Ourselves

... we all have to discover for ourselves - and it can be in agony - that possessiveness never leads to possession, and that it is only the generosity which makes no demands that elicits the full-hearted satisfying response. And for this we have first to learn to love ourselves, because without such generous love of self, our love of others, whatever its outward manifestations, becomes in its inner essence a compulsive grasping in which we try to compensate from their personality for the value which we deny to our own.

  No, it can be no easy journey, this voyage of  discovery in which we set out to find ourselves. The road to the celestial city is a long road. In places it must needs be stony and steep. And as we travel we shall not always be certain of arriving at our destination. Yet from time to time we shall ascend the Delectable Mountains, and from there we shall behold the city from afar, perceiving something of the breadth and length and height and depth of what it is to be fully ourselves. In such fleeting moments of vision we reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory which even now is being revealed in us. And this it is which gives us hope, and makes us count them happy which endure.


From the sermon: What Does It Profit a Man? (based on Luke 9.25)
by Harry Williams published in his book The true Wilderness (1965).