“Is your heart as true to mine as mine is to yours? […] If it is, give me your hand.”*
(Jehu)
We will always need to be humble enough to accept that our heart knows why we’re here.**
(Paulo Coelho)
Humility is a very powerful thing, a way of focusing who we are in relation to others, to things, and to our world.
Add gratitude and faithfulness – to see just what our lives are filled with and to create habits that extend who we are and what we have to others.
Karen Armstrong provides a means of entering more deeply into the power that we find within when introducing the exercise of ekstasis:
‘The aim of this step is threefold: (1) to recognise and appreciate the unknown and unknowable; (2) to become sensitive to over-confident assertions of certainty in ourselves and other people; and (3) to make ourselves aware of the numinous mystery of each human we encounter during the day.’^
To know who we are, humbly, gratefully and faithfully, allows us to know others, too:
‘Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) used to say that love was the sudden realisation that somebody else absolutely exists.’^
That is powerful, that is the power each of us owns.
(*Jehu to Jehonadab, who was a possible threat to his leadership: 2 Kings 10:15)
(From Paulo Coelho’s Aleph.)
(^From Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.)
