Learning to love ourselves, which is the first step in our entry into this balance of love, requires simply that we learn to be still, that we learn to accept ourselves, to know ourselves and to allow ourselves to be led beyond ourselves through stillness. Learning to love others means, in that stillness, we allow ourselves to learn to accept others and see others for what they really are, not putting them into the moulds of our own emotions or our own desires or our own fears, not projecting our own feelings or images onto them, but allowing ourselves to see them and relate to them as they are in themselves. Therefore to be able to see our relationships as something that we share with others, as the sacrament of God’s love bringing us, each of us and all of us, to wholeness, to the wholeness that allows us to share in the very being of God as St Peter says (2 Pet.1:4).
(Aspects of Love 3 by Laurence Freeman OSB )
