“Self-love is the source of all other loves.” ~ Pierre Corneille (Seventeenth Century French dramatist)
HOLLYWOOD – I must confess. For the greater portion of my life I struggled with the concept of self-love. I would equate self-love with selfishness. Any indication, any thought of showing love to myself would be instantly reversed, stopped, extinguished, vetoed, you name it, all in my effort to defeat being selfish.
This behavior was informed by my childish understanding that my faith demanded that I love or take care of others, especially those less fortunate at the expense of caring and loving myself. Then a few years ago, I was reintroduced to the response given by Yeshwa of Nazareth explaining the greatest commandment in the law.
Right there at the end “You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself” was my epiphany!
Loving myself was not only acceptable but most importantly, it was necessary. This discovery was validated when I later read that centuries ago, theologian and philosopher, Saint Thomas Aquinas had declared that “well-ordered self-love is right and natural’.
If I did not love myself I would not know how to love others. No matter what I did or did not do. Loving others is directly proportional to how I love myself not inversely proportional, as I once believed. This revelation opened the space for me to understand love.
The dictionary’s meaning did not resonate with me. Instead I was pulled to ruminate on another childhood lesson – that of the virtues Faith, Hope and Love, the greatest among them is Love.
Faith, I had come to understand, is an inner knowing and Hope is revealed as a numinous expectation. In my contemplative state I was led to understand Love as a connection – a venerated, holy, sacred Connection. Many of us, I imagine get this sense, albeit fleetingly, when we see art depicting children from various cultures surrounding the globe with hands knitted together.
When we can connect at this sacred level of awareness with all that we are, no longer fighting against self, we come to love who we are. When we believe in the fact that our lives are connected to other lives we are impelled to love those lives. When we connect ourselves to our work, we come to love our work. Immersing ourselves in a cause – making the connection- we are motivated to love that cause. But before we love our causes, work, others or anything else, we must love self.
If we believe love is an important part of our lives, let us devote the time to loving self – the crucial first step in living a life ordered by love. The fact is, when we excel in this step we gain the competence to love other lives; we connect with other lives. Consequently, the evidence of our connectedness emboldens us to love the way in which we were instructed and as a result, we become alive in this wisdom and truth. There is only The One, The All – Love. And getting to this great oak of being starts with the tiny acorn called self-love. Let’s enjoy the journey!
“Had we not loved ourselves at all, we could never have been obliged to love anything. So that self-love is the basis of all love.” ~ Thomas Traherne (English poet and religious writer)
Thank you for reading One Heart, One Minute with Opal
Opal Murray
[email protected]
