward its definition of perfection. But she is not alone in her emphasis on self-acceptance and love. The poet and activist Maya Angelou once said, “I do not trust people who don’t love themselves and yet tell me, ‘I love you.’ There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.” [4] The blogger who cites Angelou also observes, “You cannot give away what you do not have for yourself. If you are continually giving others love and attention and do not afford yourself the same courtesy, your wellspring of love will soon dry up. Fill up your own tank of self-love first and offer love to others from that wonderful space of self-radiance and abundance.” [5]

Without love, religion and faith are hollow shells. All three synoptic gospels record Jesus speaking about self-love. In Matthew 22, Jesus says that all of Jewish law and the entirety of prophetic wisdom depend in part of it. In Mark 12, he calls it part of the greatest commandment. In Luke 10, Jesus says that self-love is essential to life. The Letter to the Galatians (5:6) declares that the way faith expresses itself is through love. The First Letter to the Corinthians (13:2) cautions that our faith may be able to move mountains but without love we are nothing. And the Buddha is credited with saying, “You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” [6]

Self-love—it is learning to see ourselves as God sees us, and it is the ground floor of the Christian life.

[1]https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/shyness-is-nice/201109/why-is-self-acceptance-so-hard

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] http://launchyourgenius.com/2014/02/14/amazing-power-love-quotes-musings/

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.