Know Thyself

David Dickens reminds us that humility is not grovelling.

Humility is also not pretending (even to ourselves) that we are worse than we are.

Humility is just seeing, really seeing, the truth about ourselves. Humility is facing up to the horrifying insight when it gobsmacks us right between the eyes. Humility is remembering what we saw, after we've lost sight of it again.

True self-understanding means we don't have to pretend anything. We discover we are already much sicker, more deformed and disfigured, uglier, than we had ever supposed.

Humility is being willing to see ourselves as we really are, even though the sight is hideous. Greater humility is even longing to see our sickness, that we may repent of it and be made well. But if we really want to root it out, we'll have to become stronger within, to be able to bear seeing beyond the tip of the iceberg. This means we must fast and pray and go to church and pray and help the poor and pray and go to confession and pray and study and pray. Because God, in His love, only lets us see as much of that reality as we are able to bear - and with it, to a more than commensurate degree, discloses His fathomless Love to enable us to take courage, to repent, to wage war upon the grotesqueness within, not to despair but to rejoice and give thanks with tears.

Unwillingness to "know thyself" is probably that darkness of which Christ spoke when He said "Men preferred the darkness to the Light, because their deeds were evil." That's the terminal illness that dooms a person to die even sicker (far sicker) than when he was born.

Create in me a clean heart, O God.