dRobinson

I've been reading/ listening to CS Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. I hit a section yesterday that got me thinking. It's a word picture of true humility.

[God] wants to bring a man [or woman] to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the, fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. [God] wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents—or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things.

 Humility is not "pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools." More than "a low opinion of [one's] own talents and character," humility is  "self-forgetfulness."  God would rather a man "thought himself a great architect or a great poet and then forgot about it, than that he should spend much time and pains trying to think himself a bad one."  What a good and true view of ourselves! And how rare. We have been taken in by Screwtape's ploys to get us either seeing ourselves better (false pride) or worse (false humility) than we really are. In either case, we are thinking about ourselves and our standing too much, and we are focusing on a false view of ourselves. Here is the key. Whether we have false pride or false humility, we are out of touch with reality. I want to be real, true, honest with myself and others. Lewis says true humility is to acknowledge what is real and true, to rejoice in it, and to be able to recognise all creatures (myself included) as glorious and excellent things.   In my band of brothers, we talk about "seeing another's glory" and "living out of our glory."  This is in no way trying to usurp the glory that belongs to God alone. It is simply -- and humbly -- acknowledging that as a creature made in his image, and restored by Christ,  a person has a real, personal glory that is his/ her individual reflection of the image of God. And, as Lewis says, in the Weight of Glory,

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.

Lewis also reminds us there, ""It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour." This brings us back to true humility, where in ourselves, we acknowledge and rejoice in then forget about our own glory. But in our neighbors and friends, we nurture and encourage those gifts. Real glory and from it, real humility in another does not diminish others, but makes room for others. Humility acknowledges the glimpses of glory that we see in nature, in an excellent creation, in others, and in ourselves. It acknowledges the excellence and rejoices in it. One final quote from Lewis' Weight of Glory,

Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat -- the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.