Article April 6, 1992 Issue

Love your neighbor as yourself

Can we really love others if we don't love ourselves?

Käte Meier

Original in German

I Used to think of Christ Jesus' command "Love thy neighbour as thyself" as a demand to love my neighbor as much as myself. Through prayer and my study of Christian Science, I have come to see that this command to love our neighbor as ourselves also includes a condition: that is, first we must love ourselves in order to be able to love another.

The love we need to have for ourselves is very far removed from self-love. Instead, it is a love for our true selfhood as God's image, His idea. It involves recognizing ourselves to be God's perfect, spiritual creation. As we do this consistently, we realize that our apparent weaknesses and character flaws cannot be any part of our real being and that we can therefore overcome them. The more we acknowledge our true nature and strive to express it, the more we can be sure negative character traits will disappear from our thoughts and lives. Once we know how to love ourselves in this way, we are able to love others in the best way—by seeing who they really are as God's children.

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