Of one thing I have no doubt: until we can love ourselves there is no possibility of our loving anyone else, even a person as close to us in physical relationship as a parent, spouse or child. Only when we love ourselves with the intensity of charity that will accept all aspects of ourselves as infinitely treasurable, even when they are palpably immature if not frankly perverse, can we be still and flow out in charity to all around us. Love, as Jesus reminds us, if it is real should be bestowed on enemy as well as friend, just as our prayers of intercession if they are to be effective in changing people according to the will of God, must include those who treat us spitefully and whose attitude to us is disfigured with destructive jealousy. The ethical demands of Christ are indeed 'counsels of perfection', that there must be no limit to our goodness, as our heavenly Father's goodness knows no bounds (Mat. 5:43-8). The fruit of this goodness, the outer manifestation of which is love for all sentient creatures, indeed for all the creation of God, is an inner peace beyond human understanding. This peace in turn enfolds the beloved in an embrace that arises from God Himself and uses our feeble limbs and minds to bestow it on all our brethren. When I am at peace within myself, I am at peace with all the world, somehow being able to include all its contradictions and aberrations in a deep compassion that is the forerunner of a cosmic transformation. Certainly I cannot bestow counsel on anyone else until I am in such close rapport with him that I can give of my very essence to him. This is the prerequisite of any effective healing relationship, one in which the Holy Spirit can lead to a sustained growth of the personality to the authenticity of independence through the mediation of another person.
How can I know that peace that passes all human understanding? It cannot be grasped or claimed, nor can it be attained by an act of unaided will. The more it is strained after, the further it recedes from my view; the more it is coveted, the less does it lie within my field of attainment. Peace is a gift of God, coming when one is least aware of its necessity. For those who cannot accept the concept of deity, I would say that as one yields oneself to the power that energises life itself in simple trust, so one is filled with its benevolence, and one is enabled to accept the present situation in its potentialities as well as its threats for the future. This may be the first experience of love in the life of one who was previously agnostic about any power beyond human understanding that could have a direct influence on his welfare. Love that is real makes no demands on the one to whom it is given. Inasmuch as the love that makes the whole world move is bestowed equally on the good and the bad, the receptive and those who do not respond, it arises from a source that cares infinitely for all its creatures. Its joy lies in witnessing the growth to maturity of what it has created, the full outflowing of individuality in perfect freedom of all to which it has given birth.
To love one's own infirmities is the first step in the healing of those infirmities, which in turn shows us the way of the spirit of counsel to those around us. Loving what is weak and deficient within one is something that needs precise definition. This love is not sentimental blurring of distinctions of good and bad, nor is it a way of exonerating oneself from personal responsibility by blaming one's heredity or environment for one's defects. Neither is this love a glamour-ridden narcissism in which one admires oneself in rapt delight, seeing one's reflection in the pool of vain imagination. Self-love is not to be equated with the indulgence of our weaknesses in an orgy of liberal permissiveness, in the same way as an ineffectual parent would continue to indulge his wayward child instead of teaching him the acceptable rules of conduct even, if need be, through the infliction of effective punishment. 'My son, do not spurn the Lord's correction or take offence at his reproof; for those whom he loves the Lord reproves, and he punishes a favourite son' (Prov. 3:11-12). True love is to be contrasted with sentimental indulgence on the one hand and a concern for the world's opinion of oneself as a loving person on the other. Love that merits the strength of the word is strong, consistent in devotion, and enduring in intensity. It is a relationship in which one is prepared to part with something of supreme importance in one's life for another person's welfare. The most valuable gift any of us can so sacrifice to another is ourself, primarily in the form of our attention. When this is bestowed, undivided and unstinted, on a single human being, that person is brought into a creative relationship with ourself, even if the first emotions aroused are those of unease and distrust. Much inner aversion and resentment may have to be acknowledged before a real relationship can be established. True harmony is often the fruit of conflict that is patiently worked through in honest encounter. When we come to know another person in the depth of our own being, we start to love that person, since in the heart of inner regard the edge of surface identification is worn down and dispersed. There, adverse criticism, snobbish derision and intellectual arrogance fall away, leaving in their wake a deep affection that binds two vibrant people.
One cannot know this love for another person until one knows the secret of self-love: we love because He loved us first (I John 4:19). God loves us because He made us and even when we betray the divine image in which we were fashioned, the steadfast love of God does not fail. The love of God is bestowed equally on all His creatures, but whereas the good respond to that love and effect its circulation to all around them, the evil fail to accept the love and allow it to be dissipated heedlessly. Neither they nor anyone else can benefit from God's providence while they are in charge of the world's resources. But how can we know this love of God? When does it cease to be merely a theological abstraction and become a living reality? In many instances only when we have been brought so low that all the usual means of support have been irrevocably stripped from us. Then He who knocks perpetually at the door of the soul for admission can at last be heard, acknowledged and bade welcome. He was always there, but we were never available to attend: we had many more important matters in hand in the world of glamour than to spare the time to listen to the still, small voice within us.
In Jesus's greatest parable, that of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), the boy who has spent all he possessed in reckless living comes to his senses, to his true self in fact, when he is in the most dire straits, at the point of absolute destitution. Then he hears the voice of God within him, telling him to confess the error of his ways to his father and offer himself as a paid servant. When, in fact, he arrives back home in the utmost humiliation, his father - far from rebuking him - runs out to greet him and take him to a feast of welcome. Nothing is too precious to be bestowed on the repentant son, 'for this son of mine was dead and has come back to life; he was lost and is found'. That is the paradigm of God's love for all who truly turn to Him in the secret place of the soul. It is tragic that the dutiful elder son feels no love at all, only a fully justified resentment of the festivities in honour of the return of the wastrel. He does not realise that he too is loved with an equal ardour for what he is. Until, however, he is open to the deeper springs of God's grace, the heavy cloud of his resentment cannot be dissipated by the rays of rejoicing that should attend the return home of a lost brother. It follows that God's love never fails, but that we have to be open to receive it. When it penetrates us, we are strangely free - free from past attachments and future fears, free from old resentments and fresh schemes for self-aggrandisement, free from the thralldom of past ways of thought and from bondage to the image that we had previously projected as part of our social identity. At last we can be ourselves without fear and without self-justification. No longer do we need to ingratiate ourselves with other people; no longer do we have to conceal our less pleasant qualities from the gaze of our fellows - which means, in effect, concealing them from our own gaze, since those around us are usually well aware of our inner disposition but are probably too self-engrossed or apathetic to care very much about it. Most of us have enough to cope with in our own orbit without becoming involved in another's problems except when they can help to relieve us of our sense of failure.
The love of God for each of us is His acceptance that we are as we are. This was the love Christ had for the prostitutes and sinners with whom He dined, obviously in an atmosphere of great rejoicing. He could see the craving for acknowledgement that lay deep within the apparently degraded personalities that showed themselves to the outer world in the form of immoral, vicious people. Inside there was a small child that had never been loved. Jesus loved the small child and, by the power of the Spirit of God, He brought that unprepossessing split-off part of the personality into full integration and maturity, so that the lust and greed of the unredeemed people around Him became transfigured into self giving love and generosity to their fellows. We may be sure He did not preach repentance to them, for they would in all probability have rejected Him outright had He put himself in judgement over them. When they were accepted for what they were, the image of God - in which they too were created but which had been tragically distorted by the inroads of sin, both inherited and acquired - was restored to its original excellence. They were indeed born again, and yet nothing of the past was held in reproach or accusation. It was, as it were, their mark of identity and their reminder that they too had had feet of clay in the past. As Dame Julian of Norwich was shown, 'Sin is necessary, but all shall be well' (Revelations of Divine Love, chapter 27).
To love one's infirmities is therefore rather similar to loving one's small son or daughter even if it is a thorough nuisance to all in its vicinity. Such a child has to be educated into socially acceptable behaviour, as much for its own acceptance into the community as for the well-being of those around it. But it is never rejected or broken. It follows therefore that a psychological or moral weakness must first be accepted as a fact of one's inner life, and then offered up to God for healing in rapt prayer. For this prayer to be effective, the will to change must be active and fully committed. Thus there is no tendency to deny the magnitude of the infirmity or to play down its destructive role in the fulfilment of the person. But it is accepted without abhorrence and offered up to God for healing. In this process one becomes increasingly open to the infirmities of other people, and one can begin to flow out to them with a sympathy that may ultimately blossom into warm affection; the end is self-giving love, but this is the fruit of a lifetime's endeavour in the dark world of personal relationships, at once sordid and aspiring, treacherous and noble.
When I am, through my own sordid nature, separated in esteem from all my fellows, I am still loved by God. He is available to me in a way that was previously not possible owing to my own self-centred preoccupation with the things of this world. But when the world dissolves in a mist of unreality, the love of God remains and burns ever more brightly within me. I know I am healed by God's love when I am lifted up from the imprisonment of personal fears and insecurity to an awareness of the abiding providence of His grace, so that every part of my personality, the dark no less than the bright, is acceptable to me. This means, in other words, that when I have experienced God's love mystically, I can begin to accept myself as I now am. Then I can begin to practise the second great commandment laid down by Jesus, that of loving my neighbour as myself. As I am able to face the totality of my being, good and bad alike, so I am able to project my awareness into the people I meet in everyday life and to accept them for what they are, rather than for what I, in my arrogance, would have them be. Gradually destructive criticism gives way to a quiet acceptance, which in turn is succeeded by a strong, genuine admiration for the numerous good qualities I see in the souls of the people around me. The end-product is a love that is prepared to sacrifice itself for the other person's welfare. This is the true measure of love compared with which physical outpourings of emotion are mere superficial displays of affection. The greater the outpouring of love I show to others, the more complete is my own inner healing; in this way, the aberrations within me are cleansed, healed and finally transfigured into something of enduring value in my relationships with other people. The physician of the soul remains unhealed until he has brought all humanity into soul-consciousness. In the same way Christ remains in agony until the end of the world, as Pascal reminds us.
An inner healing relationship has a trinitarian foundation: God, myself and others. The greatest of these is obviously God, from Whom all blessings flow. But the central focus is oneself, on whom God acts in love and from whom love flows to those around. Without these there can be no effective circulation of love, and love cannot be returned fully to God. I love because I know the love of God. This love cannot remain sequestered within myself, because it is of the very nature of love to flow out to all creation. The outer manifestation of the Holy Spirit is love; all authentic gifts of the Spirit, as opposed to aberrant psychic manifestations, bring the word of God to the world. And the primary word of God is love. By love the world was created; by love it is sustained; by love it is redeemed from the bondage to selfishness (which is the core of sin) to enter into the full converse of God, the communion of all things in the divine image. The proof of this love, as St John's Gospel reminds us, is God's giving of His only Son, that everyone who has faith in Him may not die but have eternal life (John 3:16). It must be emphasised that the growth of the person into the knowledge of God's love, and hence into illuminated self-love and the love of the neighbour, is a life-long process. The saint is more aware of his lack of love than is the sincere atheist who may devote his life to social and political reform. As one grows in love, so one identifies oneself more completely with the publican in Jesus' central parable (Luke 18:9-14), who can say only 'Oh God, have mercy on me, sinner that I am'. Jesus himself was fully identified with sinners when He was nailed to the Cross between two of them. And in His love, He was able, in St Luke's account of the Passion, to redeem one of them from the cynical despair that ends the lives of most evil-doers, to an acknowledgement of the supremacy of spiritual values, as typified in Jesus Himself (Luke 23:39-43).
In this example of the lowliness of love, we gain fresh insight into the darkness of illuminated self-love. It sees in the very defects of the personality with which it has to grapple the face of God. Christ is often closer to the sinner than to the man of apparent virtue until he too sees his lack and gives himself wholeheartedly to his fellows. In the story of the rich young man who looks for the one thing needful to attain eternal life, Jesus tells him to give away everything he has, and then to follow him, a counsel impossible for the virtuous seeker after truth (Mark 10:17-22). In the story of the venal tax-gatherer, Zacchaeus, the healing of his moral defect by the love of Christ is followed by his voluntary disposal of the bulk of his money to charitable causes and his wholehearted reimbursement of anyone whom he had previously cheated (Luke 19:1-10). Zacchaeus had known the love of God in the course of his sordid preoccupation with money, and was thereafter disembarrassed of the need for money by the love of Christ. His life, including his ability to make money, was dedicated to God and to his fellow men.
The solution of this paradox of sin leading one to an encounter with God and apparent virtue separating one from Him lies in the nature of consciousness. Love is a function as well as a product of consciousness. The sinner, when he comes to a full knowledge of himself in the depths of dereliction, as symbolised by the prodigal son among the pigs, is open to the love of God in full awareness. At last he is in a position to acknowledge the one thing needful for his well-being. The conventionally righteous person, until even the fruits of his piety are put in their proper perspective, is separated from the greater love of God by his own moral rectitude, which shows itself in a failure to respond positively to the unclean, the sinner, the pervert and the criminal. And yet each of us contains these elements also in the deep unconscious part of the personality. Until they are acknowledged, loved and offered to God for healing, they will be projected on to those outside us whom we despise and fear most. The denial of love leads to rejection, and what is rejected tends to acquire a life of its own in the unconscious part of the psyche; the damage it is capable of causing is terrible. The twin monsters of our own century, fascism and communism, are too appalling a testimony to this truth to be ignored. In fascism the dark forces within the individual personality are projected on to vulnerable people of a foreign racial or religious origin. Among those attracted to communism the darkness of the self is aligned to the under-privileged masses so that it can be projected quite plausibly on to all who are successful and happy. These are identified with the rich exploiters of humanity. How often the virtuous impulse in religion has developed into a puritanical movement that has had its end in widespread persecution and destruction! Fascism and communism both have a powerful puritanical element that appeals to the self-righteous bigot in all of us, that uses the concept of God to destroy His works, that perverts moral rectitude to stifle the impulse of love and forgiveness. It was the Church of His time that conspired to crucify Jesus, not the common people around Him, who were weak rather than evil.
And yet we are not to indulge our weaknesses or those of other people. They are to be confronted, seen for what they are, and given to God in humble confession so that they may be healed. This is love in action; it is not simply a benevolent attitude but a way of life that works towards the healing of all things in God. Love is warm, but it has its chill also - for it demands everything we possess. Love endures all things, but it also works with impatience for the resurrection of folly to wisdom, for the maturing of selfish attitudes of juvenility to the self-giving sacrifice that crowns a life of creative experience. Self-love is no static ecstasy of self-approval. It is simply the first essential stage in an arduous re-creation of the personality into something of the fullness of the stature of Christ.
In the same way, only when we love the perversity that lies at the heart of another person's soul, can we effect a relationship with him. But the end of that relationship is a regeneration of that individual into a real person, one who has an alert, functioning will capable of choice, decision and action. Only when we have come to terms with the perversity within ourselves can we start to relate in earnest with the other person.