Lectio
“Our self-acceptance is the basis of the Christian creed. Assent to God starts in our sincere assent to ourselves, just as sinful flight from God starts in our flight from ourselves. In accepting the chalice of our existence, we show our obedience to the will of the Creator in heaven (cf. Mt. 26:39-42); in rejecting it, we reject God.”
— Johannes Baptist Metz, Poverty of Spirit
Meditatio
Implied in Jesus’s second great commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” is the invitation to first have love for self before being able to properly love others. Jesus does not command us to love our neighbor instead of ourselves, but as ourselves. To love our neighbor, then, is to love them with the same kind of love — the same quality and intensity of care — that we extend to ourselves, and to treat them with the same compassion, care, and tolerance we afford ourselves.
This can be a challenge, however, if we lack the capacity or ability for self-love. If, whether because of the brokenness of our environments or the brokenness we have chosen, we lack compassion, care, and tolerance for ourselves, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to hold these for others. And this difficulty runs deeper than we might expect. When we refuse the chalice of our own existence — when we reject what we are, as we are, in the condition God has given us — we are not practicing humility. We are fleeing. And what we flee from, ultimately, is not ourselves but the God who has invited us into communion with Himself — with Love itself.
If we look at Jesus’s statement, “For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get,” from this perspective, we can see that we all too often judge others in the way we judge ourselves, and the measure we give others is the same measure by which we measure ourselves. The chalice we refuse for ourselves becomes the measure we withhold from others. So if we judge ourselves harshly, we will judge others in much the same way. And if we hold ourselves to impossible standards, we will measure others against these same standards, because we cannot offer something to others that we, ourselves, do not have. We cannot love others if we do not love ourselves.
And all love comes from God. The self-love to which Jesus points us is not a project of self-improvement or an act of will, but a reception — an openness to the love God has already poured into us through the chalice of the cross, which Christ neither rejected nor fled from. When we refuse ourselves this love, which is itself an attempt to play God without God, we fail to receive the gift of Godself freely offered. And what we have not received, we cannot give. To withhold love from ourselves is, in the end, to withhold it from our neighbor — and from God, because Jesus is clear that the second commandment is like the first, and what we do to one, we do to all.
Oratio
Scattered Love
all of my love
so wounded and worn
scattered across
the field
of my hopes and memories
but it need not be
this is not as it was intended
He gathers me up
into Himself
recollecting me
into what was
from the beginning
before the brokenness
overtook me
making me whole
in His wholeness
resurrecting love
ascending into Love
Contemplatio
“and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
— Romans 5:5 (NRSVCE)
Related Scripture
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Not To Change God’s Mind: On The Incarnation As Revelation, which grounds the same conviction that God’s love precedes and enables all human response — tracing it through the Incarnation itself rather than through the double commandment.
For Further Reading
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
Leave a Reply