As I was pondering our "right relationship to ourself this week" after some personal and pastoral reflections, I was grateful to come across this article by Tryn Clark (NCL 1996) on the same.  May it inspire the thought that a healthy self-image is vital to fulfilling the Two Great Commandments.

Love and Peace,

Ethan 

There need to be in the individual such beliefs as: "I am competent; I can fight my life battles; I am worth saving; there is a good worth fighting for; the Lord loves me enough to fight for my salvation; I have experienced myself as a lovable and loving person at times, so I know it's possible for me to attain those states again." 

These are the kinds of states one can identify under the rubric of "self-esteem." And they are the kinds of thoughts and feelings that remain with us from our positive childhood relationships and learning experiences and successful encounters with life's challenges. Taken together they form our sense of ourself as an adult in the world. 

[Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven 561] describes those experiences that build our "fullness of remnants" which will sustain us later in combat, and which form the affective and cognitive structures of our self-representation, our experience of ourself, our self in relation to our value to others, our self-esteem: 

[Remnants are] not only the good and true things that an individual has learned from the Lord's Word from infancy, and so has impressed on their memory, but they are also all of the states derived from these, such as states of innocence from infancy, states of love from parents, brothers and sisters, teachers, friends, states of charity toward the neighbor, and also of pity for the poor and needy; in a word, all states of good and truth. 

[Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven 5335] emphasizes that these experiences are so essential that a person will fail in his or her spiritual combats without these things and their effects. Thus, "as a person cannot be regenerated, that is, be admitted into the spiritual combats through which regeneration is effected, until they have received remains to the full, it was ordained that the Levites should not do any work in the tent of meeting until they had completed thirty years, which work or function is also called warfare."

In the course of the struggle, we come to know that all [states] of love and truth are just that, gifts from the Lord. However, in the early states we are fighting from our own experiential sense of ourselves as a good and able person, a person worth fighting for.