“Lord, you have taught us how to love humility, but we have not learned. We have learned only to love the outward surface of it – the humility that makes a person charming and attractive. We sometimes pause to think about these qualities, and we often pretend that we possess them and that we have gained them by “practicing humility.”

If we were really humble, we would know to what an extent we are liars?”

Teach me to bear a humility that shows me, without ceasing, that I am a liar and a fraud and that, even though this is so, I  have an obligation to strive after truth, to be as true as I can, even though I will inevitably find all my half-truth poisoned with deceit. This is the terrible thing about humility, that it is never fully successful.

If it were only possible to be completely humble on this earth. But not, that is the trouble. You, Lord, were humble. But our humility consists in being proud and knowing all about it, and being crushed by the unbearable weight of it, and to be able to do so little about it.”

As a reader pointed out to me today, Merton was unyielding in his very Catholic point of view.

I always felt reading him that he was uncompromising, brutally honest, and challenging. He cuts no one, especially himself any slack. Whenever I read him, I realize how much farther I have to go.

I like to think of myself as humble, but of course, that can hardly be true. He reminds me that true humility is not so easily claimed, it goes a lot deeper and is a lot harder.

People like me practice a kind of part-time, even faux spirituality, he was the real deal. It’s a part of my life, but never the part.

I’m not heading off soon to live alone in a hermitage and to learn every day to be brutally honest about my inadequacy and struggle.

Merton always seems to be calling me out and challenging me to be honest, dig deeper, think harder.

I have always loved him for that, as painful as it sometimes is. And I thank him.