When loving yourself isn't easy...

I want to post a few blogs relating to the Old and New Testament commandments regarding loving our neighbors and loving ourselves. I immediately start the process by asking some elementary questions about the words used in those simple sentences. What is love? What is a neighbor? How do I love myself properly? None of them are easily addressed, but I'd like to begin with a sampling of Mere Christianity where C.S. Lewis muses about loving himself.

Later we can look at what Jesus said about neighbors, who they are and how ought we to love them.
It's not as easy at it sounds. Here's a great start:

"How exactly do I love myself? Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently love your neighbor does not mean feel fond of him or find him attractive. I ought to have seen that before, because, of course, you cannot feel fond of the person by trying. Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? Well, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments) but that is not why I love myself. In fact it is the other way round: my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself. So loving my enemies does not apparently mean thinking them nice either. That is an enormous  relief. For a good many people imagine that forgiving your enemies means making out that they are really not such bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are. Go a step further. In my most clear-sighted moments not only do I not think myself a nice man, but I know that I am a very nasty one. I can look at some of the things I have done with horror and loathing. So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate  some of the things my enemies do.

Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate the bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.  For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did but not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life–namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit agreed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I love myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things. Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is any way possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.”

I admit I have a hard time thinking in loving terms about some of the people in my past to have gone out of their way to hurt me with slander, innuendo, or outright lies. I also have a hard time thinking in loving terms about leaders who were unwilling to allow me to face my accusers. Granted, I have done enough wrong in my life to warrant discipline, but trying to love church leaders who opted out of the biblical tenants of discipline in favor of personal punishment, is still a challenge for me. As a wise counsellor once told me, sometimes the best we can do is hold our enemies in forgiveness until we can gather the grace to completely forgive them. The same holds true regarding how we think about ourselves.

Anyone who has ever disappointed themselves, and those they love, will experience a period of time when finding self-love is impossible. Self-love is often closely associated with how we perceive what others think about us so when we fail openly and spectacularly must begin anew by restructuring our lives by making amends, seeking forgiveness, and reestablishing valued friendships - or starting new ones. This is not easy work, and it takes a great deal of time before we can be sure that people we associate with either graciously look past our failures, or never learn about our past failures and treat us strictly at our face value.

Stephen Covey says the way to reestablish broken trust is by making and keeping small promises.  There's a tendency for broken people to want to make grand statements and reestablish trust by using promises that are difficult to keep. For example, when an alcoholic promises "I will never take another drink as long as I live”, they set themselves up for failure because they can't speak for the rest of their lives. But if they say "I will not drink today” their chances of success increase greatly.  Making and keeping small promises speaks to a pro-active and manageable commitment that is not found in grandiose promises.

 Simply put, self-love must grow out of a sense of self value, and that can only come out of the mind and heart that believes in and has experienced grace. Once we understand, and embrace the notion that despite our failures, we are still loved by both God and the special people in our lives, we can begin a new life–not sidestepping the consequences of our bad choices–with a sense of regeneration and hope.

Those who have experienced grace in times of their own failure are capable of giving grace to others in their times of brokenness. That supposed to be what Christians do: They love themselves because they know they are loved by God, and thereby are enabled to love others without strings attached,
just like God.

Occupy What?

Maybe this is too political for some, but I want to say something that is on my heart.

I'm reading a biography about Mao, you know the Chinese Communist tyrant who is said to be responsible for the killing (a euphemism for murder) of about 70,000,000 people, outside of war. His story is interesting, to say the least, but the early years of communism in China reminds me of some things I see today that many will say is unrelated and harmless. 

The Russians (Stalin in particular) were the bankroll and the military/political support behind the birth and spread of Communism in China. Mao was a fringy player at first who made a name for himself by being power-hungry, self-centered, elusive, resilient and very brutal. Since I'm still reading the book, I can't say much more about him until I'm finished.

In short, the communist Russians sought to spread their revolution, using anyone they could to foment discord in the masses of people around the world. Their technique was quite simple, make villains of anyone who owned anything, call out people who were "wealthy" as dangerous, hunt down and confiscate their wealth so it could be redistributed to the poor, and create systems of dependency in the masses, giving false hope in order to gradually gain complete control over literally everyone. All the while, the revolutionary leaders lived in luxury themselves.

I don't know but that all sounds familiar to me today. Isn't Occupy Wall Street a movement designed to convince the masses (99%) that they are victims and that they deserve a bigger piece of the pie? Call anyone who has achieved wealth (1%) a villain. Find ways to make them pay more of their filthy money to support the millions (40%) who pay no income taxes at all.  Restructure  and socially engineer society so that the government controls wealth and determines who gets what share. Create dependencies on the government's elite, all of whom live like kings and queens, so they can keep their power at the ballot box. Finally, look for ways to erode the Constitution so that it becomes more helpful to those on the dole, all the while demonizing capitalism as the reason for all our woes.     


Occupy Wall Street? Same tactics. Same rhetoric. Same goal?


I recently read something that strikes home for me. In the wild, we are told not to feed wild animals lest we create a dependency in them. They need to learn to eat by their own efforts, ideally, they forage for their own food and survival, allowing the system of natural selection to work.

While everyone agrees that's a good system, why don't we do the same for people who have greater capacities than animals. We are now creating a dependency on government that actually discourages capable people from making their own way. Should I find a job or collect food stamps and unemployment for another year? Given the choice, I'm not sure what I would do, but I suspect it would include asking for as little help as possible. (Actually, when I was set out to pasture five years ago,  I didn't apply for unemployment. We cut the budget and continued to seek ways every day to improve our situation.) Helping the indigent is good, necessary and critical to many, so it's not hard-hearted conservatism that makes me wonder about the hundreds of millions of able-bodied people who opt out of the work force to collect what they deserve from the government and those damn rich people.

For me, this is not about compassion or a perceived lack thereof,  but it's about finding a balance for the long-term good for our society, not short term fixes that allow politicians to keep their cushy life style while keeping us divided and at each other's throats.

If wisdom reigned, not expedience, we would all feel better about the future than we do.