meek

Check out the word meek and you come up with something akin to this from The Free Dictionary, with a heavy lean towards the weak; here’s another attempt:

Maybe we need to redeem the word in this way.  Meekness is about knowing we must change.  Meekness doubts in a world that seeks and demands certainty.  Meek people question themselves, how they see things and what kind of difference they can make.  When this is directed towards openness, then, from this perspective, they make the very hopeful material.

‘The ego self is by definition  the unobserved self, because once you see it, the game is over.’*

Why bring ego into this?  As the undeveloped self, the ego doesn’t want to change; it’s most happy wanting others to change.  As long as the ego avoids change it remains hidden, and as long as it remains hidden nothing changes.

Perfect.

Ego doesn’t want to questions it’s beliefs, its relationships, or its actions.  One of its strongest tactics is to suggest there’s plenty of time to change, playing into our apprehension of time passes slowly when nothing much is happening.  Ego maintains inertia.

Obversely, we change by doing, by acting, by moving.  Meekness is not afraid to look on the present self and to advocate change, change allowing for growth, and growth enabling doing what each must do, which is about sacrifice and courage.

Meekness certainly does bring some surprises with it.

‘There is in the universe a higher kind of beauty.  It is the beauty of sacrifice, or giving up for others, or suffering for others.’**

(*From Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now.)
(**From Frank Laubach’s Letters By a Modern Mystic.)