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Love yourself
The greatest commandment is Love God with all your heart, with all of your mind and love your neighbour as you love yourself.
One of the modernist's great ploys was this: Love yourself first. Then you can love God and your neighbour.
They also used:- Forgive yourself first, then God will forgive you.
Never have I heard The Church preach Love yourself first or Forgive yourself first.
There is nothing in Scripture about this. No Saint has ever taught this. In fact, I would think the Saints would have shuddered at such propositions.
It is obvious that we must love ourselves in that we appreciate what God has given us:- existence, freewill, graces of every kind, invitation to share His Divinity, and so on.
We are obliged to accept God's incredible gifts and to protect them and to embrace them with love and so we must protect our souls and bodies as loving gifts from God.
That is why The Church states that suicide is a grievous sin against The Almighty. Suicide means loss of hope. It means that the person has no hope or trust in God; that the person has not loved what God has given him.
We can not condemn the person who commits suicide, outright, for we do not know the whole situation--the person may have repented even as he died.
Nor we do we know the extent of God's Mercy.
We can observe, therefore, that it is a certainty that each person is obliged to love himself; and when that is put in perspective
it really means that each person
must do his utmost
to save his own soul.
Each person is obliged to do everything to save his soul.
He must find Truth.
He must embrace Goodness.
He must share God's Love.
Now, the Truth of the matter--and this relates to everyone except The Immaculate conception--is this:-
we are sinners;
we have betrayed The Almighty.
We see then, it should not be an easy thing to love ourselves when we perceive The Almighty and His Christ and then view ourselves in our ingratitude, self-seeking, self-centredness, not to mention our pride and self-glorification, etc. etc. etc.
It is a certainty that, to love ourselves as God intended, we must first understand Truth and
this Truth is that God is Creator,
all-perfect, all-glorious, all-powerful
and that we are creatures,
all-inglorious, all-weakness,
all-powerlessness.
Once we realise where we stand
before The Almighty and His Christ,
we may then presume
to love ourselves,
for His sake.
That is to say, we must first Love God and in sharing His Love we may then love ourselves and our neighbours.
Indeed, it is true that, in that case, we do not actually love our neighbours so much as
to share with them
the Love of God.
That is what Jesus meant when He commanded Love one another as I have loved you.
He did not command us to do the impossible. He commanded us to share the Love of God with one another as He Himself has done with us.
Therefore, to love ourselves
we must face the Truth
that we are unlovable
in our sinfulness,
before The Throne of God, but through His Mercy and forgiveness, we may be forgiven our iniquities and become lovable.
And in this Mercy and forgiveness, we realise that we are sharing God's Love.
In this, we can view two types of love: the Love of God and the love of the creature.
We must have the love of the creature in us, simply as a means of self-preservation but
the ultimate goal is to have
the Love of God in us
and once we have the Love of god in us
the self-love is put
into proper proportion.
Every writing of every Saint that I have read or heard about, have clearly portrayed a true knowledge of self and in this knowledge, they have seen themselves as pitiful sinners, unworthy of God's Graces. Having seen their unworthiness, they have been inspired to co-operate with The Will of The Father to raise themselves out of their wretchedness to become worthy of God's Mercy.
This is what love of self is all about and when considering the modernist commandment to love yourself first, we must be very wary,
for self-love of itself,
is the seed of pride and self-gratification
which are two of the greatest diseases
in the world today.
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