Loving ourselves as our neighbor

In an unattributed drawing, a young man sits beneath a tree. Hands folded on his knees, he peers into the night sky. Accompanying this simple sketch are these words: “You will never speak to anyone more than you speak to yourself in your head. Be kind to yourself.”

If we echo the young man’s stillness and listen within the silence of our thoughts, we can hear a voice that’s not our own, with a similar message. It’s the Christ, the divine message of God, which Jesus ceaselessly heard as he healed the sick and turned lives from wrongdoing and wrong thinking. The Christ still conveys today a key idea Jesus shared: We must love our neighbor as ourselves. This implies that it’s right to love ourselves.