41 — TRUE GLORY

Presence of God. — O Jesus, who for love of me accepted the dishonor of death on the cross, teach me wherein true glory consists, and grant that for love of You I may know how to conquer my points of honor.

Meditation

1 — St. Teresa of Jesus teaches: “If one is attached even a little to honor, one cannot advance in virtue without first freeing oneself from it,” because “where points of honor reign, one will never reach full detachment, nor enjoy the true fruit of prayer,” which is intimacy with God. Indeed, the Saint notes that the reason why many persons, long trained in spiritual life and deserving for so many good works, “still crawl along the ground” and do not succeed in rising higher, lies precisely in being held back by the “point of honor; and, what is worse, they do not want to be persuaded of it, deceived as they are by the devil to the point of believing they are obliged to defend it” (Vi. 31, 20; Cam. 12, 5).

Attachment to points of honor is resolved in practice into many small or great touchy sensitivities for asserting one’s own personality, for defending one’s own esteem and one’s own points of view; it becomes concrete in many more or less conscious and petty maneuvers to win or maintain certain privileged and honored positions before others, to make one’s own reasons prevail - reasons always judged good - one’s own capacities, one’s own works, one’s own merits, which are always considered great and worthy of regard. All this remains more or less masked by the fact that each person has, or believes he has, the intention of acting for good and therefore considers his own way of acting legitimate; meanwhile one does not realize that, under the pretext of defending good, of avoiding scandal, of sustaining good works, in reality one is defending self-love. This is shown by the fact that, when occasion presents itself and all other things are equal, so many efforts are not made at all to defend others’ honor and works, but only to defend one’s own honor and works. A soul that lets itself be taken by such concerns is, as St. Teresa of Jesus says, bound to earth by “a chain that no file can break. God alone can shatter it, but He wills to be aided by us with prayers and generous efforts” (Vi. 31, 20).

2 — To see whether we are truly detached from points of honor, we must not rely on certain desires that sometimes come in abundance during prayer, by which we seem ready to bear any humiliation and contempt; rather, we must examine what, in practice, our conduct is before everything that wounds our self-love. Then it will not be hard to observe that “if we are touched even a little in our honor, we no longer know how to bear it and it seems to us we ought not to bear it” (T.G. Dam. 16, 11). These more or less lively reactions of our sensitivity clearly tell us that we are still far from having trampled points of honor underfoot; and becoming aware of this deficiency will be the starting point for correcting ourselves, because the greatest obstacle to acquiring virtues is precisely believing we have already acquired them and thus no longer need to practice them.

“May God deliver us - exclaims Teresa of Jesus - from persons who pretend to serve Him and at the same time cultivate their own honor!” (ibid., 12, 7). It would be wanting to serve at once two masters, and two masters so irreconcilable as God and our self-love. Everything a soul does to serve its ego, to sustain its honor, it withdraws from the service of God, from the pure and sincere pursuit of His honor and glory. Even if at times it seems to us that we have good rights to claim, if we do not know how to renounce them, at least as regards our own person, we shall never attain that freedom of spirit necessary to enter deeply into interior life. The concerns bound up with defending our rights will only distract us from our ideal of union with God, make us lose interior peace, involve us in too many excessively human disputes, which will often be occasions of frequent failures in charity and even in justice toward our neighbor, since it is very difficult, not to say impossible, to defend one’s own rights without offending, more or less, the rights of others.

Colloquy

“O Lord, Lord! Are You not, then, our Master and Model? And in what did You place Your honor, You who are our honor? Ah, Lord, by humbling Yourself unto death, not only did You not lose it, but You won it for all of us... May it please You, my God, that by wishing to follow these ugly points of honor, some soul may not end by losing itself. Oh, if one understood wherein true honor consists... All our harm, Lord, comes from not keeping our eyes fixed on You; thus we fall a thousand times, stumble in a thousand ways, and lose the road.”

“My God, we desire intimate union with You, we claim to follow the counsels of Christ who was covered with insults and falsehoods, and at the same time we want to keep our honor and reputation intact. The ways are too different, and we shall never reach the goal, because You, O Lord, unite Yourself only with souls that deny themselves and are not afraid to lose their own rights” (T.G. Cam. 36, 5 and 6; 16, 11; Vi. 31, 22).

O Jesus, grant me the grace to make my honor consist only in uniting myself intimately to You, in seeking to make myself as like as possible to You who, being God and having the right to be treated and honored as God, willed to be treated as the least of men. You willed no other right for Yourself except that of fulfilling the Father’s will, of dying on the cross for His glory and for our salvation. Before Your example, how much better I understand the pettiness of my self-love, which, to defend foolish rights, loses itself in so many quarrels, in so many vain disputes... O Lord, why must I be reduced to crawling on the ground among the thorny brambles of my passions, when You created me to range in the heavens? Oh, help me to free myself from the foolish pretensions of my ego, which, like heavy ballast, continually try to drag me downward; help me so that, freed from so heavy a weight, I may at last take decisive flight toward You, my God!