the food of humility

"As Jesus Christ does not only teach humility, but also bestows it, let us begin by asking Him to give us a love for that virtue...No prayer could be more pleasing to Him; we can feel sure of that; He will infallibly grant our request if we sincerely wish it to be granted. But may who pray for humility would be extremely sorry if God were to grant it to them. This is one of the points on which people are most easily deluded. Some book, or meditation, of Communion touches their heart; they feel the attraction of this virtue, and ask God to give it to them; but they forget that to love, desire, and ask for humility is loving, desiring and asking for humiliations, for these are the companions, or rather the food of humility, and without them it is no more than a beautiful but meaningless idea. Now, if the bare thought of humiliation fills us with horror; if we repel it with our whole strength; if pride and self-love get the better of us on every occasion; and if, instead of stiffening ourselves against them, we yield to them and cannot for a moment endure anything that wounds them, we are flattering ourselves if we think we love humility. The fact is that we dislike it, and our prayer is a delusion. We shall do well, then to examine ourselves a little on this point before offering our petition to God; and instead of giving reign to our imagination, and making proposals that we are too weak to carry out, see whether we be resolved and prepared to bear the lightest and most ordinary humiliations. Otherwise such a prayer can have no result except self-deception; for our inmost feelings would nullify it if we were really abhorring what we seemed to be asking for.

But there are truly those, though not very many, who ask God in all sincerity to grant them humility and offer themselves to carry all the humiliating crosses that He is pleased to send them. This offer on their part is a real consecration. From that moment they should feel that they are not their own, but belong to Jesus Christ and are fighting under His standard."

~Jean Nicolas Grou