The first ingredient in
really loving oneself is a passionate commitment to personal excellence – to
loving who you really are - enough to care about becoming your best self. Really loving oneself does not mean papering
oneself, but doing hard things for one’s own good. One of the most critical
needs here is the need for a capacity for critical and constructive
self-awareness. You must be able to know
and understand what makes you tick. You must own your own personal history and
heal it if necessary. In short, you must be dedicated first of all to becoming your best as a
quality human person. Let me put that another way. (a) You cannot take a
loser and ordain him and expect to have an effective priest! If he is not a
quality human being to begin with, all you will end up with is a loser priest
who can’t relate to people or inspire them to hunger for holiness. (b) You
cannot take two losers and put them through a wedding and expect to end up with
a happy marriage and effective parents! If they are not quality human beings to
begin with, all you will end with is a miserable marriage and disastrous
parents!
The second ingredient in
really loving oneself is a passionate commitment to vocational excellence – to
what you do. In other words, if you are a parent, commit yourself to being the
very best parent you can be! If you are married, commit yourself to being the
best husband or wife you can be! If you are a priest, commit yourself to be the
best priest you can possibly be! Whatever you do, be good at it! If you strive
to be the best at what you do, you will get better at it. If you choose the
“good enough to get by” path, you will become known for your mediocrity. Without a passionate commitment to vocational
excellence, you will no doubt end up being a half-assed priest, a half-assed
marriage partner or half-assed parent! The world is already overcrowded with
mediocrity – with “half-assedness” -
people with no passion for personal or
vocational excellence! My mother used to
call them “people who merely go through the motions,” “people whose hearts are
not in it.” God says to us in Revelations 3:15-16, “Would that
you were either cold or hot. So,
because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of my
mouth.” May you be spared from half-assedness!”
May you be the very best version of yourself, a person passionately
committed to your own personal and vocational excellence, a person committed to
becoming your best self and committed to excellence at what you do!
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