The qualities of love proposed by Erich Fromm in The Art of Loving, are giving, care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. I am exploring these themes during Advent to see what they mean when applied to loving ourselves. I believe that we need to love ourselves before we can truly love others. In Advent 1, I explored caring for yourself. Today I want to explore knowing yourself.
“I linger in the mirror
and I don’t look away.” Cole Arthur Riley. To see yourself and
not look away is, I believe, key to self-knowledge. It can be a challenge
to see yourself clearly. I remember reading a definition of humility that
really grabbed hold of me. To be truly humble is to see yourself clearly.
This was a bit of a puzzle initially, but on reflection, I realized that if you
see yourself clearly you will realize that you are not the self-image that you
have constructed for yourself – this is sometimes called the persona. To
look in the mirror and not look away is to see yourself clearly with all the
wrinkles and spots - age spots and a hairline which seems to be receding each
day. Of course, that is the physical part of myself. It is also
true for the soul and spirit as well as the body. The impulse is to look
away or at least not look too closely at any of these parts.
Author Judy Cannato speaks of an alternative way of looking at yourself
in all your imperfections. It is to take a long loving look at the real:
She speaks of the approach to contemplation by “Dorothee Sölle
[1929–2003] who maintains that radical amazement is the starting point for
contemplation. Often, we think of contemplation as a practice that belongs in
the realm of the religious, some esoteric advanced stage of prayer that only
the spiritually gifted possess. This is not the case…. The nature of
contemplation as I describe it here is one that lies well within the capacity
of each of us. To use a familiar phrase, contemplation amounts to “taking a
long loving look at the real.”
God knows – literally and figuratively – that there are aspects of myself
which I wish I didn’t have. They are the ghosts that visit me at 4:00 in
the morning – things I have done I wished I had done or had done differently
and the things I had not done I wish I had done – it is tempting to complete
this with the line form the prayer in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, ‘and
there is no health in me’. But no matter in what way my reality of myself
does not live up to my self-image, I know that there is health in me because I
am created by a loving God.
However, what I have learned over the years is that I am loved despite,
or perhaps even because, of who I am. I can love myself because this is
the way that I was made with my strengths and weaknesses. I can love
myself because God created me this way and God loves all that God
created. I have not learned this easily and am still learning it.
May you have the blessing of knowing and loving who you are on your
Advent journey.
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