For much of my life – and now also sometimes – I live with some root of despair. Inside of me, there was (and is?) a pride that simmers and vegetates and grows weeds and rank flowers whenever I fail, or my own resources fail to get something I want or need.
Because my resources, and the resources of almost anyone I know, fail again and again, I often fell into despair.
Thomas Merton writes that despair is the ultimate and inevitable pride, so entrenched and stiff-necked in obsession that it selects absolute misery rather than accept happiness from life or the hands of my idea of God.
I often wondered why failure or life relied on one thought: “Why is this only happening to me?”
My perspective on the world would shrink in anger and disappointment; I saw myself as a helpless victim of painful circumstances beyond my control. How could these awful things happen to me if there was a God or if anyone or anything was watching out for me?
Looking back, self-pity was addictive: a place to hide behind, a distraction, and a surrender to life’s possibilities. It is always easier to just suffer than to change.
Feeling sorry for myself was cancerous; it removed responsibility. If life was unfair and rigged against me, I was relieved of the pressure to try, risk failure, get help, or know the real me.
During my search for a spiritual life, I learned it was impossible to overestimate the value of true humility and its place in the spiritual life. As I took the time to look deeply at myself, I didn’t like what I saw. I dislike self-pity in others, which is perhaps why I came to hate it in myself.
Meditating and mulling over this new reality, I came to see that humility was the answer for me, a difficult thing to acknowledge and even more difficult to change. All I could do was try.
A truly humble human cannot despair or indulge himself in self-pity. I had it no worse than anyone; I decided that was a way to look at the world, to stop pitying myself, and to go into the world with meaning, not whining.
When I look at the news, I see self-pity as a raging American disease; almost everyone I see is blaming someone else for their troubles and hating everyone different. In the truly humble man, there is no longer any such thing as self-pity. That’s what Thomas Merton wrote.
“For the consummation of humility,” wrote Merton, is the beginning of what he called blessedness and of the idea of joy, not complaint or bitterness. I still believe I am entitled to the bitterness and suffering in my life, but I am learning bit by bit to see the world differently.
But I am also just beginning to understand the meaning of responsibility. I am responsible for my own life, now, then, and in the future.
We all feel pain; we all suffer; it is an elemental part of being human. My new motto was this: everyone has it worse than I do.
I was not made to be perfectly happy; I doubt I will ever be wholly humble and self-effacing. But I can be better, and I can do better, and I can feel better. I’m on the way even if I never get there, and that is the point of spirituality for me.
Humility, as the great philosophers say, can be the answer to all the great problems of the soul. Loving others is the way to humility; it is selfish to give only to myself. It pushes me towards a higher level of joy and meaning. I am not there yet, but thinking about it has already changed me.
Getting older is a gift when it comes to humility: get there or disappear.
“It is here,” wrote Merton, “that everyone who humbles himself is exalted,” and then liberated, a fascinating idea for me. When I was incapable of humility, I was also incapable of joy, because humility alone has already liberated me from the self-pity that blocks the self-centeredness that makes joy and happiness impossible.
To be loved I decided, I had to love. To be strong, I had to turn away from fear and towards my own kind of faith. To be happy, I had to understand that I had to make other people happy first. To find the joy of love, I had first to love others more than I loved myself.
Once I knew that there were people more important than me, the doors opened.
Bit by bit, my Self-pity went away (it does pop up from time to time; perfection is not the point); intention matters.
The Christian prophets believed, as Jesus did, that the true waters of life are given to those who have no money. I see this in my own life.
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As I watch the war against the Billionnaires, I see the point. It is not the rich who will bring us back to a better place; it’s the poor. They are always the ones who bring humanity back. They are the ones the spirits love.
I understand the importance of money, but I also came to see the importance of valuing other things more than money. Money, like hatred and self-pity, cannot define my life. It’s not the point.
Humility has opened my eyes to other things – love, the joy of helping others, the joy of love, the joy of nature, the joy of courage, the sickness of self-pity, the idea of making the world a bit better.
The truth I found was that, in many ways, I was enslaved to the idea of the successful, other, popular and “successful” self, stuck on the vain hopes, lies, and cruelty I see all around me and the illusory desires we are all taught to want.
I’m not there yet; no one, I think, is ever there.
I’m learning more about faith, and what it means. Self-confidence is not the same as faith. Faith is much deeper, and for me to get where I want to go, I understand that faith has to be deep enough and only functions when I am otherwise in trouble, stricken by fear or anger.
Truth faith means I get up and go on, not that I never suffer. The humble man I would like to be has to go on evenly, even when age and everything else is taken away. A humble man doesn’t mind praise. It nourishes the soul.
Aging has helped me see this. It has helped me do this.
I’m not there yet, and I doubt I will ever be. But it’s a beautiful thing to want and think about.
I am not the most important person in the world, not even close. But trying has been good for me and my idea of aging.
I can’t tell you how good it feels to understand that fully.
