Hello Humility!

Hi folks!

I said in the beginning I wanted this to be a joint endeavor. I don't want you to feel like I'm just "talking at you". I love knowing the inner workings of people. So please, feel free to chime in. I'm not looking for comments to know that you are reading this... but for comments so we can support each other! For a long time, humility was an elusive virtue I sought, then I read Screwtape Letters. It changed my life completely. Now I put forth all that I have with pride and joy... not for myself, but for its own goodness. It is really quite a miracle that I am able to write this blog without worrying about whether it will become a self-centered thing. I desire people to see it for what it is... a longing for more of God and for connection with others. I know it is a good thing and hope it will serve you as well as the beauty of a sunset or a haunting melody (I'm listening to Of Monsters and Men right now!)

Much love,
Katie

"You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible. To anticipate the Enemy's strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the man 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.

The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favor that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbor’s talents—or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall.

He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognize all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love—a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbors as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbors.

For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our Enemy; He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created and always gives back to them with His right hand what He has taken away with His left."

 

C.S. Lewis Screwtape Letters