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. 

But Jesus wasn’t telling us to dote upon the self that we seem to be, made up of good and bad thoughts and right and wrong actions, teetering between sickness and health, self-denigration and self-aggrandizement. Study and practice of Christian Science reveal the nature of a spiritual “self” that we each have, constituted of all that reflects and expresses divine Love, God. This is how we’re to understand and appreciate ourselves—as Love’s individual expression of itself, held within Love’s boundless reality. Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science, used the descriptor unselfed to depict the love that reflects divine Love, and coined the phrase “our unselfed better self” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 6) to describe the individuality that expresses God in such love. We come to know ourselves in this way, and therefore love ourselves, as we get to know God, because God is the sole source of this true identity, which is wholly spiritual.