We urgently need the meditation of another’s eyes to love ourselves and accept ourselves. The eyes may be those of a parent, a friend, a spiritual director; but above all they are those of God our Father. The look in his eyes is the purest, truest, tenderest, most loving, and most hope-filled in this world. The greatest gift given those who seek God’s face by persevering in prayer may be that one day they will perceive something of this divine look upon themselves; they will feel themselves loved so tenderly that they will receive the grace of accepting themselves in depth.

What has just been said has an important consequence. When people cut themselves off from God, they deprive themselves of any real possibility of loving themselves. This also works the other way: people who hate themselves cut themselves off from God. In ‘Dialogues of the Carmelites’ by Georges Bernanos, the aged prioress addresses the following words to the young Blanche de la Force: “Above all, never despise yourself. It is difficult to despise ourselves without offending God in us.”

To finish with, here is a short passage from Henri Nouwen’s beautiful book ‘The Return of the Prodigal Son’:

For a very long time I considered low self-esteem to be some kind of virtue. I had been warned so often against pride and conceit that I came to consider it a good thing to deprecate myself. But now I realize that the real sin is to deny God’s first love for me, to ignore my original goodness. Because without claiming that first love and that original goodness for myself, I lose touch with my true self and embark on the destructive search among the wrong people and in the wrong places for what can only be found in the house of my Father.” –Father Jacques Philippe “Interior Freedom”