How well do I love myself?

Homily

31st Sunday in Ordinary Time B

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG +mj

How well do I love myself?

This is a tricky pivotal question, even if it's an essential part of the two greatest commandments.  Jesus says I can't love my neighbor unless I know how to love myself.  Yet the very nature of love is not self-centered.  Love is a gift of self to others.  To love is to put someone's will above your own.  So it's tricky.  How do I love myself in the right way?

You've been a Christian long enough to know the wrong way, I hope.  To feed my selfish ego, or to make myself the center of the universe, is not the way to love of self.  Loving self is not to disregard others.  It is not to make myself a God.

Love is free.  It's a grace.  It's a grace with a responsibility.  To love myself must mean to receive the gift of my life, and to be the best steward of that gift.  To love myself is to know my life is stamped with the very image of God.  I have a capacity to be His child and to grow in His likeness.  Ultimately, I have the chance to love like Him.  This is the very heart of truth and goodness and all reality.  Today's scriptures take dead aim at the ultimate meaning of my life.

To love myself is to nourish this incredible gift and capacity.  Because my potential to love is so great, it's ok to prioritize my health that preserves my freedom.  This includes my physical, spiritual, mental, emotional, relational and psychological health.  It's a sin to intentionally damage my health and thus my freedom to love.  It's a strength, not a weakness, to ask for help to stay healthy.  This is what it means to love one's self.

I struggle most with trusting that I deserve someone to take care of me.  I bet you do too.  It's where I most often fail to love myself.  I try to earn affection and to fix myself to the point of exhaustion.  The approach is futile.  It can backfire in so many ways and lead not to self-love but self-hatred.  There is some health that can only be received in relationship to others.  It's a strength, not a weakness, to trust that I deserve someone to take care of me.

How well do I love myself?  I'm not sure.  Like most all of us here, I think I am the exception to the rule.  I don't trust that I deserve love, so I do lots of prideful things to earn affection.  It backfires every time.

Yet I am getting better.  I hope you are too.  I have received some incredible consolations this last year from Jesus Himself.  I've heard new things from Him in prayer that have helped me immensely.  He's told me He's sorry for those who have hurt me.  He's told me He's sorry that things have to be this way.  He's told me He's sorry for the ways I have felt used.  Most of all, He has revealed how much He wants to share life with me, and how He doesn't know how to live without me.

The result is that I am more free to love God and neighbor than ever.  Why is this?  It's because I'm finally allowing God to love me first.  

Honestly, if I don't trust that I am loved first, what chance do I have to be free enough to love God with all my heart, mind, soul and strength?  For me the key to loving myself is letting myself be loved.

Maybe that's why even these greatest commandments of the law give way to Jesus' new commandment to us His disciples.  Love one another as I have first loved you.

Let's play with this tricky pivotal question this week.  How well do I love myself?