Inconspicuous Pride And Unseen Humility

Pride is the most subtle of sins.  To conceal itself, it becomes a part of something else.  In its hidden state, the sin of pride is often unnoticed by the person committing it.  Pride that has become inconspicuous does not mean that pride is absent, nor does it mean that it cannot be revealed.

Sometimes, pride can be found in the judgment of others, in thoughts and in words.  When one judges, one usually believes that one's conscience is clean and one's thoughts are pure; yet, nothing can be further from the truth.

Everyone sins, except for the Blessed Virgin Mary, the new Eve, and the Son of God, the new Adam.  Nobody is a descendant of the new Adam, or the new Eve, but everybody is a descendant of the original Adam and Eve, man's erstwhile parents who were convinced by the Serpent that they could be like God--perhaps even better than God.  Believing wrongly, they disobeyed God.  Their descendants today, that is everybody, are just like them.  There are those who are far worse, those who are secular-minded, who could care less about God, who do not genuinely believe in God and who commit the sin of pride recklessly and eagerly.

The reparation for having committed the sin of pride is humility.  Humility is an action, not a concept.  Humbling oneself sometimes means keeping quiet, saying nothing that chastises and burdens others with guilt, or that deprecate the dignity of others to elevate oneself.  For some people, all that is easier said than done.

The unconscionable, self-aggrandizement and judgmental man has become the new man.  This new man does not deem it necessary to reflect deeply and honestly on his own thoughts and actions or to have any compunction whatsoever.

As often as man points his finger at others, he ought to point as often the same finger at himself, because people are more similar than they are different.  The similarities can be nearly identical, especially when people are close to each other.  The closer they are, the more they are alike than different, and the more vehement the accusations when they do arise and the less they are able to forgive each other, even though humility demands forgiveness which is a step toward love.

To know what is true humility is to experience it, not the humility one thinks one has experienced in one's life because the sin of pride is able to disguise itself to confuse one's thoughts in order to mistake it for humility; rather, it is the humility of another that one needs to adapt oneself to, the humility of one who is part of one's life, who does not demand, who is ever-ready to forgive and love, no matter how hurtful the pain that has been caused by a loved-one, be it the lack of attention paid, the lack of time spent together or the lack of self-sacrifice in returning the love given so unconditionally.

To experience this humility, one has to lead  the life of the humble one for an entire day, a consecutive 24 hours.  Only then will one realize what is true humility which begins and ends with a quiet, undemanding, all-forgiving and continuous love.

This love is similar to that which flows from the Sacred Heart of Christ.  The difference is that the love of Christ is infinitely more intense, more abundant and uncontainably more expansive, a love that was formed with incomparable humility and etched by immeasurable pain, that grew boundlessly within the enclosed depths of quiet internal suffering beginning with the betrayal by Judas and ending with Christ's last breath on the Cross.

Nobody had before or since experienced what Christ experienced except for His Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Who in silence received without mitigation and contained within Her Sacred Heart the full range of pain and humility that Her Son had suffered out of love for God and for man.

The invisible act of humility, the absorption of injustice and pain in the silence of pure love, had been epitomized by Christ and His Blessed Mother.  The sin of pride, the antipode, is equally as invisible.  Invisibility is true humility's nature, whereas pride inconspicuousness is staged.  Pride is invisible because it is camouflaged in self-deceit and self-importance, causing one to be blind to true humility in others and to one's potential to be humble.

Paradoxically, it is true humility that is not seen that one must strive always to see in others and to bring out from within oneself, so that one may catch a glimpse of God in Heaven in all of God's magnificence.