The touchy-feely sock puppets of the self-help posse will tell you that before you can love anyone else, you have to love yourself (there’s actually a web site called loveyourselffirst.com). My experience, however, leans me more toward the notion that I can’t love myself until I love others. To love me, I have to do something for someone else first. During those occasional fugues of egocentricity, I get underlying moods of self-loathing and a sense of worthlessness, and its not until I force myself to serve that I’m wild about me again. I’m not saying my camp is the right one. The Lord’s second greatest commandment is to love thy neighbor as thyself (Mark 12:31), suggesting that love for self comes first. Maybe I’m confusing “love” for “like”, but i don’t think so.
True love (or as Miracle Max in “Princess Bride” called it, “to blaav“) is something projected outward towards someone else, no? Am I my own true love? (Not hardly.) Again, the Lord pointed out, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13) Therefore, love of self is not true love– or pure love. On the other hand, love of self doesn’t encompass narcissism, either, regardless of what Wikipedia wouid have you believe. That’s true lust, which is fun, too, I agree.
Getting back to true love… What is that, exactly? If you had asked me 34 years ago, I’d of told you it was the blonde roller girl at the A&W with the really tight butt. My opinion’s sort of evolved over time (I suspect so has her butt). Rita Rudner once said, “I never fell in love… I stepped in it a few times.” Is true love the “can’t breathe, can’t think until I see them again” feeling we had in the beginning of our relationships (prank calling them at 3am, singing “On the Street Where You Live”), or the unmurmuring willingness to clean dirty bums when it isn’t our turn, or watching Merchant Ivory when Clint Eastwood is on another channel, or still holding hands and opening car doors at age 90? Is true love our relationship, or is it us– our frames of mind? And is it right to think of true love as a condition only involving couples? We seem to keep the term within those parameters. Is true love real? Is it something we fell into, or did it come later? Or, is it like a religious love, accompanied by soft-filtered lenses and “ooo-ooooo’s” in the background?
I guess I love myself, but not like I used to. Back in the day I had a mad crush on me, wild infatuation. These days it’s more like routine, habit. Running around, doing for others, every once in a while I’ll look in the mirror and go “There, there.” I do still open the door for me when I think about it. *sigh*… What can I say? The romance is dead.
3 responses so far ↓
1 xoxoxoxo // May 12, 2008 at 2:31 am
Let me share a tiny insight that flashed in my head when I read your post-
When the Savior is questioned regarding the greatest commandment in the law and He replies that it is to “love the Lord they God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul and with all thy mind”. He then says that the second is very similar and it is to “love thy neighbor as thyself”.
The word used for “love” in both verses is agapao-which translated means beloved, to welcome, to be fond of, to serve. According to Vines Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words -”Christian love is the fruit of His Spirit in the Christian.” “Christian love, whether exercised toward the brethren, or toward men generally, is not an impulse from the feelings, it does not always run with the natural inclinations, nor does it spend itself only upon those for whom some affinity is discovered. Love seeks the welfare of all, and works no ill to any, love seeks opportunity to do good to ‘all men, and especially toward them that are of the household of the faith”
****FLASH*****
We are to love our neighbors (and ourselves) in the same manner that we love God. With reverence, with humility, with intent to do what is best for everyone.
The “love” you felt for yourself in your early years was selfish. It was focused on what you wanted irregardless of if those wants were what was best for you, it was impulsive and based on mortal emotion and ego. Vines states “Self-will, that is, self-pleasing, is the negation of love to God.”
What I think you are saying is that only when we are loving and serving others in the manner that Christ did (and as we have been commanded to do) that we are capable of truly loving ourselves. When we see others as like us, when we find common ground with them (through service) and love them as we ought to-it opens a kind of window that allows that particular fruit of the spirit to pour over our own heads and fill up our hearts.
2 David // May 12, 2008 at 4:32 am
My editor.
Yeah, that’s what I meant… although your explanation sort of reminded me of that song I couldn’t stand as a kid: “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.”
3 xoxoxoxo // May 12, 2008 at 9:47 pm
ROFL
I had just always paired the love I’m supposed to have for my neighbor with the love I have for myself-instead of connecting the idea that I should love my neighbor as much as (and in the same manner as) I love God. It only makes sense considering that whatever we do to the “least of these” we do unto God.
Which then means that even if we esteem ourselves to be the very least, last on the list, behind everyone else-we should still treat ourselves as we would the Lord Himself.
I don’t think it is possible for human beings to begin to comprehend the love that God feels for us and is surrounded by continually. THAT is truly love.
Leave a Comment