Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time
“… you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mk: 12:31)
Many years ago, when I was a 16-year-old high school sophomore, one kid in our class decided it was a great idea to send around a sheet of paper listing all our names and asking everyone to anonymously write what we thought of each other.
You can easily imagine how hot a topic that was for a group of teenagers already obsessed with identity issues.
In fact, it was such an urgent concern at the time that I still remember it to this day – especially the indicator that informed me I scored unusually high on what could only be called the “NERD scale”!
Of course, the reason it was so important to me, and to all of us in the class, was that we were going to get an answer to the most pressing question in our adolescent lives:
What do people think of me?
Am I liked? Am I in the in-crowd?
Am I seen as someone important?
Or, as today’s Gospel would put it: Am I loved?
One of today’ great tragedies in America is the impact that social media is having on our young people, especially teenage girls.
According to the Education Policy Institute, “heavy social media use is linked to worse well-being, especially for girls. Girls experience more depressive symptoms than boys, such as feeling worthless or hopeless, while they are also more likely to feel unhappy about their physical appearance.”
This is not to suggest that boys don’t have their own concerns that can easily lead to depression, anxiety, and other chronic issues like alcoholism, drug dependence, and suicidal thoughts.
As a psychologist, I’m sad to report that both boys and girls struggle with chronic feelings of insecurity, often resulting in self-destructive acts.
And the reality is that it’s become a major mental health problem in our time primarily due to the addictive nature of such websites as Tik-Tok and Instagram.
Nor is it just teenagers who have these kinds of issues. We adults are often just as anxious and depressed over self-esteem concerns.
How many of us adults, for example, have had the experience of meeting someone for the first time who says something like: “I’ve heard so much about you.” Almost immediately our brain gets secretly caught up in an unspoken, almost frantic interrogation that goes something like this:
“What have you heard? Who said it? What are people saying about me? Do they like me?”
Even Jesus, according to today’s excerpt from Mark’s gospel, emphasizes the importance of self-love:
“You shall love your neighbor as you love your own self.”
Jesus is encouraging a healthy kind of self-love.
Clearly, he’s not talking about “narcissism” … a word derived from the ancient Greek story of a man named Narcissus who saw his reflection in a pool and fell in love with it!
Narcissism is a perversion of self-love. Literally it is the conviction that I am entitled to special treatment, have a constant need for being admired, and lack empathy toward others. The whole world revolves around me! And that, then, gives me permission to do or say anything I want, any time I want.
This is not what Jesus means when he talks about loving your own self. Instead, he’s referring to the kind of self-love embodied in a sense of humility, of self-awareness, of self-respect, and an openness to the reality that we are a gift from God.
Jesus is clear throughout all the gospels that what is most important is that we live in a way contrary to the ways of the world around us.
What will bring us true contentment, in the words of Benedictine sister, Joan Chittister, is a sense of “enoughness, of sufficiency … even in the face of the great ambitions, desires, power, status, wealth or success that are the coins of the realm that the world we live in so treasures.”
The happiest people, Jesus teaches us, will be those who are satisfied with “enoughness rather than surfeit, those who know what it means to be ‘poor of spirit,’ rather than those who are intent on pretending to be more than they really are.”
Living this way, Jesus tells us, will cure us of our endless desire, appetite, passion, and greed for what ultimately isn’t worth it to begin with.
“Blessed are the meek,” Jesus tells us. They will “inherit the earth.”
Or, again to borrow the words of Sr. Joan Chittister, “Blessed are those who realize their own limits, weaknesses, need for support, and dependence on God. Emptied of themselves, they can then see the goodness of others. They are able to speak the truth in humility. They realize their own powerlessness and God’s greatness and the basic goodness of the world around them.”
I’m not sure we high school teenagers decades ago would have understood what this gospel and Sr. Joan are talking about, but o-o-o-h what a difference it could have made … and still can!
Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.
