#learninghumility

[leslieworks]

This is a great little Quora answer. I agree wholeheartedly. Learning humility doesn't seem to be something they teach at college, or indeed, in some families or cultures. It doesn't make you a wimp, passive or weak. if anything it shows inner strength and outer respect. 2 qualities that make you a winner in life and work. 

[melissafurniss]

The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began. Other vices may sometimes bring people together: you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people. But Pride always means enmity--it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God. In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that--and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison--you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you. That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people: that is, they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility to Him and get out of it a pound’s worth of Pride towards their fellow-men. I suppose it was of those people Christ was thinking when He said that some would preach about Him and cast out devils in His name, only to be told at the end of the world that He had never known them. And any of us may at any moment be in this death-trap. Luckily, we have a test. Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good--above all, that we are better than someone else--I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil. The real test of being in the presence of God is that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether. It is a terrible thing that the worst of all the vices can smuggle itself into the very center of our religious life. But you can see why. The other, and less bad, vices come from the devil working on us through our animal nature. But this does not come through our animal nature at all. It comes direct from Hell. It is purely spiritual: consequently it is far more subtle and deadly. For the same reason, Pride can often be used to beat down the simpler vices. Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a boy’s Pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave decently: many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper by learning to think that they are beneath his dignity--that is, by Pride. The devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride--just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains (similar to frostbite) cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer. For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

[learninggracenotes]

population density and humble pie

Austria may not have a huge population, but you're never not around people. And lately, I keep running into situations that remind me that living with people means that you don't get to do things your way all the time. You can't live like you're alone.

For one thing, in Austria, swimming is a contact sport. Well, let me rephrase that - swimming tries very hard NOT to be a contact sport. I haven't decided yet if it's one big game of chicken, or a weird version of sharks & minnows, but it's definitely different from how we do it in the states. In the US, pools have lanes. People share these lanes, and each person swims back and forth at his or her own pace. Not so here! Here, swimming is a free-for-all where 20 people do breast stroke in a 3-4 lane space, and it's inevitable that you will occasionally take a kick to the head, or get slapped across the ankle. But of course, being from the states, I'd rather swim freestyle. You quickly learn to bob your head up every few seconds to check and make sure no one's swimming straight at you. "Crap! Does (s)he see me?" you wonder, "(S)he's almost on top of me! How fast can I swerve?" Or alternately "Woah! That was close, I didn't even notice that person... good job they saw me coming." I've had to change how I approach swimming, because at home, it's a time of prayer and meditation for me. I can move my body and let my mind wander into God's presence. Here, the same behavior will ensure I crash once or twice a length and eventually get yelled at by the pool supervisor.

And that's another thing. People here will never hesitate to let you know when you're breaking the rules. Just now, sitting in Starbucks, I had my feet propped up on one of the coffee tables, and a lady came up to me. "Do you speak German?" she asked, cell phone in the hand she had propped on her hip. I looked up, confused. Her black leather boots matched her hair, and the lack of a green apron made it clear that, despite the stern expression on her face, she was not an employee. "Yes?" I said, perplexed. She proceeded to tell me, in clipped tones, that she didn't think it was fitting for me to put my feet on the table, and that she was thoroughly disgusted by it when she thought of the fact that she eats off of such tables. I was dumbstruck. I've been told not to prop my feet on chairs when wearing shoes, but in Starbucks, of all places, a haven of American culture, I should be allowed to prop my un-shod feet on a coffee table. Furthermore, this lady was taking it upon herself to yell at me as if she were my mother and I had propped my feet on the kitchen table. But there you have it. A patently Austrian moment. Her message delivered, she stomped off to the bathroom self-righteously, leaving me to my anger and the laughing eyes and placating smile of the pretty blonde sitting next to me.

But it isn't just swimming pools and coffee shops where I encounter this message that I need to be more conscious of the fact that living with others means self-denial. It stalks me at home and finds me in my bed, too. Well, not quite in my bed. But certainly at home. My recent experiences with Maria, my landlady, leave me in little doubt that not only am I headstrong when it comes to personal habits, I also have a habit of avoiding people with whom I experience conflict - and that that does NOT lead to happy roommate relationships.

In all honesty, it makes me want to rebel. I want people to stop sticking their noses in where they don't belong and stop trying to control/change my behavior. It makes me feel like I'm a nonentity until I break the rules, and then I'm a bad entity that has to be put back in place.

In my musings I wonder, if I let myself be broken in, like a horse, if I would then be valued, like a faithful charger or trusty carthorse. But then I realize that doesn't make any sense, really, because who would value me? Society? It is notorious for valuing only those with money or prestige, and following the rules guarantees neither. Friends? Surely friends value a person for more than their ability (or lack thereof) to deny themselves? 

But I'm not just learning to follow rules. These encounters are making me eat slice after slice of humble pie, and, if nothing else, learning to be humble will make me more Christlike. I just hope that's really how this all works out. The Spiritual Disciplines Handbook by Adele Ahlberg Calhoun defines humility as follows: To become like Jesus in his willingness to choose the hidden way of love rather than the way of power.

My struggle currently is figuring out what/where the hidden way of love is. Because, you see, humility isn't just NOT choosing the way of power. In choosing not to walk the way of power, you have to walk another path... and the way of hidden love isn't the only possible option. At the very least, there's also the way of bitterness, the way of resignation (these two run parallel), and the way of avoidance. I've walked them all recently, and have had to turn and walk back to the intersection every time. What is the way of hidden love? Where is it?