Self-Love?

For a while now one of my friends--Steve from Harvestboston.net--has been thinking and writing about this concept of self-love (check it out here and here). He brings up a good question: if the second greatest commandment is to love our neighbors as ourselves then do we need to better understand what it means to love ourselves? I think we do. Perhaps the best thing I can do to love myself is to observe Sabbath. In taking some time out of my week having fun, relaxing, worshiping, reading, being with God and Jennie and friends, or by spending time doing whatever else would truly be rest I will better experience God as present and real. And really, who am I to think that without God's help and presence that I could truly help or bless anyone else? All blessings originate from Him.

I was reading through C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters this morning and found the following quote. (If you're unfamiliar with the premice of the Screwtape Letters then please click here first.)

To anticipate the Enemy’s [God’s] strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents - or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love–-a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours. For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our enemy; he really loves the hairless bipeds He has created and always gives back to them with His right hand what He has taken away with His left.

–Screwtape (C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, letter 14, pp 71f)