The Golden Rule

In the morning, as I savor my first cup of coffee, I remind myself to Think Red. I want to take the words of Jesus (the ones printed in red in my Bible) seriously and assume he meant for me to do the things he said. 
 
I find some of the things Jesus said hard to understand; but most of his sayings are simple to comprehend yet hard to put into practice. Even simple things like, love your neighbor as you love yourself or his treat others as you want to be treated rule are easy to understand but difficult to pull off. 
 
Knowing and loving ourselves takes intentional effort and a steady diet of soul–searching discipline. In his book, The Wisdom of the Desert, Thomas Merton writes, “What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous.”  If we have any hope of loving others well, we must first discover and love ourselves. Knowing what motivates us, understanding why we do what we do, looking beneath our hopes, dreams and desires to see what inspires them, doing the hard work of healing damaged emotions from past trauma are all part of the inward journey that Merton is pointing to. I’m encouraged to take the voyage of self–discovery when I remind myself that Jesus will lead the way.
 
But loving myself is only half of the equation. I must learn from Jesus how to treat others as subjects of their own history rather than objects of my goodwill or affection?  If loving myself requires intentional self–discovery of my subjective experience, I suppose loving others would call for the same. According to Merton, “Love means an interior and spiritual identification with one’s brother [or sister], so that he [or she] is not regarded as an “object” to “which” one “does good.” The fact is that good done to another as to an object is of little or no spiritual value. Love takes one’s neighbor as one’s other self, and loves him with all the immense humility and discretion and reserve and reverence without which no one can presume to enter into the sanctuary of another’s subjectivity.”
 
Lord, help me love myself today and help me love my neighbor as my other self.