Arquivo para December 6th, 2024
Wisdom and humility
06
Dec
Those who claim to be great, or who receive
great honors, are not great; in fact, they are more linked to temporal power than to divine wisdom, they are only those who are content with passing joys and honors, often linked only to self-interest.
Other words that correlate with true humility include: naturalness, simplicity, simplicity, unpretentiousness, dispassion and detachment. In today’s world of immediate and fleeting narratives, they are clearly linked to pretension and affectation.
Another misconception that is more difficult to understand are the everyday correlates of humility, such as: submission, obedience, respect, compliance, subjection and passivity. This refers to people who are humble, but have difficulty discerning, even though obedience is a praiseworthy virtue, it can become subservient and harmful.
In the book Near to the Wild Heart (Perto do coração selvagem), the writer Clarice Lispector wrote: “I accept everything that comes from me because I have no knowledge of the causes and it is possible that I am stepping on the vital without knowing it, that is my greatest humility,” so one can be consciously obedient.
The former prime minister of Israel (1969-1974), Golda Meyer, once said to Moshe Dayan, a military man and politician at the time: “Don’t be humble, you’re not as important as you think”.
The vice that opposes humility is pride. There are many proud, vain, false prophets, Pharisees or just worldly people who have this vice. In biblical terms, it was pride that made one of the archangels of the high hierarchy want to be equal to God; the part contains part of the Whole, but it is not the Whole, and the narrative that everything is fragmentary is also false.
In all the biblical passages in which Jesus performs miracles, he always says to the interlocutor: “your faith has saved you”. The proud, Pharisees and idolaters want to attribute to themselves or their group the divine interventions in which they only participate in the invocation, and many of them don’t believe that the invocation is valid and so they condemn the intercessors, even though they do the same.
Pride explains many evils: war, greed, not caring for those in need, disrespect for nature (wanting to dominate it) and especially power and disrespect.
So humility is the effective antidote to all these evils: we are no more or better than anyone else, but we each have our own uniqueness and our own purpose.
