By Ryan LeBlanc
Self-love has got me all hot and bothered. I find it to be a really frustrating and confusing paradox.
It starts with a very common theme in Christian preaching – self-love is bad. Kill your self-love, so you can instead love God and others. Die to one’s self.
Maybe you know what I’m talking about, from the kind of preaching you have heard in your own life.
I’ve found it in a lot of 17th-century French Catholic theology. We call it Jansenism, which was condemned as heresy, but maybe not condemned wholeheartedly by everyone in the church. Jansen himself argued that human nature after the Fall is so thoroughly corrupted that any movement toward self — any desire, any pleasure, any willing of one’s own good — is suspect. So self-love isn’t just dangerous — it’s essentially identical with the corrupt will turning away from God.
Shortly after Jansen, Pascal was a very strong writer with strong faith, but seemed to have a soft spot for Jansen. His Pensées treat the moi (the self) as fundamentally hateful: “le moi est haïssable.” I wonder if some of us think hatred of self is true Christian teaching.
Is this the gospel? Is this what Christ means when he says he loves me?
From where I sit, this seems quite a bit off. Christ is rather insistent of his love for me, and it seems rather inconsistent for him to require me not to love myself.
Where did the idea that it is morally bad for me to love myself come from?
It didn’t come out of the blue. We can find some roots for this idea in Scripture itself. Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me,” (Matthew 16:24) and, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (John 12:25) Paul writes, “You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts….” (Ephesians 4:22)
These are challenging texts. They make clear to me that life with God involves sacrifice.
But those verses in themselves do not seem to indicate that I need to hate myself. And some Christian preaching gives that definite impression.
When I look at my spiritual journey, in fact, it is when I am least compassionate with myself that I am furthest from God, from a holy life. Those moments when I collapse and surrender my unloving behaviour towards my self, those are my moments of repentance, of redemption.
I get into trouble when I pretend I do not need love. From God, or from myself.
I also know that God’s presence abides in love – and so, my only true religious experiences are when the sacred rites open my heart to God’s love. As well, all truth, goodness and beauty that I love in the world constitutes an encounter with God – a kind of veiled religious experience that faith illuminates, not cancels.
As I approach God with supernatural faith and natural wonder, I deeply yearn for goodness – for myself! Nothing feels right or good to me without God – and this feeling is that deep mysterious attraction which helps me find God and lets him find me. To be happy with God in heaven for eternity – how could I love myself any better than to choose and accept this for myself? Doesn’t it seem that I need to more strongly and faithfully will my own good, come to understand at an ever deeper level this fundamental desire that drives my existence?
It would seem, then, that part of God’s plan is that I do love myself. At least, I must love myself enough to desire my own salvation, in which God offers his love for me. Also, I participate in God’s original purpose for creation when I delight in it – when I actually experience and understand my desires for goodness, and allow them to guide my actions in the world. As I experience desire, pleasure and willing my own good, I am experiencing – often imperfectly – the existence which my Creator made me for.
I’m not alone in this. Around the same time and place as Jansen, lived a Doctor of the Church St Francis De Sales. In On the Love of God, he wrote “just as the Great Creator has given fire the impulse to rise heavenwards, and water to flow to the sea, even so He has implanted in man’s heart a special natural tendency not merely to love that which is generally good, but specially His Heavenly Goodness.”
My self and my desires are what God uses to lead me to him.
Self-love is good, then.
But is it really that simple? As simple as the Jansenism that I reject, but the opposite?
Somehow, I don’t think it can be as simple as “Self-love is good,” because there are many things that look like self-love, but do not cooperate with God’s plan.
When I am tired and discouraged, it seems easy to rationalize self-indulgence as self-love. But scrolling on my phone, ignoring my commitments, fixating on offenses, or congratulating my own righteousness actually neglects my need for love, substituting a falsehood for what I really need.
It really is true that God asks me to leave behind what I once thought was good – but it is equally true that God always offers something better. Turning from sin and believing the gospel is the best good I can do for myself – this is true self-love. After Ephesians tells us to put away our old self, the scripture continues to tell us, “to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” (Ephesians 4:23-24)
I wonder, then, if fixating on how the devil will use my desires and attractions to lead me into hell is not in fact another poor substitute for actually believing and living the gospel?
I wonder if self-hate generates an excuse to reject the commandment to love God and others?
So maybe what needs to be clarified, for us who have heard the message that self-love is bad, are the different ways we seek to love ourselves.
When I am shallow and small-minded and stone-hearted, I believe that selfishness is self-love. It is not.
Selfishness is destructive. Of my holiness, of my relationships, even of myself.
But when I am bathed in the light of God’s love for me, I forget about selfishness, and instead participate in God’s will for my own good. When I trust in God’s good news that I am lovable, I choose selflessness. Doing hard things for love of God and my neighbour no longer appears to me as self-hate.
Suddenly, saying no to my phone or unhealthy food means saying yes to peace and well-being – God’s Will for me. Embracing the challenge of a difficult moment asks me to put down my pride and take up meekness – and for that moment, I join those inheriting the Earth. When I actually look at and acknowledge the worst things about me, God’s forgiveness teaches me a master class in loving the person I am.
I love my self the best when I love God with all of my self. When, in fact, I lose my self in my love for the one who loves me.
It is false to say I hate myself when I love God – and it is false to say that hating myself is loving God.
These two falsehoods both come from the devil, but we generally hear the first spoken by a hedonistic, indulgent world, and the second from those who signal themselves to be pious and religious.
Going forward, I am going to shift my language a little bit. When I’m next tired and wretched, and it is time to choose between indulging myself and living out my dignity, I will not ask, “How can I love my self in this moment?”
Instead, I will ask, “How can I love my soul in this moment?”
Soul-love. Not love for what my ego comes up with.
A small change. But if I remember that loving God is also loving my own soul, maybe I can trust enough to allow the grace I need to guide me. Maybe that question can help me be a bit more docile to the Spirit, while remaining in the compassion that my Savior has for me.
Love what is good in the world and in my soul, and find it more deeply in the one who created all.
I cannot imagine loving myself better than that.
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Ryan LeBlanc is a teacher with Greater Saskatoon Catholic Schools and a parishioner at the Cathedral of the Holy Family. His writing is available on his blog at ryanleblanc.podia.com
Catholic Saskatoon News is supported by gifts to the Bishop’s Annual Appeal: dscf.ca/baa.