glorycloud's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- role of being nothing but a reflector and a receiver of divine light "Humility is the supreme consciousness and living both of the divine infinity and our own littleness. It is at the same time the consciousness that the divine infinity pierces everything and everybody around us. This is why we said that it is a giant growth of knowledge. The humble person gives in to his fellow as he would before God. If pride blinds our eyes to the infinite reality of God, humility makes them see it. So, whatever we do, as long as we lack humility, as long as there is a trace of pride in us, we lack the thrill of contact with God; we lack the profound consciousness of a deeper relationship with God, and neither do we make others feel it. Where humility is lacking, there is superficiality, the commonplace, a closed horizon, the kind of conceit that provokes a smile of pity. Only the humble lives in the immeasurable depths, full of mystery, in God. Only his deeds and attitudes are seasoned with salt (understood as seriousness and deification). You have to make yourself little, and then some, so little that you must consider yourself nothing, to see the majesty of God and to make yourself feel humble by His action. Humility is all encompassing wisdom. The humble person, far from becoming poor, embraces the infinite more than anybody else and offers it to others. The proud person is mostly smoke. Humility is the valley of the lush field of corn which draws its vitality from the vigor of the infinite. Pride is the barren rock battered by the icy north wind of nothingness, which draws out life. Humility is the supreme transparency of our nature, won after getting rid of the host of passions; it penetrates all the faculties of the soul. By the passions, secretly driven by pride, man is continually thinking of himself; he doesn't see the reality and work of God-he gets in the way so he can't see them. He is his own darkness and smoke. The passions are growths, sick ones, of the ego, the smoke comes from it, gets between his view and the true ego, so he takes himself for somebody who isn't real. And I wonder if when the mind transcends itself, that it, reaches ecstasy, in order to see God, doesn't it mean precisely this humble forgetting of self in the face of His overwhelming reality? To know something you have to forget yourself, because you are nothing but an instrument for seeing, or receiving the infinite realities, not even an instrument that exists by itself. You are a worker only because of the good will of the owner. Humility looks like self-reduction to nothing; in reality it is a return of our nature to the place where it is a window of the infinite and empty room intended to be filled with divine light. In fact, the window doesn't exist for itself-the room which God sends light to is dark without it. So it is with man-if he only accepts this role of being nothing but a reflector and a receiver of divine light, he has a tremendous destiny: that of living with the infinite. If he is ashamed of this role and is filled with his own smoke, he can no longer see anything even in himself." pg. 183,184 Dumitru Staniloae 9:39 a.m. - 2009-01-11 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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