FROM THE BOUNDARY - Love actually – Part five

Last week, I asked whether, 2000 years after Jesus, we have more love in us. I said that your guess is as good as mine. What I am clear about, though, is that all, or nearly all, of us have the potential for love.

We need to be told that, but though we might expect it from the Church we’re not.

Isn’t it time the Church switched on the light for us? Isn’t it time it stopped putting us down and began teaching us how to realise our love in a way which leaves us feeling we can’t help ourselves in giving more and more?

Yes, but what of self-love? You remember the cliché, ‘How can you love others unless you first love yourself’? There’s at least a hint of it in the Gospel. How can you love your neighbour AS yourself unless you first understand the parameters of self-love as applied to yourself? And unless you love yourself sufficiently, of what value and use is your love for your neighbour?

I don’t know about you, but for me the cliché, at least in a vacuum, has always seemed worrisome at best and obnoxious at worst. Self-love might just imply putting ourselves first and disregarding other people if they get in the way. Doesn’t it reject self-sacrifice and humility because SELF comes first? If ‘love is blind’, maybe it means ignoring our own faults and emphasising those of others.

Is self-love inevitably selfish? As a human being, never mind as a Christian and a priest, I simply can’t subscribe to any of that. I’m far too aware of my own imperfections to think a lot of myself and insist on the front seat. In any event, there’s clearly a ‘case to answer’ when it comes to the idea of ‘loving yourself’.

The other day something rather beautiful happened which bears on this. My wife and I went to our doctor, a good friend, to get some treatment for ‘damp grey cloud cold syndrome’ we’d brought back from UK. When we entered his office, we said, “Look, we can’t give you a hug as we usually do because we don’t want to pass our colds to you.” His response was: “Do give over. I’m a doctor and God supports my work and so I’m protected. Where’s my hug?”

That was a noble, generous thing to say, wasn’t it? Mind, I couldn’t help pointing out that Francis Bacon had once responded to someone who claimed that shipwrecked mariners had been saved because of their Christian beliefs, ‘Ah yes, but where are those Christians who were drowned?’

Now I suppose one could characterise my doctor’s response as a form of conceit. I don’t think so, though. For what it suggests is that he’d thought carefully about who and what he was with all its attendant risks. It was not a ‘look at me’ response. It was one which said ‘This is who I am’. It entailed his awareness of his true self, one which he was not prepared to suppress to please anyone.

It seems to me that that, his awareness of himself and ours of ourselves, is the precondition of what we mean by self-love. And it equally entails loving others by trying to see the truth about them, treating them as unique beings whom we don’t require to ‘fit’ into any fake pre-conception of how they should be. Until, then, we’re aware of who we are and understand that our self-searching is in fact an act of loving kindness to ourselves, how are we fitted to show that same loving kindness to others?

But there’s more. My doctor also has a penchant for super paint jobs on racy cars. He loves motor sport. That’s part of who he is. It brings with it a sense of fun and fulfilment. And why not? Equally, why shouldn’t I, though a priest, drive a snazzy (though tired), orange sports car and do ballet? That’s part of who I am. I wouldn’t want to change him, nor he me. It’s stuff which makes our hearts beat faster and our eyes glow. It’s an aspect of the truth we’re carrying within us. Until we see and understand this in ourselves, how can we see and understand it in others? It would never occur to us to try.

The alternative is shallow judgmentalism of others and smug satisfaction with ourselves however empty our lives actually are. Our awareness and acceptance of what makes the world go round for us is also loving kindness to ourselves which we can lovingly transfer to others.

It’s in these two senses, then, that we can’t love others – which at root actually means not wishing to change the truth in them – unless we first love ourselves by being aware of what’s true in and about us.

It might be expressed this way. In life’s passage, fight for what you believe is right and what’s important to you. So also fight for the ones you love in the battlefield of their lives, and never forget to let them know that as you fight for yourself so also you fight for them too, because you love them and can do no other. Yes, become a fighter. Thanks Doc.

Go safely, then – until the next time.

Poetry from the boundary: “Oh heart, are you great enough for love?” (Tennyson).