Tuesday, January 23, 2007

The Seven Deadly Virtues - Humilty

Humility Picture courtesy of Mike Paul Blog

Recently, I've been doing a lot of thinking about humility. I've come to the conclusion, that I really need to learn to be humble. The real humility, and not the insincere, "look at me, look how humble I am" humility.

Dean recently posted on this topic. He did a really good job on tackling the issue of humility from a different perspective.

The following is an excerpt:

..."I hope by now the shock has worn off and you realize that I do not mean for you to physically cease to be. Physically dying would be a much easier but much less fruitful task. No, what we want to do is empty ourselves, to the point that we lose ourselves. Why would we want to do that? Well, let’s take a look at who we are. We are all selfish, self-righteous, prideful, arrogant, unloving, lying, envious and jealous people. In other words, “somethin’ done went wrong with us.” Do you not find any of those traits in you?...

...Now, in order for us to get anywhere, we have to start with the virtue that begins the dying process. Humility is the key to all of the other virtues. Without humility one cannot take any of the other virtues to heart because there is no space left inside the heart because it’s full of self. Now humility does not mean that you have to walk around telling people how lowly and unworthy you are. In fact, if you were to meet a truly humble person, you would most likely say to yourself, “Wow, he (or she) really listened to me and cared about what I was saying.” Humility gets rid of the you, while raising up others. This is one of the reasons why it is so hard, because it helps you to realize that the world doesn’t revolve around you!

Humility truly allows us to gain wisdom and knowledge. This is because it helps us to rid ourselves of what we think we know, so that others can fill our minds and hearts with the true knowledge that we don’t know. In other words, humility is the softener of hard-hearts, and hard-heads.

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