Sunday, September 07, 2008

Today at church in the second reading, we had the phrase that often...and still does cause me a great deal of confusion, "Love your neighbour as you love yourself". Hard...why? well as many of you know, if you are regulat blog readers...I do not love myself. In fact there are many things that I despise about myself. Now, does that mean that I cannot love others? In my opinion no. I can love others - I deeply love my family (well most of the time!), and I love some of my friends dearly.

Fr B in his sermon today, said there were people out there who do not love themselves, and see nothing good about themselves, and so not have an over-riding ego, when they are the people who need one - he then went on to say, how this was sad, and that things should be done to help these people. Now, I am not saying that I need a huge ego, and that I don't have anyone to help me. But it is sad. When I see people really happy with where they are, with their life, and their body - I wish and pray that at some point I can be like that.

But this does not mean that I cannot love. In fact, this came up in Taizé, and I was so upset about it, I talked for a long time to one of the Brothers about it after an evening prayer - a very emotional talk it was as well. I will not say what I said, or what was said to me - some things have to be kept personal, but it helped. Not completely - I was told by anither friend that the hardest part for me in this was to learn to love myself...

I am missing Taizé a lot at the moment. I am missing the honesty with myself that I had when I was out there, as I had the time to think about what was going on, and work out how I actually felt about different situations. Being depressed isnt just about feeling down - its feeling helpless. useless, worthless, angry with yourself, not understanding what is going on, powerless. Different situations lead to different feelings. In normal life, I dont have time to think about things so deeply, and meditatively, and have so much prayer time - yes I should make more time, but here I dont have the time for meditation three times a day, a church 5 minutes away from my accomodation that I can walk into at whatever time of the day, and people i can talk to when i need to. so yeah, I miss it.

all in all, this piece of scripture does baffle me a little, but i am trying to get to grips with some of the interpretations that I have been given of it.

enough from my tonight