Almost everyone knows the great Command-ment: "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself" (Luke 10:27). This all seems so easy . . . so simple. If people lived according to this greatest commandment, it would lead to a beautiful world here. Moreover, not only would this make for a beautiful world here, it would lead us to beauty and goodness itself-God-in the kingdom of heaven.

We all know this. There must be a 1001 reasons why everyone ought to live this way every day. The reason we don't do this is that love depends on knowledge. We cannot love what we don't know, nor will we love genuinely what we don't know to be good. Today many people have difficulty knowing themselves for whom and what they truly are . . . children of God, and good. Being able to live the Great Commandment requires that I know myself in these two ways.

A great story, play, and film is The Elephant Man. It is a story of a unique relationship between Dr. Tebbes and John Merrick, the man who has the "elephant disease." At one point John journeys by himself, a monumental feat in itself, across the English Channel from Brussels to London. In the London train terminal, he is harassed by a young boy and then chased by others. He eventually takes refuge in the men's room. There, cornered and afraid, he yells out, "I am not an animal. I am a human being." What self-knowledge! What an acknowledgment of identity!

To this, however, you and I must add "child of God." Only if and when we add "I am a child of God" will we know ourselves for whom and what we truly are. Only then will we be able to love ourselves. And only after that are we ready or even able to love others and God. We love not for what we can get. We love in response for whom and what we are. Genuine self-knowledge is the basis of morality-knowledge we struggle so very hard to claim today.

© Harcourt Religion Publishers/BROWN-ROA