Loving Self

 

This week we are exploring how we might love ourselves.  Yesterday, we visited with Jacob who wrestled with God…letting that story open our own internal/external wrestling moments.  Today I invite you to read this beautiful poem,  Love After Love by Derek Walcott.  Remember, the invitation to read poetry slowly.  Re-read the poem three or four times.  Read the poem aloud.  Notice and name which lines warm your heart and which ones cause a furrowed brow to form creating confusion. 

 

Love after Love:

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

 

How can you “feast on your life” today?  How might you celebrate with wine and bread (I love how Walcott uses a communion reference there – communing with ourselves!)?  What love letters to yourself would you write?

 

That is a great invitation, by the way.  Write a love letter to yourself.  Or you could write down five or ten things about yourself that you are most proud of.  Or you could list a few places where you sense that you are fully alive.

 

In my love letter I might write how much I enjoy being a husband to my best friend and father to my children.  How I am grateful for YOU who read these morning meditations and writing.  How I feel alive when walk outside in ways that connect me to the Creator.  I pray your love letter to yourself would let your shy soul out into the sunlight and warmth of God’s love this day.  Amen.