You,
“Love
of Self”
The high mark of accepting
yourself in love or loving yourself is how you love others with the same sense
of levity. This is the very point of it all. Once we accept that we are who we
are, then we are ready to accept the crucial other as flawed, frayed,
frustrated and fallen, just like us.
The elimination of the ‘them’
and the embrace of the ‘us’ is at the heart of the pilgrim’s progress. The love
of God is consummated in loving, forgiving and giving our life for others. There
is no short cut to that high level of consciousness. There is no avoiding
others if you want to live the life that God intended. We are a body with a
head not bodies headless and individual.
This is not to say that this
comes easy and it definitely does not come naturally. Other people are
annoying, guileless, selfish and hurtful. This is not denied. The thing to add
to that is that there are human like us. We are also at turns annoying,
guileless, selfish and hurtful. We must accept this about ourselves and be open
to love and change. We must accept this in others as our pursuit of love and
change. We move closer to the truth the more we accept the ordinary sense of
things, the truth that we are not super or Meta or in any way especially exempt
from the everyday aches and pains of being human.
This is not a gloomy view of
our present state but a map to the great walk ahead of us all. We walk
together. We experience God together. The individual connection with God is
made to connect us all to an eternal symbiosis with each other. It will not
happen in the church halls of Sunday and midweek services. It will happen in
the everyday connections we make with each other as we move from ‘them’ to ‘us’.
This is the church of which
Christ is head and for which the dark has no answer. Little lights and a mighty flame.
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