REsources For Living     

by Lynn Ungar, Minister For Lifespan Learning, Church Of The Larger Fellowship

What with Valentine’s Day being in February, we decided that this issue of Quest should be on the theme of love. It’s a topic with plenty of room for things to say. For instance, back in 1986 Whitney Houston released a song called “The Greatest Love” that spent three weeks at the top of the charts. Which means that anyone in the age group this column is designed for probably has never even heard the song, but hang in there with me—or check it out on YouTube. It’s a good song, but one that has always left me pondering the topic of love.

The chorus of this song ends with:

The greatest love of all
Is easy to achieve.
Learning to love yourself
It is the greatest love of all.

That sounds good and encouraging, but is it really true? For starters, I think there are a lot of people who would say that loving yourself really isn’t easy at all. Honestly, who among us hasn’t spent time bashing ourselves over the head with our stupid mistakes, our physical imperfections, the ways we don’t live up to our own expectations or the expectations of others? If learning to love yourself were really that easy, would Whitney have even bothered to sing about it?

But I have a bigger question that comes along with the last two lines: is learning to love yourself really the greatest love of all? It seems to me that when we think of people who are truly great, people like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., what was inspiring about them was not just that they loved themselves, but that they managed to promote love for all people. They stood up to hatred with love, they preached love, they practiced love and they used love to bring more justice into the world. I don’t think just loving yourself is enough to transform the world like that.

On the other hand, in a world that wanted to tell both men that they were worth less than white people, both Gandhi and King knew in their very centers that this prejudice was a lie—that they had just as much inherent worth and dignity as anyone else. They did love themselves, and they were willing to do the work to change the world so that they could be treated with respect for that worth and dignity.

Maybe the greatest love isn’t one or the other, loving yourself or loving those around you—maybe it’s putting the two kinds of love together. Of course, the most famous statement of this idea comes from Jesus, who said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” It’s all there in five words. The greatest love of all isn’t just for yourself. If you just love yourself then you might decide that you deserve to have everything you want, ignoring the costs to other people and the planet. We’ve seen what happens when the heads of companies like BP and Enron just love themselves, and it isn’t pretty.

But the greatest love also isn’t based in loving everyone else because they’re so much better and more deserving than you. If you just love other people then you are likely to end up as an exhausted doormat (Do doormats get exhausted?), someone who runs around trying to make other people happy without any core sense of who you are and what you need.

Recently I’ve stumbled on a new favorite phrase, one I’d like to have on a button or a bumper sticker. You might want to use it too. Here’s my new favorite: “You’re unique, just like everybody else.” I think the world would be better off if people would just remind each other of this great truth on a regular basis. You are unique. There is no one quite like you in the world. You deserve to be treasured—your particular gifts and abilities and experiences have never been seen before and will never be seen again. But the world will also be better off if you remember that everyone around you is just as special, just as precious, just as deserving of love and respect as you are. You’re unique, just like everybody else.

The greatest love isn’t loving yourself. The greatest love also isn’t loving everyone but yourself. The greatest love is living from the certainty that every person, every animal and plant has its own inherent worth and dignity, just like you. Some people would describe this as God being inside of all beings. We love God through the way we treat everyone and everything we meet. We decide how to treat others based on the understanding that how we treat them is how we are treating God. Or, if the God idea doesn’t work for you, you can go with the idea shared by religions around the globe: treat others as you would like to be treated. Not just because life works better that way, although it certainly does. Treat others as you would like to be treated because loving yourself and everyone else is the greatest form of love, and love is the heart of everything good.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Love,
Lynn