11th February 2007
At Evening Prayer I was giving thanks for a good weekend and continuing to reflect on what blessedness and chosenness means to me - a reoccuring theme over recent days. I caught myself reflecting negatively on my own worth.
Like most of us, I am my own harshest critic.
I read from a favourite consolation these words:
Instead of wasting energy in being disgusted with yourself, accept your own failure, and just say to God, 'Well, in spite of all I may say or fancy, this is what I am really like - so please help me in my weakness'. This, not self-disgust, is the real and fruitful humility.
Evelyn Underhill.
Underhill hits home every time.
It seems to me that humility is the key to blessedness. My inner knowing, growing and glowing that I am as God would have me be, is celebrated through my delight in the important things in life. My angst in the moment is neither here nor there in the cosmic scale of things.
This is what Isaac Newton wrote of himself:
I do not know what I may appear in the world; but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me...
Sometimes I can't see what is staring me in the face - and I take comfort in the fact that a genius - a person who changed our understanding of what our created world is - like the Isaac Newton had that sense too.
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