Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

Herb Stevens's word unique resolved for me that seeming contradiction: do I "love myself" or "give myself up"? During a recent retreat at St. Cuthbert's in Brewster, New York, I heard an old story from Eastern Europe that put it in four words.

Zuysa was the village rabbi, wise, kind, and beloved, who worried nonetheless that he might have failed to observe some commandment. He went to a mountaintop to ask God what more he needed to do.

"At the gate of heaven, Zuysa," he heard God answer, "I won't ask why you didn't give more to the poor, or fast more often, or memorize more Scripture. I will ask only one question.

"Why weren't you Zuysa?"

Why weren't you Herb ... Molly ... Corrie ... Tib? Why didn't you show forth the aspect of God you alone embodied?

Zuysa's story was in my mind that night as I reread Paul's letter to the Ephesians. When he urges them to reach "the whole measure of the fullness of Christ" he can't be suggesting that anyone can do this solo! Paul was addressing Christ's Body, that Body with "many members," no two alike. Each member with its special role, its part in the fullness of Christ that no one else can supply

"Giving up myself," I believe today, means giving up my notion of what my role should be and accepting - with joy - the one for which I was created.

To love myself is to accept God's evaluation instead of my own. And what a staggering value he places on each of us! In December 2000 I heard an Advent sermon in London's Westminster Abbey The topic was sin. The fact is, said the Reverend Robert Wright, that "I am as loved and worthy of esteem as I ever shall be - already infinitely loved and respected.

"The condition of not knowing this," he continued, "is sin. The tears that flow following its discovery are called repentance, in which we weep for the sin of ever having thought of ourselves as unloved, for not having loved ourselves as we are."

Infinitely loved ... as I am! Not as I will be, or could be, or might have been, but just the way I am this minute. To think less of myself is not humility but the pride that says I know better than God.

God loves each one of us as if there were only one of us. St. Augustine

How long has God been preparing each of us for that part no one else can play?

When I applied for confirmation at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine back in 1962, the first question on the candidate form was Date of Baptism. I couldn't remember what I'd told the registrar of marriage banns in Geneva fifteen years earlier. In any case, it was a made-up date; I doubted such a ceremony had ever taken place. But when I telephoned my mother to ask, she surprised me. "Why ... yes," she said after a moment's thought. "It happens that you were."

I was born, I'd known, in Los Angeles, during an earlier effort of Daddy's to open an office in his beloved California - as short-lived a venture as the one when I was twelve.