Well, jet lag yesterday gave me a chance to catch up on all my Rio travelogue posts; jet lag today will be dedicated to The Purpose Driven Life.
Day 16: Life is all about love.
It really doesn’t matter which spiritual tradition you follow, love is the core tenant of all of them, and I’m glad to see Rick Warren reiterating this for the Christian faith. In my experience, Christianity is often characterized by guilt, shame, fear, and judgment. Obviously, this isn’t true for all Christians, or perhaps even for the majority of Christians. But, the heavy emphasis I’ve seen on the “grace of God” and the sinful and unworthy nature of humans tells me many Christians, whether they realize it or not, worship in fear and shame, trying to earn God’s approval, rather than in love, recognizing that acceptance and approval are their birthright.
Warren writes “Relationships, not achievements or the acquisition of things, are what matters most in life… Busyness is a great enemy of relationships. We become preoccupied with making a living, doing our work, paying bills, and accomplishing goals as if these tasks are the point of life. They are not. The point of life is learning to love – God and people. Life minus love equals zero.”
My life and everything I’ve written about in this blog regarding my past perfectly reflect Warren’s words. I achieved and I acquired, and I grew more miserable with each new achievement and each new acquisition. I had a serious lack of love in my life.
Why is that? Why is it that some people’s cups overflow with love, while others experience a painful and paralyzing lack of love in their lives?
In her now famous talk on vulnerability, Brene Brown says that the difference between people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and people who do not is that those who do believe they are worthy of love and belonging, and that’s it – believing oneself worthy of love is the difference between having love in your life and not having love in your life.
That’s the one thing I would add to Warren’s chapter, the bit that seems to be missing – before you can love anyone else, and before you can feel loved by anyone else, you have to love yourself first.
Have you ever rejected a compliment? Has someone ever complimented you on something you feel insecure about – your looks, your talent, your intelligence? If you don’t believe yourself to be attractive/talented/intelligent, you’re not going to believe someone else when they tell you you are. In fact, you may think they’re trying to game you, to flatter you so that they can then take advantage of you. You may become suspicious and untrusting of them. It works the same with love – if someone shows you love, but you don’t believe you’re loveable, you’re not going to be able accept that love. In fact, you will become suspicious and untrusting of the person showing you love. You will reject that love, perhaps angrily and harshly and abusively, because you feel threatened by it.
Truthfully, I think loving oneself is what is really meant by the concept of loving God and why loving God comes before loving others in importance in the Christian faith. I wrote in Day 1 and Day 2 that human beings are not separate from God (again, however you conceive of that notion), that there is only Being (Truth, Light, Love, Awareness) in this world and we are all expressions of that Being. It’s when we deny that and imagine ourselves to be separate, when we adhere to the dictates of our ego or false self rather than the guidance of our True Self, that we experience pain and suffering. Loving God is really about knowing your True Self and living according to its deepest values and desires rather than the despotic and fickle demands of your ego. This is how we love ourselves first so that we may love, and be loved by, others.
Deepak Chopra says that in order to increase anything in your life, in order to get more of what you want, you have to give it away. If you want more acceptance, you have to be more accepting of others; if you want more compassion and empathy from others, you have to be more compassionate and empathetic toward others; even money – if you want more money, you have to give more money to others. The same goes with love – if you want more love, you have to give love to others. But, when you feel a lack of love in your life, you have no love to give others. You cannot give to others what you do not have yourself. Before you can love others, you must first love yourself.
I didn’t love myself, and I feel like I’ve written about this ad nauseum already, most specifically here. Because I didn’t love myself, I had no love to give others, nor could I accept the love of others. I grew more secluded as a result and continued on insanely living my life in the exact same way I had been and hoping for different a result.
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I wasn’t expecting to say all that when I sat down to write about this chapter. I didn’t realize that was inside me. I really liked this chapter: what Warren had to say about the importance of love, about what love looks like, the bible verses he quoted… Sometimes writing does that – it brings things out of me I didn’t know I had inside me. That’s when writing is best, when it’s most meaningful and productive – when it reveals you to yourself, when it illuminates a previously unrecognized truth. It is emotionally draining, especially when shared with the world at large. But it is also catharsis – a most amazing sense of release and healing.
TL;DR: No tl;dr for virtual book club posts.
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