I only brought two books with me on the Ride:Well Tour: Mary Oliver’s Dream Work (my favorite collection of hers) and Walking on Water by Madeline L’Engle. I’m a fairly uncommitted reader, so I thought that would be enough.
L’Engle refers to several books in Walking on Water, two of which I found myself desperately needing. One being her own A Circle of Quiet, and also Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. It just so happened that A Circle of Quiet is in my own library of books, and with two taps on my phone, I had Rilke’s on the way to meet me in Nashville when the tour stopped there.
I finished Rilke’s the two nights I was home, and plucked A Circle of Quiet off the top shelf in my office to put in my messenger bag. Also, since my church (St. Bartholomew’s) was hosting me, from their bookstore, I picked up a copy of Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail – a book exploring the movement of protestants into the Anglican/Episcopalian tradition, since I currently find myself in such a transition.
Only eleven pages into A Circle of Quiet, I came across these words I found quite worthy of sharing. I’d love your thoughts on them:
The Greeks had a word for ultimate self-consciousness which I find illuminating: hubris: pride: pride in the sense of putting oneself in the center of the universe. The strange and terrible thing is that this kind of total self-consciousness invariably ends in self-annihilation. The great tragedians have always understood this, from Sophocles to Shakespeare. We witness it in history in such people as Tiberius, Eva Peròn, Hitler.
I was timid about putting forth most of these thoughts, but this kind of timidity is itself a form of pride. The moment that humility becomes self-conscious, it becomes hubris. One cannot be humble and aware of oneself at the same time. Therefore, the act of creating – painting a picture, singing a song, writing a story – is a humble act? This was a new thought to me. Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.
I tweeted this specific line a few days ago: “One cannot be humble and aware of oneself at the same time,” and surprisingly received some negative feedback. I personally thought it was a brilliant, but others didn’t share the sentiment.
Oswald Chambers hinted on something similar once:
Yet you will never be able to measure fully what God will do through you if you have a right-standing relationship with Jesus Christ…it is actually by His mercy that He does not let you know it.”
Y tu? What do you think of humility, self-awareness, and self-consciousness and how they play together?
When we notice how we are being humble, or sacrificing for one thing or another, I think that could be a form of pride. It’s in the unaware, subconscious moments we don’t notice when it’s truly God working through us, and we’re allowing him to by getting out of the way.