LOVING SELF IS THE HARD PART

November 17, 1991

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Deuteronomy 6:4-9
Mark 12:28-34

-+-"You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
~Mark 12:31 (NRSV) -

"You shall love the Lord our God with all your

heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor
as yourself."

Twenty words. It's that simple.

if there was a single sentence to recite every day to remind
us of what it means to be a Christian - this would be it.

Three loves:
Love of God: worship and adoration and praise.

Love of neighbor: relating with kindness and compassion to
the one who needs you; and,

Love of self: which is the pattern, the model for the way
you are to love your neighbor.

Simple enough. The love of self is assumed in this formula.

It is, you might say, the foundation upon which the structure
rests,

My proposal this morning is that, simple as it is, we have a
lot of trouble with this one, a lot of confusion and discomfort

and occasionally pain, right here at the foundation, with the
love of self.

I was reminded of that reading Frederick Buechner's memoir,
Telling Secrets, which was published this year. Buechner, as you
may know, is a writer who became a Presbyterian minister and
continued to be a writer of novels and essays, in addition to
books about religion. It was from Buechner that we learned the

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phrase, "The Sacred Journey," and that our own lives had spiritu-
al significance. People who have read Buechner carefully have
known that his own father's suicide when he was a little boy,
has played a very major role in his life. Those privileged to
know him personally realized several years ago that there was a
crisis of some sort in Buechner's own private life, a life to
which he occasionally alluded, but always with circumspection.

In Telling Secrets, however, Buechner decided to write about
what was happening in his life; and what was happening was that a
beloved daughter was dying of anorexia. Nothing Buechner could
do for her was making any difference. "The only way I knew to be
a father was to take care of her, to move heaven and earth if
necessary to make her well and, of course, JI could not do that."
[p. 26]

The doctors and psychiatrists told him that the best thing
he could do for her was stand back - get out of the way - stop
trying to do things to protect and care for her. And that became
a deeply personal crisis...as Buechner acknowledged that his
father's suicide and his life long refusal and inability to deal
with it, to grieve over it, to get angry about it, to forgive it,
had made him an obsessive parent. He would take care of his
family come hell or high water, as his father had not taken care
of him. In the process, he was quite willing to simply forget
himself. As his daughter starved herself of food, the author
starved himself of anything that might nurture, feed and enrich

~ himself. That was the situation which finally forced the issue of

self love.

"People in caring professions," he said, and I think it
applies to anybody who cares about others, "are famouS for ne-
glecting themselves with the result that they are apt to become
in their own way as helpless and crippled as the people they are
attempting to care for and thus no longer selves who-can be of
much use to anybody." ([p. 27]

Fortunately, when the real crisis came he was 3,000 miles
away from his daughter. Doctors and nurses who were not lovesick
were realistic and tough and conscientious and made difficult
decisions, forced the issue and she began to get better. Buech-
ner concludes in retrospect that they loved his daughter in a way
that was closer to what Jesus had in mind than he had been doing.

"Love your neighbor as yourself," he said really means love
yourself at least as much as you would love your neighbor who is
in trouble. "Mind your own life, your own health and wholeness,
both for your own sake but ultimately for the sake of those you
love too. Take care of yourself so you can take care of them. A
bleeding heart is of no help to anybody if it bleeds to death."

11/17/91

It seems like it ought be so simple. Love God, love neigh-
bor, love self.

The story is simple enough. A scribe, an ecclesiastical
ljlawyer, comes to Jesus and asks a question. There is a rabbinic
tradition in Judaism of asking a great teacher to summarize all
his wisdom briefly.

So the scribe asked Jesus, what commandment is the first of
all? Jesus repeats the Shema which the devout have been reciting
twice a day for centuries and ever since:

"Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one.

"You shall love the Lord your God with all your
heart, soul, mind and strength."

And then he added another sentence from the 19th chapter of
Leviticus:

"You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

Simple enough, but people have been pondering it ever since,
pondering the mystery that spiritual health and faithfulness to
‘ Jesus involves all three, pondering the truth that the three are
balanced, pondering the paradox that if they are out of balance -
if you love God more than your neighbor, or your neighbor more
than yourself or yourself more than your neighbor - all three
loves are simultaneously affected and diminished. That is, if
your love for yourself is not tempered by love of neighbor, what
you have for yourself is no longer love but selfishness. And,
consequently, if you love your neighbor more than yourself or
apart from a tempering, balancing love of self - what is going on
may be some kind of unhealthy dependence on that person, co-
dependence, we have learned to call it.

Now, the trouble with this is that we are inclined to think
that our religion really means for us to forget about ourselves,
not love ourselves so much. John Calvin put it clearly enough.
"We are too much devoted to ourselves."

And so, we have concluded that faithfulness implies self-
denial, self-sacrifice, which it does. Besides, we are sinners,
aren't we? The sinful self is exactly what's wrong with us.

I continue to believe that the classic Protestant definition
of sin as rampant egotism, is a valuable and accurate insight
into the nature of humankind, and a pretty good analysis of what
goes wrong in nations, political systems, foundations. But, in
its uninterpreted form, it has produced a fair amount of guilt
for religious people. People have felt deeply and profoundly
guilty - simply for being human; felt impotent, incapable of any

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good, undeserving of any love. A psychologist friend of mine
used to tell me that he'd be more comfortable with the Christian
Church if we'd make sure we tell the whole story about humanity
instead of obsessing about the sinful part: that humankind is
blessed by God, that our humanness is part of the created order
which the Bible says is good, that our humanity is the only
picture we have of the reality of God - made in God's image as we
claim to be. He'd be a lot more comfortable in church, he used
to say, if the service began every other Sunday with a prayer of
human affirmation instead of a prayer of confession. We are, he
said, no more totally depraved than we are totally good.

There is a sense in which the Me Decade, the New Narcissism
of the 80s was a full cultural revolt against the traditional
suspicion of the self, identified with the Protestant, Puritan
analysis of sin as too much self love, a Kind of cultural correc-
tion. But as is often the case with revolutions this one becomes
obsessive, exaggerated, a caricature of itself. Suddenly, in the
80s, the self, so long maligned as the source of our Sin, made a

comeback, became the arbiter of all good. "If it feels good, do
it," became a popular moral guideline. "Do yourself a favor.
Become your own best friend." Self-fulfillment, self-enhance-

ment, self-gratification became major cultural motifs.

You know the story... greed became respectable. Harvard
medical School psychologist, Steven Berglas, was interviewed by
Time two weeks ago and talked about "Pathological Narcissism," an

impossible need to have and get and own more... which cannot be
Satisfied and which overwhelms all of the rest of life...a
Calvinist nightmare come true... egotism out of control!

We are paying a very significant price for that, by the way.
Sex, for instance, which for centuries, was suspect in and of
itself, suddenly and dramatically was everywhere; movies, televi-
sion, advertising. We became instantly and gloriously free to
enjoy sex whenever and with whomever it pleased our fancy. There
was something terribly poignant - something pathetic - about Wilt
Chamberlain boasting about having sex with 20,000 women - the
same week Magic Johnson announced his condition as a result of
anonymous ad hoc sexual contact. "A matter of numbers,"' he said.

We are paying a very severe price indeed for a decade which
overthrew self-denial and replaced it with self-gratification as
the moral norm. I am suggesting that when one of the three loves
in Jesus' formula is out of control, the other two ultimately
disappear and the original love becomes warped and twisted.

When you love yourself at the expense of your love of neigh-

bor, self love becomes selfishness, self absorption, self obses-
sion.

LL/17/91

And when you love your neighbor or your daughter or mother
or wife - at the expense of self love - your neighbor love be-
comes dependence.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, the narcissistic ex-
cesses of the 80s, I am proposing that the proper love of self
remains fundamental to our Spiritual health - and it remains
difficult. A major spiritual hurdle for many of us is self-
affirmation, self-appreciation, self esteem, self-love.

In point of fact, the self that is you was created by God,

is part of the creation of God which God calls gocd, which God
dearly loves.

In fact, you are God's creature, God's child. "God loves

you," St. Augustine said, "as if there were only one of you to
love."

Your baptism is a mark of God's love for you which will
never change. You are forever dear to the heart of God. You are
what God intended: you are the purpose of creation.

ft is not blasphemous to talk about yourself like that. But
the opposite may be. It may be the ultimate blasphemy to deni-
grate your life, to devalue yourself. It may be the final sin to
hate yourself. It is surely the final tragedy, to waste your
life because you do not value your own precious self.

Dr. Bernie Siegel who is a surgeon who thinks and writes a
lot about the connections between physical health and self-esteem
Says that the societal costs of not loving our selves are enor-
mous.

"Look around you if you doubt the damage caused by lack
of self love. Notice how many people commit suicide by
accidents and untreated illness. We're so self-de-
structive we have to have laws. I call them 'please -
love - yourself - laws' - even to get us to wear hel-
mets and seat belts."

Alex Kotlowitz, in There Are No Children Here, eloquently
describes the enormous challenge of cultivating an appreciation
for any life in a social environment which denies the value of
your life... the ultimate tragedy of urban poverty. Children who
are told over and over that they don't matter, that their lives
are not worth anything, that nobody cares whether they live or
die, will choose, more often than not, life denying, life-
threatening behavior. Lafayette Rivers has no friends - just
associates. Kotlowitz Says when children give up on themselves,
they also give up on others.

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Some of the best things that happen in our Tutoring Program
are here. Children not only learn to read and write better, but
for several hours a week, learn by experience that they matter to
someone: that their lives have value. When that works - when
the seeds of value and self-esteem are sown by love of neighbor,
love of self becomes a miraculous and transforming possibility.

Sometimes you and I are unable to love God fully, or our
neighbors totally, because we've never gotten around to loving
ourselves. Sometimes we can't love ourselves because we carry
around with us the hurts and burdens of the past, perhaps even a
long ago childhood and the effect of it is that our lives are

dedicated to winning approval. Sometimes that comes about be-
Cause of something that happened to us - a parent's suicide for
Buechner ~- sexual abuse - neglect - and sometimes our inability

to love ourselves is self-imposed, with its roots in our memory
of something we did or something we left undone.

Lewis Smedes, a professor at Fuller Seminary, in a recent
book includes a powerfully personal account of how he has lived
his life trying to compensate something he did to his mother.

They were very poor. His father died at thirty-one, leaving
a wife with no skills, no knowledge of English and six children
to feed. She took in ironing and scrubbed floors. But in her
pride, she tried to prevent her children from knowing how she
earned money. One day on the way to school, Smedes, about eight
years old, saw her on her hands and knees scrubbing someone's

porch. She saw him. "Hellow Lewis" is ali she said and then
resumed scrubbing. "I was ashamed of her and she knew I was
ashamed." All his adult life he has remembered that moment and

the fact that he once wronged a great woman. It took a lot of
counseling and reflection to discover that the depressions he
suffered all his life were related to the guilt he still felt -
for being ashamed of his mother.

Finally, so depressed, he felt as if he were "dangling over
the edge, falling where nobody could rescue me with the good news
that I was good enough for them to approve of me, I fell into my
own abyss."

"I fell into God." He simply heard the good news which we
try to say to one another every Sunday... "You are forgiven"...
"You are free to forgive yourself"... which means - "You are free
to love." A Pretty Good Person, p. 108-109]

And so it can happen. The final word spoken about you and
me is a word of love and approval and affirmation. "There is a
balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole." There is love enough

for all of us. There is news that is profoundly and ultimately
good.

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You are loved. You are esteemed and treasured. Your life
has infinite value because it -is loved infinitely.

And because of that - even you could love God and your
neighbor as you love yourself.

Amen,

11/17/91