You Are My Beloved

Have you ever played that game – sometimes it’s used as an icebreaker – where you are asked, “If you were in an emergency situation and could only bring 3 items with you, what would you bring?” I know that when I am asked questions like that, I start scouring my brain to try to decide what is most important to me and why I’d chose that.

Or maybe you have been at a lecture or conference with a great speaker.  Almost inevitably, an audience member asks some version of the question, “What is one book or resource that you would recommend?” or “What is the most important action we can take?”

Well someone asks Jesus this kind of question today.  It could have been a set up question, but I tend to read it as a genuine encounter. The scribe really wanted to know, “What IS the most important passage in scripture, Jesus?”

It might have been a no brainer for Jesus or he might have had to think for a minute.  But he quotes from Deuteronomy 6 (what is called the shema), “Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” Jesus then adds another passage from Leviticus 19, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

The scribe genuinely affirms Jesus’ response, and Jesus indicates to him that they are both on the same page and that this scribe is close to God’s kin-dom.

For today’s reflection, I want to focus in on 2 words from what Jesus said and those words are, “as yourself.”

In our most recent Monday evening gathering on prayer, numerous people commented in one form or another how hard it was to pray for themselves.  Some indicated that, perhaps, they did not deserve prayer as much as others because their problems were not as great. And I have heard many people say some version of, “I have a hard time loving myself…”

So many of us struggle with self-love and self-acceptance. We have internalized many harsh and critical voices that relentlessly assess us – our actions, our thoughts, our problems, our weight or body, our speech. These voices offer ongoing, generally negative, commentary about our not measuring up in one form or another (and can be well fed by modern social media where everyone else seems to be doing just fine). And these internal voices may have even come to sound as if they are our voice.

But they are not.

I know this because I have hung around 2, 3 and 4 year old kids and maybe you have too.  These young humans have no harsh inner voice. They only know themselves to be blessed (that’s our original voice).  Sure they mess things up, but it is the older humans around them who start narrating the story for them. And this slowly seeps in – drowning out our original voice.

Lent is not just about giving things up or doing for others. Part of our Lenten journey is connecting with our own goodness and blessedness.  This is precisely what happens to Jesus right before he goes into the wilderness – he hears God’s voice say that he is blessed. And one way to look at the temptations of Jesus is that they try to steer him away from that identity.

I have often turned to the work of spiritual writer Henri Nouwen for guidance on self-love. Even as a wildly popular speaker and spiritual guide, he still struggled with his critical inner voices and the depression and anxiety that accompany self-rejection.  He shared about it publicly because he wanted people to have permission to talk about it. But he also spoke a lot about working to connect with our belovedness – just as Jesus did.

Nouwen stressed that living into our belovedness was critical in order to counter the voices that call us worthless, unworthy or unlovable. He went on to suggest that the forces of empire and capitalism have a vested interest in keeping us from loving ourselves because when we do not love ourselves we tend to seek an identity outside of ourselves – through materialistic success, worldly power or popularity.

He went on to say that the “tendencies toward self-rejection and self-deprecation make it hard to hear these words [that you are beloved]…and let them descend into the center of my heart. But once I have received these words fully, I am set free from my compulsion to prove myself to the world and can live in it without belonging to it. Once I have accepted the truth that I am God’s beloved child, unconditionally loved, I can be sent into the world to speak and to act as Jesus did.”

If we want to pattern our life on Jesus, then part of that journey is dwelling in our own goodness, our own completeness, our own value. We are worthy – which is why we say at every mass, “Lord, you make me worthy to receive you and by your word I am healed.” For today try to dwell in your own goodness. You are God’s beloved.

PS – I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that today marks the feast of St. Patrick.  We could spend an entire blog post unpacking the many myths and half truths associated with Patrick (and most saints for that matter). I often wonder how our modern celebrations connect us to (or distance us from) some of the deeper meanings of the lives that we are supposedly celebrating. In so many cases, I fear that our cultural celebrations have traded away the authentic and complicated stories for cheaper, flimsier versions. I found a fascinating history of St. Patrick at the following site – and many sites contain similar (and conflicting!) stories: https://blog.oup.com/2014/09/real-story-saint-patrick/