Love Thy Neighbor

A subscriber to Thoughts While Shaving recently sent me the following:

“This moment that humanity is living through can be considered a door or a hole. The decision to fall into the hole or go through the door is yours.

If you consume information 24 hours a day, with negative energy, constantly nervous, with pessimism, you will fall into this hole.

But if you take the opportunity to look at yourself, to rethink life and death, to take care of yourself and others, you will go through the door.

Take care of your home, take care of your body. Connect with your spiritual home. When you take care of yourself, you take care of others at the same time.

Do not underestimate the spiritual dimension of this crisis. Adopt the perspective of an eagle that sees everything from above with a broader vision.

There is a social demand in this crisis, but also a spiritual demand. The two go hand in hand. Without the social dimension, we fall into fanaticism. Without the spiritual dimension, we fall into pessimism and futility.” (Hopi Indian Chief White Eagle)

There is a lot of wisdom here. But I would offer one additional perspective re:

– – When you take care of others you take care of yourself at the same time.

Christian doctrine centers on, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” ‘As yourself’, not ‘like yourself’. Note the difference. Your neighbor is not a copy of yourself; your neighbor IS yourself.

Christian cosmology is a cosmology of reciprocity. Unlike the active/passive verb forms hard wired in most Indo-European languages, Christianity contends that whatever you do to another, you do to yourself. So, taking “care of yourself” can only occur in the context of taking care of others. With Christianity, there is always only one world and whatever you do modifies all of Creation.