18. Self-love the hard way
I got hooked on self-help books because they promised self-love fast and easy, and I wanted that. Who wouldn’t?
Then I heard about a workshop leader who offered the same and you didn’t have to read anything, just show up. So on a Saturday morning I caught the bus across town to his daylong event where he fired off crisp imperatives in his booming voice: Just do it! Take the leap! Believe, and self-love is yours!
In the weeks that followed, I tried to use his pushy kind of willpower to love myself, but my heart was not convinced. It seemed to want something more generous and less forced.
Undaunted, I went to a training on affirmations. The idea was to barrage yourself day and night with whispered repetitions of I love you until your resistance broke and you tumbled happily into actual love. By the end of the first month, though, I felt like I’d turned myself into a fast-talking con man.
Undaunted still, I went to a Sunday afternoon gathering in a dimly lit community center led by a striking woman with greying hair who sat in a draped easy chair flanked by tall vases of crimson amaryllis. She spoke in hushed tones to her devotees sitting cross-legged on the floor at her feet while the rest of us, perched on folding chairs at a medium distance, listened in like eavesdroppers. She said there’s a shard of the divine in each of us. Find that and love it and that’s how you love yourself. In the moment, in her presence, I considered it, but when I tried it on my own at home, I couldn’t pull it off. I guess I was set on loving my own human self, not a surrogate.
I persevered, checking out one program after the other, but my diligence backfired. Easy-step programs are supposed to be so simple any idiot could do them. But I was flunking them, so that meant I was something worse than an idiot. Which only served to deepen my well of self-hate, which was already deep enough. After all, I was born a sinner. My minister said so and he spoke for God. My sinfulness made me unlovable, and there was nothing in my childhood years I believed more deeply than that.
Now, if you’re ontologically unlovable, if that’s the constant bass line of your life, and if it sucks all your escape melodies back into its sad gravity, then why wouldn’t you develop self-hate so cellular that any sloganeering guru would be laughably outmatched?
But I had it easy.
What if you’re one of the people our society has chosen to hate? What if from the moment you’re born millions of your fellow citizens hate you because of the color of your skin? What if those haters are so trapped in racial spite they’re actually able to hate you when you’re a little baby?
Or what if you’re born gay? You get a pass as an infant, but later on, the very minute your gayness becomes visible, millions take that as their cue to begin hating you and hurting you before you’ve even had time to figure out for yourself who you are.
What if your society gives you the total treatment? What if it bombards you with the background radiation of disregard, punctuated by blatant attacks, supported by an institutionalized system of abuse, inside a culture designed to get you to turn society’s hate into self-hate? Then along comes an eager guru who presses you to, “Love yourself! Just do it!”
Really? Breeze through massive, mulish hatred in an instant on command?
And then there’s the trouble we all share. If we want to love ourselves down to the bottom of who we are, that means we’d have to love ourselves to the bottom of our operating system because that’s the core of our being. But it’s also the source of human evil. And how are we supposed to love that? I can’t and I won’t. I won’t cozy in with an OS which causes so much destruction and pain. And this leaves me in an impossible bind: I can’t love myself completely unless I know myself completely, but once I know myself completely, I can’t love myself.
Except…
What if you quit trying to love yourself to the bottom of your humanness and just love yourself to the bottom of your own heart?
Except…
That’s not easy to do because our hearts are complex. We’re dilemmic beings. We’re caught in evolution’s endless tug of war: me versus you, us versus them, give versus take, cooperate versus compete. A person can get lost in the dark circus of these conflicted forces.
And there’s more. Not only are we dilemmic, we’re developmental. An hour after being born, a baby giraffe is able to stand on its own four feet, and within a day is able to run with the group. And it’s got to be ready to run given the predators that prowl its territory. By contrast, we humans are born dependent and remain so for years. There’s more creative possibility in us than any other mammal, yet we pay a big price for that advantage.
Growing up means we have to suffer through “growing pains.” A phrase which is much too cute given how very painful the pain of growing can be. Like when someone points out a blind spot you’ve got and embarrassment pierces you. And maybe what’s been revealed is a serious deficit and it’s going to take you years to fix it and you feel miserably exposed and you know you’re going to keep suffering shame until the fix is finished.
And a lot of what we learn as we develop we have to learn from making mistakes. We have to fail and fail and fail. As children we live under a reign of correction. We hear tens of thousands of noes by the time we’re only five or six, one study says five times more noes than yeses. How could that not assault our nascent, little-kid self-love? No wonder we might come to judge ourselves as inherently wrong instead of lovable.
Either one of these two fundamentals would be bad enough by itself, but we humans are a multiplication. We’re dilemmic times developmental. Which makes the journey to self-love hard squared.
Except…
We can call on the twist of grace. Which opens up for us the toughest but surest path to self-love—the path of moral labor.
Say, for example, you’re married and the father of two young children and you’re offered a promotion at work. It’s a great job. Half the guys in the office would give their right arm for it. And you know what’s expected of you. A corporate executive is supposed to climb the ladder of success. So you decide to take the job. Except you’ll have to travel for two weeks every month, and on the days when you’re in town you’ll be working long hours. So you won’t get home till after dinner most nights, or maybe not until after the kids have gone to bed. Family time is important to you, and you want to be there for your kids in a way your father never was for you, so you decide not to take the job. Except the salary is half again what you’re getting now, which means you could put your family in a new house in a safer neighborhood in a better school district. You want your kids to have teachers who could bring out their full potential. Except you remember what matters most to you in this life is to be a loving husband and a great dad, and you don’t know how to do that if you’re gone all the time.
So you’re caught in a dilemma. Do you make a better life for your family…or do you make a better life for your family?
You talk with your wife for hours each night for a week, and on Saturday you have a family meeting with the kids, and finally you decide to refuse the promotion because when all is said and done, time with your family has to come first. You want to provide for them, but it’s just not okay to be an absentee provider.
You know there will be days when you’ll regret your decision. You know exactly who will be chosen to take the promotion in your place, and he’ll be happy to needle you about how dumb you are. He’ll regale you with stories of traveling to interesting places to meet with interesting people. There will be days when you’ll wish it was you taking those trips. Dilemmic decisions are so easy to criticize after the fact because there are such strong arguments on both sides, and that means critics can easily make you wrong no matter which option you pick, and you can make yourself wrong, too.
Except you know you’ve bearded this dilemma in its den. Of course you’ll have regrets, but you feel a glow of pride, too, as you decide to leverage this dilemma. You’re going to use this one very hard decision to trigger a stream of easy decisions. You’re going to take classes to finish your MBA—just one night a week and every other Saturday—so you can get a better job and earn more money but still be around home a lot. And you’re going to spend serious time with your kids on their homework, helping them learn how to become excellent students so they can power through their schoolwork and have time to develop other talents—one loves drawing, the other loves singing—which you’ll also help them with and you’ll enjoy doing that.
And now you notice you have a newfound sense of appreciation for yourself, and for this you are thankful.
Some dilemmas, though, are tougher. Say you’re a woman who married her high school sweetheart right after you both got out of college. Your husband had a lot of sexual experiences during the four years you spent mostly apart, but you never did. He’s the only man you’ve ever been with.
Just before you head off to a conference you have to attend for work, the two of you have a big argument that doesn’t get settled. So there you are 2,000 miles from home, and you’re mad, and without even thinking about it you have sex with three different men during the five days of the conference. And you’re glad you did because now you’ve got experience. You’ve learned something about variety.
And it was disappointing. Each time, after the guys finished, you kicked them out. You didn’t let them stay the night. You didn’t talk to them the next day. By the end of the week you realized that you need intimacy with sex. You want to be with someone who really knows you and cares about you. You now understand that anonymous sex, which some people find hot, doesn’t work for you. That’s just not who you are. You’re glad for these three encounters, because that voice that nags you about missing something and being naïve, has finally shut up. So you head home happy. You feel more committed to your husband than ever before. And you want to celebrate with him.
Except how can you? Telling him would hurt him way too much. And it wasn’t just one man you cheated with, but three! He’ll be so hurt. And you can’t risk your husband leaving you. He’s not only your husband but your best friend and irreplaceable. You can’t imagine your life without him. So you decide you’ll keep this secret.
Except how can you? You’ve never been one to keep secrets. You’ve always told your husband everything. You hate the thought of having to spend the rest of your life keeping this dangerous secret, having to stay vigilant every waking moment so you don’t blurt it out, and not being able to talk to your girlfriends about the breakthrough you experienced because you’re scared gossip might get back to your husband. And you realize that from now on you won’t have the freedom to just be yourself, to be carefree. And you think, “Well, that’s my punishment, I’ll just have to suffer it.”
Except that means you won’t be giving your husband the best of yourself. You’ll be holding yourself in check. You’ll be carrying unspoken guilt which will drip a slow poison into the relationship. And your husband might begin to sense something’s wrong but he won’t know what it is, which will leave him helpless to do anything about it.
Suddenly you realize keeping this secret is like cheating on him again. And you can’t do that to him. And now you’ve hit your moral core. You don’t understand how something you did can feel so right and so wrong at the same time, but you know you’ll have to tell, even though it will be the scariest thing you’ve ever done.
Except you don’t want to hit him hard with the cold truth. You’re not going to blurt your confession then stand there like a helpless victim waiting for his anger. You want to take responsibility for what you did. You want to think through how you can best be his friend in the midst of his righteous pain. So you go meet with a therapist you’ve heard good things about. You test her out because you want someone you and your husband can turn to immediately if need be, someone who can help the two of you find your way through the coming crisis. You want to know ahead of time that this is someone who’s got real skills with difficult issues, not one of those pitiful therapists who loves the drama of distress and instigates more trouble than they cure.
She suggests you write a long letter to him, telling him everything that’s in your heart so if he’s too freaked to listen, or you become too emotional to be coherent, you can give him the letter and he can read it when he’s calmer, and read it more than once. And she’s got another dozen ideas about how to break hard news. So now you’re as ready as you’ll ever be.
You pick Friday night to tell him so you’ll have the weekend to start going through whatever comes. You’ll tell him what you did, and that it got that old longing for experience out of your system, which you wish you had taken care of back in your college days. And you can’t imagine never again having his arms around you holding you tight, but you can’t imagine having his arms around you while you’re hiding a malignant secret. And you’re so scared that he might be too mad to stay with you, and you wouldn’t blame him if he left you, but you want him now more than ever and you’re so thankful for the relationship the two of you have created together. And you’re not trying to talk him into forgiving you. You’re actually not asking him to forgive you because you understand there’s a way in which what you did is unforgivable. And what’s most important is that he gets to figure out what he needs, and that he gets to make his own real decision. And you can’t imagine life without him, but you intend to stand by him as he goes through all the feelings he needs to go through and as he decides what he wants to do about you. And now a warm, buoyant rush of love fills your heart…and it’s for yourself.
Specific dilemmas are challenging enough, but what about embracing dilemma as your life’s mission? Say you’re a new minister nine months into your first call, still getting your feet on the ground with the basics, when two women come to meet with you one evening. They’ve just moved to town and are looking for a church to join. They’re sincere Christians and they seem very sweet, so you’re delighted, until they add: “We’re married and have two little boys.”
Instantly, you’re thinking about the three most fundamental families in the congregation. Each has been here for generations—parents, grandparents, and great grandparents. And if you accept this lesbian couple, those families might leave, and you feel so strongly about people having a church home that you can’t bear to think about driving them out with a decision you made. How could you live with yourself if they left and left mad? So you’re going to have to tell this couple no.
Except they deserve a church home, too. And what if no other church in town accepts them? That would be intolerable. How could you be part of that outcome? So you’re going to have to tell them yes. Except you really don’t like conflict. So you’ll tell them no. Except this couple moved into the house right across the street from the front door of the church, and you’d have to look at that house every Sunday morning as you greet congregants after the service, and you’d be seeing those two women and their two little boys around town and that big ugly NO would be there between you. Except a minister’s job is to bring people together not rend a congregation in two.
So you decide you’ll put the question before the congregation for a vote and let them argue it out on their own and not take a position yourself. Except you didn’t become a minister to be a passive facilitator. You’re passionate about your faith. You remember how in seminary you discovered that you don’t believe in worshiping the historical personage of Jesus. You believe in listening to and following the Christ presence in your heart. And that presence calls you to be inclusive as Christ was inclusive. He welcomed in outcasts, and lesbians are certainly treated as outcasts often enough.
You think about your childhood minister who was the one who inspired you to go into the ministry. You remember his way of gently bringing people together, over and over again, and moving them forward. So you decide to fly back home for a day to talk with him about how to best help your congregation through this crisis. And it’s not like you’ve got lots of knowledge about lesbian and gay issues, so you decide to get help with that, too. And you realize your heart has made a decision, and so you say yes to this couple. It’s the only way you can honor your relationship with the Christ who is alive in you.
The next morning when you wake up, you notice you have no regrets about saying that yes, but it takes your breath away to realize just how deeply committed you really are to inclusivity and how much trouble that might cause you. Maybe you’ll get fired from this church. Or maybe not. Either way you’ve set yourself on a challenging path and you can’t imagine turning back. You understand that on into the future, for the rest of your life, time and again, you’re going to be doing the hard, hard work of holding very different people in your heart at the same time.
But now you’re sure this is what you’re called to, and you feel on solid ground with yourself like never before.
Whenever we make a dilemmic decision, the outcome matters, it matters a lot, but even trying our best, we’ll have mixed results and failures along the way. So I’ve come to believe there’s something that actually matters as much as the outcome, and sometimes more, and that’s how much we wrestle with the decision. How much we care. How much moral labor we put into it. How much heart.
But so far, I’m only talking about person-to-person dilemmic decisions or decisions in small groups. Because when we consider decision-making at the level of our community, nation, or species, I don’t know what to tell you. At those levels, dilemma morphs into impossibility.
Take the early Christians, for example. They were inspired by the preaching of Jesus to create a new kind of community—a brave and noble experiment. They wanted sanctuary from the brutality of the Roman Empire. They wanted a more fulfilling religious life than what the Jewish hierarchy of the time provided. But to establish a radically different community, they had a lot of decisions to make, specifically, moral decisions.
Some were easy: We will give aid and comfort to the widows, orphans, sick, and disabled among us. Jesus did that and by his example we know what he wants us to do.
But other decisions were much more difficult because they were dilemmic and Jesus was not a detail guy. He presented his gospel in broad strokes. He wasn’t familiar with the how-to genre and its step-by-step methodology. He didn’t leave behind a handbook on creating Christian community that people could follow and be assured of easy success. And he didn’t know anything about evolution. He didn’t know the lessons science would eventually teach us about how to nurture cooperation. So even if he had wanted to write a how-to, he would have been limited in what he could offer.
The early Christians, then, were left to struggle with complex moral decisions very much on their own. For example: How does someone become a member of our community? Do they just have to say, “I believe”? Or do we need something more? Do we need to see them behaving in accord with our standards first?
How do we decide when it’s time to expel someone from our community? How disruptive or dangerous does their behavior have to be for us to take that kind of drastic action?
How do we choose our leaders? Do we vote? Does each leader choose his successor? Do we want a single leader or a team of leaders to make our decisions for us? Or do we want to operate by consensus? What do we do when we hit an impasse? How do we resolve it? Where the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John tell different stories, which version of Christ’s life should we believe is the truth? Who gets to interpret the scriptures for us?
What’s the role of women? Can they be leaders? Can they be preachers? Can they baptize?
How do we regard sexuality? Is it a gift from God to be enjoyed? Or, apart from procreation, is it inherently evil? Should we rejoice in our bodies or should we punish our flesh?
How do we choose the person we will marry? Do we marry only within the community? Is divorce allowed? How do we parent our children? Are father and mother equals or do we consider men to be the unquestioned authority in the family?
Should we follow the leadership of James, the brother of Christ? Should our movement remain a Jewish cult? Or should we follow the leadership of Paul? Should we evangelize among the gentiles, bringing Christ’s message to all the world? And if we take in gentiles, do they have to follow all the Jewish laws, like circumcision, or do they get a pass?
What’s our position on slavery? Do we listen to Paul who endorsed slavery to the extent that he said the Christian slave of a Christian master is duty-bound to serve that master with exemplary loyalty? Or should Christians refuse to hold slaves, believing that it is wrong for any person to own as property any child of God, whether believer or heathen? Given that Jesus was fiercely against oppression and suffering, did he just assume that it was obvious that slavery is an oppression and a source of suffering and therefore to be opposed? And, if so, do Christians have a duty, not just to abstain from the practice themselves, but to actively oppose slavery throughout society? Or would that kind of activism have been simply too risky, given that mass slavery was a mainstay of the Roman Empire and a major source of its wealth? And given that the Romans might have destroyed the whole of the Christian movement in response to such political action.
And what about Paul’s exhortation that we become “slaves of Christ”? Should that be our relationship to Jesus, oppressor and oppressed? Is that really what Jesus wanted? Or did he intend to liberate us from all such grievous and wounding bonds?
Different Christian communities came up with different answers to these defining issues. Some gave up laboring over the questions and adopted a list of rules. And once those rules were set in stone they were considered sacred. Then different communities with different lists turned against each other, attacking each other viciously, even over something like semantics. For example, is God one person with three aspects or is he three persons in one? Was Jesus always part of God’s very being and therefore his equal? Or did the Father create the Son, thus making Jesus subordinate to the Father? Trinitarians battled non-Trinitarians bitterly over that perfectly insignificant doctrinal point.
Twenty centuries after the death of Christ, Christianity as a movement still has not settled in a coherent, cooperative way many of the questions the early Christians struggled with. It certainly has not been able to figure out what to do about our dilemmic nature. It has not ended oppression, not even in nations like ours which identify as Christian. And it hasn’t come up with a workable way to save us from extinction. Christianity, of course, is not alone in this. No one has been able to resolve these things, not religious leaders of any stripe, and not agnostics or atheists, either.
So why did I take us through this extended inquiry? Because understanding how deeply rooted our dilemmic nature is, and how everyone suffers from it, including society as a whole, allows us, when we’re up against hard decisions, to feel more compassionate toward ourselves, more self-loving. And helps us remember that it really is not our fault that we’re made the way we are.
Given this dilemmic nature of ours, a set of rules is very appealing, but rules only work in simple situations. If there’s even a minor degree of dilemmic difficulty, they fail us. And if all we do is follow rules, we stagnate morally.
Caring about someone, taking them into account deeply and personally in their rich complexity, this requires not rules but a heart. And our hearts get a moral workout each time we struggle with a decision about the people in our lives. There isn’t any way to get rid of our dilemmic nature. It will be with us till the end. The best we can do is to master the art of living into dilemma. We can only work to get better at wrestling with this core part of ourselves. And this wrestling, oddly enough, feeds self-love, because making hard moral decisions doesn’t harden you, it makes you tender. When you labor in the service of nurturance, you soften toward yourself, and into yourself.
When you do your own moral labor, you earn sweat equity. You don’t have to depend anymore on the approval of God or your society. Now you’ve got self-created, self-determined self-love. And you don’t just feel it, you incarnate it.
And because it’s hard-won, it’s got resilience. It sustains you through tough times far better than any easy-step version possibly could.
Some gurus talk about self-love as a simple, single thing like a boxed commodity that once you’ve got it you’ve got it, so check it off your list. By contrast, slow-cooked self-love keeps cooking. Every morning, when you get up, you know that if you engage in your diligent daily practice of moral decision-making, you’ll be enriching yourself and deepening yourself, so by nightfall there’ll be more of you to love, and still more tomorrow. Your self-love won’t get stuck in the doldrums of the same old, same old, like what happens with too many relationships. Every day will be an adventure you get to look forward to.
There’s that familiar saying, “You have to love yourself first before you can truly love anyone else.” But I know from long experience that it’s possible to hold yourself in disregard and yet do the practical, daily work of nurturing others. And you do it because you have a moral passion for nurturance. Nonprofit activists are famous for this. Moms are famous for this.
I’m not advocating self-hate as a way of life because self-hate is a poison. And the care you give others is richer when you’re able to care for yourself at the same time. But I don’t think it’s fair to privilege those who have arrived at self-love. And it’s certainly not fair to discount anyone who hasn’t gotten there yet. Maybe it’s true such folks are acting out when they give to others what they so badly want for themselves. But so what? If they’re fighting for nurturance, if that’s their bottom line, then I want to honor them. Moral fight does not depend on self-love. You can be a fighter for nurturance long before you ever get to the feeling of self-love. Even decades before.
There are moments now when I can say I love myself, and say it as a simple matter of fact rather than as an aspirational wish. I’ve come to this late in life, but for a boy who at a young age became a virtuoso of self-hate, getting to self-love at all is a very long way to come. To be tender with myself, to know that I’m not impossible, this is enough and I’m at peace. It’s the long practice of dilemmic decision-making which finally made of me the kind of person I find myself drawn to. I feel shy about saying this, but it’s true.
It’s not like I’m ever going to be madly in love with myself. But after years of wishing I could be someone else, I’m now okay with being me despite the mess I am. Sometimes I notice I’m even a bit taken with myself. It’s not most of the time, but I have my moments. And every little once in a while, in that deepest place in my heart, I fall into affectionate communion with myself, which I don’t know how to talk about more than to name it and to affirm that if anything is a state of grace, this, for me, is it.
