Humility

Humility - an old-fashion word, and not very popular today. For me, it brings up images of self-degredation, or lack of pride in onesself. “Humble yourselves”, in the religion of my childhood, was synonymous with denying what you knew was right in favor of someone who had authority to tell you what the truth was.
Yet we also lose something without this word in our vocabulary. What do we do when we fail at our own values? There are things we believe in, ways we want to live, values we want to measure up to - and as humans, there will be times we fail, when we act in ways we are not proud of, when we do not act like the person we want to be. What is our attitude towards ourselves when we fail?

Well, we can get out our affirmations and psych ourselves up, memorizing statements about how worthy we are, reminding ourselves of the good things we’ve done, and how we will do better next time. Or we can beat ourselves up, repeating critical voices of the past that would have us believe we barely deserve life for the atrocity we’ve committed.

But humility can provide an attitude that is both realistic as well as loving, by acknowledging our weaknesses. We don’t always have the strength of will or presence of mind to live the way we want to live. We can recognize that we are people who cannot always do it alone, that we need the strength and support of others who believe in us. In short, to have humility is the recognition of who we are - not who we want to be, nor who we fear we might be - but simply who we are, with our strengths and weaknesses, successes and failings.

Humility is next to compassion - if we cannot see our weaknesses clearly and without distortion, without shame and without excuses, we cannot have compassion for ourselves. Nor can we truly have compassion for others’ weaknesses if we harbor shame of our own.

We are unfathomably glorious yet terribly fragile creatures, living in a world that, despite the risk, we have to trust.