You may
have noticed that I’ve been absent from the sanctuary for about a month. I wasn’t on a world cruise or a 30-day
spiritual retreat, I broke my arm. Now, my girls tell me that I need a better
story, but the truth is that I fell out a chair reaching for a Bible and
shattered the humeral head of my left arm.
All in all, I’m healing well, and the pain has been manageable, so I
have no reason to complain—but I will anyway.
For the first three weeks, I was confined to a sling, and I quickly
learned how much I use my left arm. I
couldn’t button my pants; shirts became instruments of torture; and possibly
the lowest of the lows—my tyrannosaurus rex left arm couldn’t reach my right
arm pit to apply deodorant. Put all
three together, and you’ll understand why I stayed away from Mass. You’re welcome! Though my limitations were minor in the grand
scheme of things, they were frustrating, nonetheless. From time to time I’d get angry with myself. I was embarrassed to ask for help all the time. I felt foolish for having had such a stupid
accident, and sometimes, I hated myself for it.
I know that Jesus tells us to love our enemies in the Gospel, but what
if I’m my own worst enemy?
In today’s
readings, we’re called to love. Our
first reading from Leviticus tells us to “love our neighbors,” and, then, Jesus
ups the ante in our Gospel by commanding us to “love our enemies.” “This teaching charts a movement from a
selective love to a universal love.”[1]
But isn’t loving our neighbors hard
enough? Look around! Loving our enemies seems nearly
impossible. To that end, much homiletic ink
has been spilled, including by me, on what it means to love our enemies and how
we should go about doing it. The answer
seems to come down to taking baby steps, which got me thinking about the very
first step. You’ll recall that our
passage from Leviticus tells us to “love our neighbors as ourselves.”
This commandment assumes that we
love ourselves. Now, speaking for
myself, I’m not sure that’s a safe assumption, at least not all the time. So, in case you might be like me, let’s focus
on that first step—loving ourselves.
We Catholics understand love as a “theological
virtue,” a gift from God infused into our souls that fills us with
unconquerable goodwill. We don’t
generate love on our own—it isn’t a chemical reaction or biological urge. Love comes from God, who is love itself. “We could not love if we were not first loved
by God.”[2] And that’s where loving ourselves comes into
play. In order to love others, we have
to receive God’s love first. We have to
accept the priceless gift of God’s love that we could never earn by our own
merits. We have to let ourselves
be loved by God. Of course, God loves us
all the time, but if we don’t let his love in, we have none to give
away. Receiving God’s love is loving
ourselves, and as I’ve said before, love is dynamic, not static; it has to
move. So when we open ourselves to
receive God’s love, we can’t hold it in.
We have to share it. Loving our
neighbor and loving our enemy, then, begins with loving ourselves.
But we
don’t always love ourselves. In fact,
we’re often our own worst enemies. We’re
ashamed or embarrassed about things we’ve done or have failed to do. We hold ourselves to untenable standards, and
we even blame ourselves for freak accidents, things beyond our control, and not
being able to button our pants. When we
treat ourselves this way, we live within the confines of what Bishop Robert
Barron calls the pusilla anima—the small soul.[3]
Saint Augustine uses a similar concept
to describe ourselves when we sin—incurvatus in se—curved in on oneself.
What does this mean? When treat ourselves like the enemy, we close
ranks, we take a defensive position, and our souls shut down. In that posture, there’s little room to
receive God’s love, and we’re miserable.
But
when we love ourselves, we move from the pusilla anima to the magna
anima—the great soul![4] We open up to receive God’s boundless love,
and the Spirit of God dwells within us.
We become what Saint Paul says we are in our second reading: Temples of
God (1 Cor. 3:16), and we’re happy. And
you know, loving ourselves isn’t rocket science:
+ We love ourselves when we respect our God-given human dignity, when
we take care of ourselves, and when we allow others to be Jesus for us by accepting
help when we need it;
+ We love ourselves when we rise above our failures, weaknesses, and
suffering and find purpose and meaning in our lives nevertheless;
+ We love ourselves when we receive God’s compassionate, merciful
love in prayer, in the Eucharist, in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and in
all of the good works of his Church.
And why shouldn’t we love ourselves? We’re loved by a God who pardons all our
iniquities, heals all our ills, redeems our lives from destruction, and crowns
us with kindness and compassion (Ps. 103:3-4), just like our psalmist tells us.
Even in our abject failures, our profound weaknesses, and our seemingly endless
sufferings, God still loves us, which is reason enough to love ourselves. Who are we to treat ourselves with contempt
when the Almighty God has decided that we are worthy of his love, warts
and all?
You
know, I really can’t complain about my injury.
For all of the times I got down on myself, there were many more times to
love myself. For example, throughout
this ordeal, my attitude has been really good—I can’t imagine not having a
complete recovery. I also discovered a
grit and perseverance in myself that I didn’t know I had—like the time I
couldn’t twist open the screw top of a Talenti ice cream container, so I
marched that baby down to the basement, clamped it in a vice, and ripped the
top off with my good hand. And last, but
not least, I acknowledge the small victories—like when I got out of the sling;
when I raised a coffee cup to my lips for the first time; and yes, when I
buttoned my pants. Now I just have to
remember to do it! Thank God for
vestments! God loves us; we need to love
ourselves, especially when we’re our own worst enemy.
[1] John Shea, The Spiritual Wisdom of the Gospels
for Christian Preachers and Teachers: Year A, On Earth as It Is in Heaven
(Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2004), 84.
[2] Pope
Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: The
Infancy Narratives (New York: Image, 2012), 76.
[3]
Robert Barron, And Now I See: A
Theology of Transformation (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company,
1998), 5.
[4]
Ibid.
