Humble Pie (Retro Post)

Got some more brilliance from CS Lewis' book The Screwtape Letters. My most recent reading encountered the concept of true humility and our misconceptions of what being humble really means. Sometimes we can get this confused and this past letter in the book was a good explanation of how we are to be humble and proud at the same time. Here's an example from the book;

"[God] wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more or less glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another."

Catch that? Being humble is not going out throwing a CG, one hit, shutout and then downplaying it by saying you got lucky or something to that extent. CS Lewis says, humility is not "a pretty woman trying to believe she's ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools". Humility is being proud of the CG, one hit, shutout and then being JUST AS proud when the guy who's competing for that big league spot with you throws a no-no the next night. That hit anybody pretty hard? It def did me. I'll finish with this from the letter in the book. The high ranking demon in Satan's army writes to his nephew saying this:

"The Enemy (God) wants him (man), in the end to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbor's talents - or in a sunrise, and elephant, or waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things."

-TEvans