A Reading from the Gospel of Matthew
But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they came together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”
Reflection
One question that arises from Jesus’s teaching on the Greatest Commandment is: “What does it mean to love God with all our mind or all our heart?”
Another question that arises is: “How do I love myself?”
Our interior is complex, with many parts.
We can identify protectors (managers and firefighters), exiles carrying burdens that get banished from our conscious experience, and even an innermost self.
The innermost self is capable of caring for our whole person with compassion, creativity, courage, calm, confidence, clarity and connectedness.
These are what the Internal Family Systems (IFS) psychological model calls “The 8 C’s.”
When we can feel the 8 C’s, we have an indication that we are acting out of our innermost Self.
When we are acting out of our innermost self, we can love the other parts of ourselves.
There may be a part of us that is a hard worker and another part that knows how to have a good time.
We may have a part that is strong and can fight for justice and another part that is tender and romantic and knows how to be attentive to a woman.
When we are acting out of our innermost self we can see and love all the good ways God has made us: “For you formed my inward parts, you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am wondrously made. Wonderful are your works” (Ps 139:13-14)!
On the other hand, sometimes a part of us takes over and we lose this grace-filled perspective.
When we are burdened with failure or threatened by someone who makes us feel inadequate, our hard-working part can be pushed into extreme functioning.
We overwork to prove ourselves and to exile the pain of feeling our weakness.
When our weakness is exposed, perhaps by an angry boss or a jealous colleague, the part of us that knows how to have fun might act out as a “firefighter” through pornography or alcohol in order to squelch the pain.
This can intensify the shame and cause our inner critic to start beating up our fun-loving part.
Meanwhile, another righteous part of us might call the priest on speed-dial to bury it all in a quick Confession.
Speaking of ourselves in “parts” language can start to sound a little crazy, as if we have multiple personalities, but most people who read this kind of description can also identify with it.
As St. Paul said, we are at war in our members (cf. Romans 7:23).
We know there are conflicting forces at work in us and each has a certain kind of logic that it follows.
What are we to do about this?
The key is to get some distance from individual parts and operate out of our innermost self.
We can do that by various grounding techniques, such as taking a few deep breaths (breathe in to a count of four, pause for a second and breathe out to a count of four; repeat this several times).
Also, by focusing on the feeling we can get some distance from it.
For example, when a craving starts to come up (from a firefighter preparing to wash out the feeling of shame), we can get a little distance from the craving by asking questions like, “How intense is this craving, on a scale of 1 to 10?” or “Where do I experience this craving in my body?”
As we spend more time in our innermost self, we will grow in confidence that all the parts of us are good, even if some of them cause some problems at times, and we will learn to love God with all our hearts even as we love our neighbors as ourselves.
For more on a Catholic approach to IFS see Souls and Hearts.
For more on IFS applications to shame and purity, see Purity is Possible and Optimal Work.
