Humility

Pride is one of those English words that have multiple meanings. One can take pride in one’s work, or one’s country, or one’s community. That may be a strong, beautiful and necessary pride. However pride, the vice, the deadly sin, the root of many evils is an ugly thing. It could be defined as an inordinate opinion of one’s own dignity, importance, merit or superiority and it leads us to treat others with contempt at best and hatred at worst.

We have a tendency to extremes, I think, and often forget that virtue lies in the middle. So we, knowing that the virtue opposite to pride is humility, imagine humility to be putting ourselves down, talking away anything good about ourselves. In doing this we insult God’s creation and reject truth so that cannot be the way to go.

Humility is truth. If we want to be humble we need to know ourselves, our strengths, our weaknesses and acknowledge our sources. Our talents are gifts that we have through no merit of our own. I find I need to remind myself of this from time to time to prevent myself becoming too big-headed. It is important to realise though that there are certainly times when we have put in the effort and cultivated those talents. Perhaps it is in our appearance or an art or an achievement at work. Then it is good to take a compliment, as gracefully as possible, and there is no need to try to put yourself down to be humble.