humility

To be of benefit and service

I believe that any human activity which stems from basic gentleness and the nonviolent nature of human beings has the guarantee to be of benefit and service.

Persevere in humble faith

Look well, O soul, upon thyself, lest spiritual ambition should mislead and blind thee to thy essential task: to wait in quietness, to knock and persevere in humble faith.

The wonder of the simplest gifts

Cultivating gratitude opens us to allurement, strengthens our trust, and expands our compassion. Gratitude manifests in the midst of our everyday living when we pause to take account of how much we have been given. We are present to the wonder of the simplest gifts: a glass of water, a spoonful of food, a breath of air. At such times our hearts are full.

January 2010 (Vol. XXIII, No. 1)

New Year's Greetings, dear friends of silence!  As we move through the winter season, let us, like the earth, lie fallow for a while, allowing unseen and as yet unknown life to gestate within our depths.  With deep humility, let us reflect in the silence upon what it means to surrender to the Divine Spark that resides in each of us and allow that creative Life Force to do with us what it will.  It is a gift of this quieter season that we can be released from our ego-driven lives and draw closer to the source of Love in the silent darkness.  Let us surrender ourselves in humble recognition that we are called, through faith, simply to be open and accepting; to listen, without expectations, to whatever is coming to birth within us.  We are called to a humble openness, to walk the way of goodness with the comfort of Love, at one with all humanity and with our earth.  May we surrender to the call, whatever it may be, as it comes to each of us.

Humility is the base from which everything grows

Mick Hales Monastic Gardens

We are striving for humility in our lives, to draw closer to God . . .  It is not an accident that the humus, or the soil, comes from the same word.  It's the base from which everything grows.  Gardening and the spiritual life go together.

I try to be like the water

Lily Yeh The Other Side

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.

Primary prerequiste for holiness

Alan Morinis Climbing Jacob's Ladder

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.

A humble spirit does not ask for more than it needs

Gary Zukav

A humble spirit does not ask for more
than it needs, and what it needs,
the Universe provides.

Humble amazement

Amar Jyoti

Humble amazement is a prerequisite for
coming to know God.

The hardest gift to accept

Judith Bluestone Polich Return of the Children of Light

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.

The feeling of ourselves as we are

The Cloud of Unknowing

Humility in itself is naught else but a true knowing and feeling of ourselves as we are.

The keystone human virtue of humility

Tony Hendra Father Joe

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.

Humility is the gentle acceptance of that most tender place inside ourselves

Marabai Staff Dark Night of the Soul

Humility is not a matter of beating ourselves up. It is not a question of judging ourselves as stupid or sinful, as hopeless and bad. Who are we to judge these things? Humility, it seems, is the gentle acceptance of that most tender place inside ourselves that throbs with the pain of separation from the Beloved. It is that deep knowingness that identification with the false self brings nothing but further separation. It is an initially reluctant dropping down into the emptiness and an ultimate experience of peace when we stop doing and rediscover simple being . . . when we heed the call to cease creating and remember we are created.

Knowing that God is the sole doer

Jerry Thomas

Humility is knowing that God is the sole doer.

Passing through the portals of humility

Rudolf Steiner Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment

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.

To live the paradox of our blessed and broken natures

Wendy M. Wright Weavings

Humility as a virtue has to do with knowing ourselves as human, as earthy, as the clay into which the divine breath has been breathed . . .  It is to live the paradox of our blessed and broken natures, to know that matter matters, that flesh carries spirit, that life is discovered at the precise meeting place of the human and the divine.  To practice humility is to live deeply into this truth, to lift oneself to the mountain top of prayer and aspiration and to embrace the lowly valley of our own abjection.

Rooted in this earth of everyday life

Piero Ferrucci Inevitable Grace

The word "humility" (also "human") is derived from the Latin "humus," meaning "the soil." Perhaps this is not simply because it entails stooping and returning to earthly origins, but also because, as we are rooted in this earth of everyday life, we find in it all the vitality and fertility unnoticed by people who mostly tramp on across the surface, drawn by distant landscapes.

Beginning of humility

Susan Vreeland The Passion of Artemisia

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.

If you think you are humble, you are not

S. Molly Monahan Seeds of Grace

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.

To live the paradox of our blessed and broken natures

Humility as a virtue has to do with knowing ourselves as human, as earthy, as the clay into which the divine breath has been breathed . . .  It is to live the paradox of our blessed and broken natures, to know that matter matters, that flesh carries spirit, that life is discovered at the precise meeting place of the human and the divine.  To practice humility is to live deeply into this truth, to lift oneself to the mountain top of prayer and aspiration and to embrace the lowly valley of our own abjection.

Humility is the base from which everything grows

We are striving for humility in our lives, to draw closer to God . . .  It is not an accident that the humus, or the soil, comes from the same word.  It's the base from which everything grows.  Gardening and the spiritual life go together.

Humility is the gentle acceptance of that most tender place inside ourselves

Humility is not a matter of beating ourselves up. It is not a question of judging ourselves as stupid or sinful, as hopeless and bad. Who are we to judge these things? Humility, it seems, is the gentle acceptance of that most tender place inside ourselves that throbs with the pain of separation from the Beloved. It is that deep knowingness that identification with the false self brings nothing but further separation. It is an initially reluctant dropping down into the emptiness and an ultimate experience of peace when we stop doing and rediscover simple being . . . when we heed the call to cease creating and remember we are created.

Rooted in this earth of everyday life

The word "humility" (also "human") is derived from the Latin "humus," meaning "the soil." Perhaps this is not simply because it entails stooping and returning to earthly origins, but also because, as we are rooted in this earth of everyday life, we find in it all the vitality and fertility unnoticed by people who mostly tramp on across the surface, drawn by distant landscapes.

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