Intrinsically Bothersome

My dearest Honors family,

You know that feeling when a text simply bothers you and you know this means that you have no choice but to write your paper on it? Well...this is my feeling about Kierkegaard's "Works of Love".

This little chapter has completely enveloped my heart in some sort of crazy machine, kneading and pulling it into some doughy substance. It has taken a single presumption of my existence and challenged it to an intellectual duel. The subject of contention is this: what is love? Do I really know what it means to love?

It's not so much that I've always said of myself, "I know how to love completely and entirely". It is more that I thought that the importance of knowing how to love was for the sole purpose of loving another, whether human or God. Kierkegaard seemed to be saying to me throughout my reading: "Lucy Beth...how can you know how to love them if you don't know what it is to love yourself?"

He makes the point that one is to love his neighbor "as himself" and that God is the only one whom one can love "more than himself". If I am to understand how to love anyone as or more that myself then I have to first know how to love myself. I think that I have always been under the impression that I should first forget about myself and learn to love God and others and after that all thoughts of loving myself just get forgotten. Not to say that my life has been void of selfishness, but that I saw loving God and others as a way to get rid of my selfishness. But Kierkegaard put this crazy idea in my head that if I cannot love myself then I cannot love others and therefore my attempts to love were simply a failed means of escape from the ever-present, underlying selfishness that is inherent in those who do not know how to truly love themselves. This loving of oneself is not how it would outwardly appear: selfishness. On the contrary, it is a discovery of the true self; a union of the existing self (one that is uncomfortable in its own skin, always desiring to be someone else) and the pure self (the self that God created each of us to be). It is only when one is his or her true self that he or she can love God and others.

I questioned before that if we love God more than ourselves, then how can we love Him if we don't first love ourselves? But we cannot love without Him so we must love Him first:

"How could one speak properly about love if you were forgotten, you god of love, source of all love in heaven and on earth; you who spared nothing but in love gave everything; you who are love, so that one who loves is what he is only by being in you"
pg. 278, "Works of Love"

I can only love by being in Him who is love. So I first must allow my self to "be" in Him. Then I will see how He loves me. Then I will love Him as He first loved me. Then I can love myself as I was meant to, me who has my being in Him who is love and who loves me and whom I love. Then and only then can I begin to love my neighbor.

This carries even further with the definition of "the neighbor". The neighbor is not distinct, extraordinary or rare. He is not loved out of interest or specific desire. He is loved because he is the neighbor and is loved as he is. He is loved out of eternal duty, yet not out of habit. There is an incredible balance of personal, deep love and dutiful, required love. It is not one or the other.

All of this is very scattered, I know. But it is one of those things that you know, yet at the same time you do not know. Furthermore, you feel, no you know, that you must know it to continue living. Because if you do not know then you will go on not really living. For to live is to love and to not know how to love is to keep oneself from living. So please, spell it out for me. But please don't. Because if love can be compressed into a neat little package with step-by-step instructions, then it is not what it claims to be and loses its value and therefore is not worth the having. So Lord, open my eyes and my heart, and help me to understand love.