In 2000, while I was in the hospital for by-pass surgery, an old man called out for help each night. All the prayers for his comfort and quiet seemed to float away. One night I found myself saying,
"Old man, you are not going to be miserable this night. My soul is coming over and our souls are going out dancing!"
I don't have a rational explantion, I only know he was quiet that night, my soul uplifted. I believe our souls danced that night. The next day the old man died. Such is the power of Spirit in our lives.
~ in a letter form Jacqueline White, a Friend of Silence
Humility is an inner quality that is ranked as the primary prerequisite for holiness. Without humility, we might be too proud to acknowledge our weaknesses, and so we wouldn't be inclined to work to make the necessary inner changes. . . . To strengthen the soul-trait of humility, walk the mind slowly and methodically along the full journey of life, from the fertilization of the egg all the way through death and decay. It engenders great appreciation for the wisdom of the divine and fosters a healthy and genuine sense of humility and gratitude for all we have received.
The heights of the spirit can only be climbed by passing through the portals of humility. You can only acquire right knowledge when you have learnt to esteem it.
~ from KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER WORLDS AND ITS ATTAINMENT by Rudolf Steiner
We don't talk much about humility in AA, almost never use the word. Maybe that is because, as the spiritual adage has it, if you think you are humble, you are not. But I see enough of freedom, serenity, healing, and unselfishness around me to think it must be hiding there somewhere.
I try to be like water. Water goes to the humblest, lowest places and provides moisture. My place in the world is pinpoint small, but it goes down deep. The residents of this bleak, barren, and disjointed community have taught me that there can be profound wisdom, wonder, and love in a place of almost total despair. Our neighborhood may be nothing like the pristine hallways of a gallery, but we do art here. Our art holds our feelings, the feeling that we care deeply -- like water, like life.
~ from Lily Yeh in "The Other Side," July/August 2004
Once you grasp the nature of unconditional love, you realize there is a higher order of complexity that is unfolding within human consciousness as a whole. Then you receive the next gift of the angel light -- humility, perhaps the hardest gift to accept. In the angel light, there is no room for self-importance -- it is, in fact, a major obstacle. Instead, it is necessary to surrender all our false pride. Humility ultimately teaches us that all life is sacred -- a gift of the divine union of form and the formless.
~ from RETURN OF THE CHILDREN OF LIGHT by Judith Bluestone Polich
Cara Mia, if that man has not separated you from the love of God, and he has not, then the only thing keeping hate of him alive is your thought about him. Only your pride keeps him in your memory. Dissolve your pride, and you dissolve your hate. To be still possessed of the hate that pain made is not intelligent. Take care. It can sap your energy to what you know to be your purpose. By being troubled about it, you have already discovered it to be unworthy of your grander aims, and that is the beginning of humility.
A saint is a person who practices the keystone human virtue of humility. Humility in the face of wealth and plenty, humility in the face of hatred and violence, humility in the face of strength, humility in the face of your own genius or lack of it, humility in the face of another's humility, humility in the face of love and beauty, humility in the face of pain and death. Saints are driven to humbling themselves before all the splendor and horror of the world because they perceive there to be something divine in it pulsing and alive beneath the hard dead surface of material things -- greater and purer than they are.
