27. As long as you love another person less than yourself, you will not succeed in loving yourself

If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than yourself, you will not succeed in loving yourself, but if you love all alike, including yourself, you will love them as one person and that person is both God and man. Thus he is the great righteous person who, loving himself, loves all others equally.” ~ Meister Eckhart

For 26 days we have focused on the inner mind and soul in an effort to reach deeper into the contemplative mind to find union or at least contact with God. Now we get a curve ball. We have to look outside ourselves and love all of our fellow humans as we do ourselves. That is, after all the, the most important commandment we have in the New Testament, to love one another as we love ourselves.

This love thing is kind of tricky. We tend to associate self-love as being narcissistic and vain. To love yourself is negative habit that reeks of pride when we are constantly reminded to be humble. There something more here to consider about self-love because we are asked to compare that love to the love shared with us with Christ and to imitate it.

The nature of that kind of love all encompassing. There is affection, friendship, patience, compassion, empathy, enjoyment, pleasure, faithfulness and kindness all wrapped up into one embrace of grace and mercy. We have to be all of those things to ourselves. This love is not about achievement, success, material things, superiority or even gloating and haughtiness toward others.

That seems to be a strange notion, to be kind to yourself. Of course there is action involved. Because God is love and we know God through his love for us, our love for ourselves has to be outwardly expressed. We don't get to just pretend we have affection for all others but we have to love them in the same we love ourselves with all of the attributes listed above. As hard as is it to love myself, it is even harder to love others in the same way. Heck, there seems to be a larger number of people I don't even like much less love than I can bring myself to like or love.

If we all did, however, love ourselves and one another just imagine what life would be like here. The truth is it will never happen here because our humanness always will get in the way. All we can do is imitate Christ to the extent we can and hope we can experience and ability from the effort.