A Brief Reflection on the role of Agape

A Brief Reflection On the Role of Agápe

When Caring for Your Feelings

Texts from St. John’s First Letter, Chapter 4

(adapted by Rev. Edwin McMahon, Ph.D.)

16: “GOD IS LOVE (AGAPE). A person who dwells in love is dwelling in God, and God in that person.”

19: “We have love because God has love for us first. But if a person says, ‘I have love for God, while hating themselves or another person, that person is a liar. Why? Because if you do not have love for yourself as well as the brother or sister whom you have seen, it cannot be that you have love for God whom you have not seen. And, indeed, this command comes to us from Christ himself; that one who has love for God must also have love for himself or herself as well as for others.”

7-12: “So, dear friends, let us have love for all people, including ourselves, because love is from God. Everyone who has love is a child of God and knows God. But those without love know nothing of God. FOR GOD IS LOVE; and his love was disclosed to us in this, that he sent his only Son into the world to bring us life. The love I speak of is not our love for God, but the love God showed to us in sending his Son as the remedy for the defilement of our sins. If God thus had love for us, dear friends, we in turn are bound to have love for one another and for ourselves. Though God has never been seen by any person, God dwells in us if we have love for ourselves and each other. Thus, God’s love is brought to perfection within us.”

The Role of Agápe When Caring for Your Feelings

Some may wonder about the appropriateness of using the word, “agápe,” when it is directed toward oneself and one’s own feeling. But a moment’s reflection on the psychology of this approach can easily clarify its important function.

Loving Your Neighbor as Yourself

Experience today, along with ample psychological research, shows that people who have not been taught a way to process their negative feelings, and whose environment has impacted them with a sense of low self-esteem, self-doubt and a negative self-image, will then invariably tend to treat other people in exactly the same way they feel about and treat themselves. We can finally appreciate today that at the time the scriptures were written if the authors had developed a better sense for this connection, that the ways in which people feel about themselves then influences their treatment of other people, these same authors would have expanded their injunction about “love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mk 12:31) Love your neighbor as yourself makes absolutely no sense psychologically when a person carries feelings of self-hatred within and against themselves

Our fears and tears, our feelings of low self-esteem, sadness, and anger which we so often perceive and label as enemies are really trying to tell us something very important. They are not our enemies, and such experiences fall well within the added injunction of Christ, “You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Mt 5:43-44)

We must learn to bring a loving, caring presence (agápe) to the feelings and burdens we bear within our own bodies. They, too, have a story to tell. A healthy self-love that is congruent with and owning the reality of one’s experience acknowledges and works with the obstacles we all carry in our efforts to love both ourselves and one another.

Commentary: Christian spirituality is meant to be a lifelong, organic, developmental process of noticing and nurturing our important feelings as the doorway that allows our body’s affection teacher--the gift of God’s love—to open our pores of presence. Then, from inside us, as this develops into a habit within our bodies, the hidden depth and breadth of God’s Presence

in all things breaks through.