As St. John, the most theological of the evangelists, instructs us, “God is love”. And so the criterion of whether we are truly following the Way of Christ is love; but not just any love – divine Love which is unconditional. Christ Himself exhorts us to love even our enemies, which is humanly speaking impossible. But by this exhortation, He reveals to us the all-embracing character of His love – of how He is; and how we must exist, if we would be like Him and with Him.

The Fathers teach us that the root of all evil is pride. Pride is a sinful self-centeredness. It is the refusal to relate to those who are different than us and a refusal to embrace them because they are not like us. Herein lies the difficulty. We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. This means that we must love ourselves because God loves us. It does not mean, however, that we love ourselves MORE THAN others or love ourselves because we think that we are better than others.

This is the human struggle. If we hate who we are, hate ourselves, then we are unable to love others since we have no understanding of what love is. This is why we need to be grounded in Christ Who loved Himself because He was loved by the Father and therefore was able to love even His enemies.

This takes a great deal of self-reflection and understanding. We must come to know ourselves as God knows us and not take pride in who we are but, rather, love ourselves because we were created by God in His image and with the potential to be like Him as He revealed Himself to us in the Person of Jesus.

Again, it all goes back to understanding that we are who we are because of God’s love. We deserve to be loved not only by ourselves but also be others because God created us as loveable and competent beings. He is the Creator. He chose to make us who we are so that we might render to Him all glory and praise.

One of the common weaknesses that we find in human nature, as was expressed in the story of Adam and Eve, is that we humans can easily be seduced into thinking that any greatness that is ours is somehow due to us because we have somehow achieved it.

I know that this will take a little thought. It is not always easy to keep a balance in respect to how we feel about ourselves. While we must love ourselves, we must love ourselves because God loves us and is sharing His life with us. Finding the balance between pride and self-deprecation is extremely important.