Only by being humbled in our own eyes can we begin to see our true place in His world.
To recognize our weakness does not diminish us. It frees us. It liberates us from the exhausting illusion that we must somehow be without fault.
And once we have faced our own frailty, something remarkable happens: we become gentler with the frailty of others. We become more than merely tolerant of those whose flaws have been painfully revealed. We understand them. Their failures no longer seem foreign to us, because we discover something of them within ourselves.
Frequently, our age finds such humility difficult. We feel the need to defend ourselves, justify ourselves, and conceal our weaknesses.
Yet the paradox remains: the smaller we become in our own eyes, the larger our capacity for compassion.
Here lies one of Benedict’s great steps toward spiritual maturity: when I no longer need to stand above another, I am finally free to stand along side of them with the living Christ by our side.
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