We say that the mirror doesn’t lie. But does it actually tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? The thing about a mirror is that it only shows us one side of ourselves (pic of dog) … one dimension of who we are … and we don’t just see the image that is reflected back to us… we see what we project on our image … and what we distort of our image with our self-critical eye and our ideas of what is good or beautiful or perfect …
When it comes to the whole practice of love, the mirror presents our first challenge … learning how to love our nearest neighbour … the one that lives in our own skin. And then, when we’ve got that part down … figuring out how to turn away from the mirror and practice somewhere else.
It is a peculiar piece of teaching when you think about it … love your neighbour the way you love the one in the mirror. And that advice for living comes to us as a response Jesus is said to have given to some arrogant religious leaders who are trying to test his knowledge of their tradition by asking him to prioritize their 613 laws.
The way Matthew tells it, there is a spitting contest between two competing religious factions in 1st century Judaism. When one faction, the Sadducees, failed to trap Jesus with their silly hypothetical question about who will be married to who in the next life which they don’t actually believe anyone is going to have … their opponents, the Pharisees, have a go at trying to paint the unauthorized but popular teacher into a corner …
By asking him to gold star the most important rule in their religion, they are trying to frame him for failing to keep all the others rules he will, by default, deem to be unimportant. And for them, keeping every rule, no matter how trivial is how they measure their worth and how they judge everyone else. In two versions of this exchange, Jesus summarizes the essence of his spiritual understanding in that soundbite we’ve come to know so well … love the source of life with everything you’ve got … and love your neighbour as yourself … love your neighbour as though you were loving a part of yourself … an extension of you …
I don’t think this bit of spiritual direction is an invitation to narcissism or hedonism or arrogance … I think it might be a way to say that love begins at home, in the heart, within oneself … but it can never be contained there … it begins in seeing ourselves as a part of all that is … the radiance and the shadows … the whole and the broken … the best and the worst we’ve been and said and done … to see and receive ourselves in love’s light.
To love my neighbour as myself asks me to love you as though you were a part of me … to act as though what I do to you, I do to myself … what I do to myself, I do to you … to live as though there was no place where I end and another begins … we are contiguous and continuous … if I harm you, I injure myself … If I honour you, I honour myself. If I reject you, I reject myself …
This spiritual soundbite is spoken to some of the most critical, harsh, and judgmental individuals that we meet in the stories we have of Jesus of Nazareth … those who stand and sit in judgement of their fellow Jews for the smallest failures and infractions … those religious elite who impose penalties on those they lead … those who spend their days looking for fault and finding it everywhere except in the mirror … those who will be co-opted to collaborate with the Roman occupiers to increase the tax burden and help deprive subsistence farmers of their land in exchange for some favour or other. Those who see others as less than and themselves as more than … It is to these individuals that Jesus says … find a mirror and begin to practice love there … and then leave the mirror and love the ones you didn’t see there as though they were you and you were them.
Is it not a way of exposing the root of our problem with love? it isn’t the friend or the enemy that is at the root of our problem with loving … our limitations in loving are not so much about the other as they are about the relationship with the one we see in the mirror … … love starts with our first relationship … the one we have with ourselves … but it doesn’t end there …
If the second great commandment is like the first (as he said) … isn’t loving your neighbour as you love yourself simply another way of framing that first commandment … isn’t is another way of saying ‘love the oneness we are all part of’ … love the source that we are all inextricable connected to … love the heart of life that makes us all part of what is … start there and move out from that centre …
The wisdom of the poet mirrors the wisdom of that first century teacher “Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.” Start with the one in the mirror. Treat that being you see before you with kindness, fairness, gentleness, patience, humility, respect, dignity and grace. Then take what you learned to do there and move on from the mirror to do the same for those who are leaving their mirrors to see themselves in our eyes.
This is a moment to stand in front of the mirror … to learn its lessons well … and then to leave it and love the world we see directly … that which is right before our eyes as is closer to us than we can imagine.
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