Humility is not for wimps

I don't remember exactly where I read this. I think it was one of the recovery magazines that are always around the rooms attached to halfway houses or recovery centers.

"Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It's thinking of yourself less."

I love it. It's simple and direct. But I don't think it's something that many of us are familiar with or comfortable with when we come into the rooms. Of course, I don't have any frame of reference for what it's like for a woman, but as a guy the word humility always implied a defeat. "The team suffered a humiliating loss to cross-town rival..." "He was humiliated by his failure to..."

Then we come into the rooms, already beaten down by our disease and desperately clinging to whatever self-esteem and ego we have left, not understanding that it is our selfishness and self-centeredness that is at the root of our problems. It is all about me. And my rectal-cranial inversion keeps me thinking it is all about me.

My Catholic faith has taught me to be humble before God. At least, I thought it had. After all it was God, capital G, they were talking about. It was easy to be humble before HIM.

I had missed something though. God comes to me through others. And sometimes the other isn't very attractive. "Don't you know who I think I am!" But, can I stop thinking about myself long enough to take a cup of coffee to the elderly man in the corner trembling with Parkinson's who wants to talk but you can barely understand him? Can I forget about myself long enough to talk to the guy with the shakes, who still smells of urine and vomit, but who desperately wants help? Can I forget about myself long enough to pick up the empty coffee cups and candy wrappers and throw them away?

Sometimes. Sometimes. Sometimes I can't and I know I have a long way to go. But I know the direction I need to be going and I have hope. Hope that only the rooms and the program and my God, with and without the capital G, could have given me.

I'll close this post with the plaque on humility Dr. Bob had on his desk:

"Perpetual quietness of heart. It is to have no trouble. It is never to be fretted or vexed, irritable or sore; to wonder at nothing that is done to me, to feel nothing done against me.

"It is to be at rest when nobody praises me, and when I am blamed or despised, it is to have a blessed home in myself where I can go in and shut the door and pray to my Father in secret and be at peace, as in a deep sea of calmness, when all around and about is seeming trouble

Until next time...