Self-Loving Your Neighbor

In the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the titular Scott spends much of the runtime behaving selfishly, including leading a teenage girl on despite emotionally having moved on, never owning up to his lackluster treatment of his friend and ex, and already showing his new girlfriend Ramona signs that he'll be yet another of her evil exes soon enough.

After an ordeal which involves technically dying briefly, he arrives at the climax and announces for the first time that he's standing up for himself and not to win the hand of Ramona.

At that moment, the video game aesthetics of the movie award him with a flaming sword as an unseen MC declares, Scott has earned the power of self-respect.

In math, there's a principle that the sentence, a problem says, can be read in either direction.

For example, 2 plus 3 is 5 is the same as 5 is 3 plus 2.

With this in mind, I'd like to examine what Jesus declares the second most important commandment, drawing from the book of Leviticus, and likely drawing inspiration from a Pharisee about two generations before him named Hillel the Elder.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

would it not equally be true to say love yourself as your neighbor? So what does it mean to love yourself? Once at youth group, I raised the question how this passage applies if one doesn't love oneself.

Sadly, this was not received as a potential red flag that should be followed up on, but instead our leader simply said that I feed myself and bathe, so that must mean I really do love myself.

Yet plenty of negligent parents managed to do that bare minimum without meaningfully demonstrating love to their children.

When many think of self-love, the image that pops into their head is perhaps the mythical Narcissus, so enamored of his own reflection in the water that he neglected everything else and died in that spot.

Or perhaps they conjure the rich and powerful who are so obsessed with stroking their own ego, they demand statues erected of themselves or their names slapped on buildings while they terrorize the poor and marginalized to feel powerful.

But I can confidently say that none of that is an act of love.

Narcissus needed to care for himself to receive love from Echo.

The rich, as much as any of us, need to be in community with others, and it's not healthy, responsible, ethical, or loving to vault oneself to these heights.

where no community can be possible.

Conversely, some might see loving others as being a doormat, what we might term a people pleaser, constantly diminishing oneself or one's needs in order to be useful enough to others to earn some affection in return.

This is also unhealthy and will inevitably lead to misery and isolation.

To love yourself is to engage with yourself as a full person.

Neither self-aggrandizing nor self-effacing, but meeting in the middle.

You deserve to be taken care of.

You deserve dignity.

You deserve to kill the little manager in your head expecting you to be as useful as possible in order to earn being here.

And you deserve to be corrected when you're out of line.

And I expect you'll find that loving yourself better makes you better at loving others.

In the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the titular Scott spends much of the runtime behaving selfishly, including leading a teenage girl on despite emotionally having moved on, never owning up to his lackluster treatment of his friend and ex, and already showing his new girlfriend Ramona signs that he'll be yet another of her evil exes soon enough.

After an ordeal which involves technically dying briefly, he arrives at the climax and announces for the first time that he's standing up for himself and not to win the hand of Ramona.

At that moment, the video game aesthetics of the movie award him with a flaming sword as an unseen MC declares, Scott has earned the power of self-respect.

In math, there's a principle that the sentence, a problem says, can be read in either direction.

For example, 2 plus 3 is 5 is the same as 5 is 3 plus 2.

With this in mind, I'd like to examine what Jesus declares the second most important commandment, drawing from the book of Leviticus, and likely drawing inspiration from a Pharisee about two generations before him named Hillel the Elder.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

would it not equally be true to say love yourself as your neighbor? So what does it mean to love yourself? Once at youth group, I raised the question how this passage applies if one doesn't love oneself.

Sadly, this was not received as a potential red flag that should be followed up on, but instead our leader simply said that I feed myself and bathe, so that must mean I really do love myself.

Yet plenty of negligent parents managed to do that bare minimum without meaningfully demonstrating love to their children.

When many think of self-love, the image that pops into their head is perhaps the mythical Narcissus, so enamored of his own reflection in the water that he neglected everything else and died in that spot.

Or perhaps they conjure the rich and powerful who are so obsessed with stroking their own ego, they demand statues erected of themselves or their names slapped on buildings while they terrorize the poor and marginalized to feel powerful.

But I can confidently say that none of that is an act of love.

Narcissus needed to care for himself to receive love from Echo.

The rich, as much as any of us, need to be in community with others, and it's not healthy, responsible, ethical, or loving to vault oneself to these heights.

where no community can be possible.

Conversely, some might see loving others as being a doormat, what we might term a people pleaser, constantly diminishing oneself or one's needs in order to be useful enough to others to earn some affection in return.

This is also unhealthy and will inevitably lead to misery and isolation.

To love yourself is to engage with yourself as a full person.

Neither self-aggrandizing nor self-effacing, but meeting in the middle.

You deserve to be taken care of.

You deserve dignity.

You deserve to kill the little manager in your head expecting you to be as useful as possible in order to earn being here.

And you deserve to be corrected when you're out of line.

And I expect you'll find that loving yourself better makes you better at loving others.