[Jesus] answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.'” Luke 10:27
“The best way to love ourselves is to love others, yet we cannot love others unless we love ourselves since it is written, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed when we love ourselves wrongly we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others. Yet there is a sense in which we must hate others and leave them in order to find God. Jesus said: “If any man come to me and hate not his father and his mother…yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).
As for this “finding” of God, we cannot even look for Him unless we have already found Him, and we can not find Him unless He has first found us. We cannot begin to seek Him without a special gift of His grace, yet if we wait for grace to move us, before beginning to seek Him, we will probably never begin. The only effective answer to the problem of salvation must therefore reach out to embrace both extremes of a contradiction at the same time. Hence that answer must be supernatural. That is why all the answers that are not supernatural are imperfect: for they only embrace one of the contradictory terms, and they can always be denied by the other.
Take the antithesis between love of self and love of another. As long as there is question of material things, the two loves are opposed. The more goods I keep for my own enjoyment, the less there are for others. My pleasures and comforts are, in a certain sense, taken from someone else. And when my pleasures and comforts are inordinate, they are not only taken from another, but they are stolen. I must learn to deprive myself of good things in order to give them to others who have a greater need of them than I. And so I must in a certain sense “hate” myself in order to love others.
Now there is a spiritual selfishness which even poisons the good act of giving to another. Spiritual goods are greater than the material, and it is possible for me to love selfishly in the very act of depriving myself of material things for the benefit of another. If my gift is intended to bind him to me, to put him under an obligation, to exercise a kind of hidden moral tyranny over his soul, then in loving him I am really loving myself. And this is a greater and more insidious selfishness, since it traffics not in flesh and blood but in other persons’ souls…
Man is divided against himself and against God by his own selfishness, which divides him against his brother. This division cannot be healed by a love that places itself only on one side of the rift. Love must reach over to both sides and draw them together. We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others.”
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) in No Man is an Island (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955) xvii-xx. Click to read the PDF of this contemporary spiritual classic.
Letting go of material things frees us to love others. Jesus knows this. Mystics like Merton figured it out. Too many givers love themselves by holding back things or through their giving that seeks to control they traffic in souls rather than loving others. Embrace the tension of the two sides as the only path to generous living. Love God and love others by letting go of that which hinders love.
Merton says it best: “We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others.” The way to love unselfishly is to hold on to Christ rather than material things. If that sounds too lofty, pray and think about it today. May the Holy Spirit guide you into this profound truth.
Also, enjoy the new header photo, which my son, Sammy, snapped at Beaver Brook yesterday just west of Denver. We did a 5.2 mile loop to the stream and were fortunate to catch and release 34 trout. Catching trout is like receiving gifts from God – glimpses of “God’s extravagance” as Sammy likes to say – and releasing them is our gift to the anglers after us. Book a day with Sammy if you want to learn fly fishing!