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Thirteenth Wednesday after Pentecost
- caelidomum
- Sep 9
- 4 min read
Thirteenth Wednesday after Pentecost. Twentieth Reason for Being Very Humble: Self-love Exposes Our Salvation to Great Peril.
Summary of the Morrow’s Meditation.
We will meditate to-morrow upon a twentieth reason for being very humble, which is that self- love is: 1st, a never-ceasing danger; 2d, often a more serious danger than we suspect it to be. We will then make the resolution: 1st, never to seek after praise and esteem; 2d, never to make any endeavor to hide what is humiliating to us. Our spiritual nosegay shall be the counsel of the Holy Spirit: “Humble thy heart” (Ecclus. ii. 2).
Meditation for the Morning.
Let us adore the Holy Ghost giving us this counsel: Humble your heart and serve God in all humility and patience (Ecclus. ii. 2, 4). He could not give us more useful advice, for self-love every moment exposes us to danger, often of a more serious kind of danger than we dream of. Let us thank the Holy Spirit for a counsel so precious.
Self-love is a Never-ceasing Danger.
Self-love is constantly at work around us, occupied in seducing us, as well in little matters as in great, in solitude as well as in the world, in private as well as in public. Always and everywhere it is at the door of our heart, with its arrow in its hand ready to pierce us. We labor with- our minds or with our hands; it is there to tell us that we are doing well, and to congratulate us; to persuade us that we do better than others; that we are more clever, more intelligent; or if we do not succeed, to fill us with vexation; to put us into a bad temper, and to make us dream of something or other in which we believe we are superior to our rivals. If, instead of working, we do nothing, self-love is still there, making our imagination wander back to the past to praise us for what we have done; to the future, to dream about what we will do, what we shall become, and to compliment us upon it; upon persons of our acquaintance, to penetrate into their hearts that we may see what they think of us; or to assist at conversations where we suspect that they are speaking of us. If we converse it invites us to prove that we are intelligent, to speak of ourselves and of what we are doing, to hide what humbles us, only to let the good side of us be seen, to put in relief whatever lowers others, even if we should be obliged to lie in order the better to succeed. Hence the taste for a spirit of raillery and criticism, because it makes us enjoy the superiority which a person who turns another into ridicule seems to have over the one who is ridiculed, his wit if the arrow be shot with delicacy in a diplomatic manner, and, lastly, the fault which is criticised, and from which we imagine ourselves to be free. If we give up ourselves to the practice of good works and of virtues, self- love is still there to compliment us, to intimate that we are worth more, that we have more merit, that we do more good than many others. Lastly, if we are endeavoring to acquire sincere humility, it is still there to assure us that we are really very humble, that we know ourselves; it even feeds itself on our belief that we are contemptible. What can we do with so determined an enemy, of whom it has been said that it is the first thing which lives in us and the last which dies ? We must remember that no one has more self-love than he who imagines he has none; we must mistrust ourselves ana our heart ceaselessly; we must often cry out to God, “Lord have pity on me, for I am proud.”
Self-love is a more Serious Danger than we Imagine it to be.
Be afraid of self-love, says St. Bernard; it is an arrow which pierces but slightly the mind and the heart, but it does not make a slight wound; it inflicts death upon him who is not on his guard (St. Bernard, in Ps. xc.). We easily forgive ourselves the vain complaisance of self-love in regard to ourselves, and we neglect it as a matter of no consequence in regard to our salvation. Such feelings as these are so sweet ! We smile at them and we love them. Doubtless a fugitive thought of self-love is not a mortal sin; but to allow self-love to take to itself the merit of our works, is that nothing? to occasion the subtraction of graces which put to profit would have been the means of procuring for us many others, and without which perhaps we should not be saved, as it happened to St. Teresa when God showed her the place she would have occupied in hell if she had not rejected a movement of self-love — is that nothing ? But after having re pressed this first feeling of self-love, a second will come, then a third, and thus our self-love will go on always growing, and heaping up in us a mass of pride which will in the end close to us the kingdom of heaven; moreover, the habit of being pleased with ourselves will prevent us from seeing what are the virtues we do not possess, the faults we have to correct, and we shall thus arrive at the hour of death without being prepared for it; lastly, self-love, when it is not suppressed, will lead us to the commission of all kinds of vices, to presumption, to ambition, to the vain pretensions suggested by susceptibility, to luxury and to the desire for riches, to a dissipated, worldly, effeminate, and sensual life; lastly, to our eternal ruin. Self-love doubtless tells us that we shall not fall into these excesses; but a blind man is never better seduced than when the precipice on the edge of which he is about to put his foot is hidden from him. Hermits-, after eighty years of penitence, have been known to ruin themselves through self-love. It is written that “pride goeth before destruction, and the spirit is lifted up before a fall” (Prov. xvi. 18). Let us be afraid of making the sad experience of it.
Resolutions and spiritual nosegay as above.
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