© 2014 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
Self-love does not encourage selfish withdrawal. It is a love intended to blossom in an embrace of the other. It is the love that I owe myself on a daily basis to enjoy life and love others.
But what does this have to do with my self-defense and this relentless ejection?
If I do not follow Aristotle’s advice, if I do not love myself even a little, in this case if I despise myself because I have been thrown away, then every link, every attachment seems hateful to me, both towards myself and towards others. I risk becoming in turn an ejection machine, an inflexible catapult. All this fragility that I despise in myself, I reject it in others; each weakness is a next victim. Each distress an irritating aversion. But if I manage to love myself in the greenness as in the dejection, I reconnect with the miracle of the heart. My tenderness flares out to infinity, it deposits on each one a sparkling dust like the gentle caress of a benevolent wind.
So nothing closes in me anymore, nothing stops or locks itself. I keep a friendship for everything that wavers, everything that bends, even to the incessant vertigo of my fragility. I discover myself as I discover the other, differently. I look at him as he gives himself; it is no longer the other as a useful thing, to be ejected or thrown away, but the other in his singular freshness, in his overflowing uniqueness, in his inestimable singularity. Soon, I see a providential glow on his face, a window full of hope, a promise of infinity: “Every face that faces me is an opening towards infinity, and it is this opening which not only imposes a moral attitude on me but also frees me from the being in which I am mired by guiding me towards this other than being that are love and responsibility towards the other man [^1].”
This parenthesis of infinity spreads within me in a luminous evidence; it stretches me to the other infinitely, connects me to it in a true expansion. Far from the encounters that consumption alone calls for. Far from interchangeable friendships. Far from interested considerations, but close, much closer.
Closer to me, closer to the other.
1. Morad El Hattab, Chronicles of a moon drinker against evil and love, Albin Michel, 2006 p 241
Published by Presses de la renaissance
Alexandra Ahouandjinou