I’m with Marianne Williamson (who said something often incorrectly attributed to Nelson Mandela): no one can afford not to be brilliant etc.

I think it’s easy to misunderstand humility as never accepting praise or being satisfied with yourself. It can stem from a false view of how greatness operates - that if someone else is great it somehow subtracts from or threatens the greatness of others - as if there is limited greatness to go around. While it’s surely true that wherever two people are, one of them is greater (and my scriptures even say this), focusing even only on that misses the point. I find myself often referring back to a quote from my departed grandmother: “Only the Lord knows who’s greater than who, and HE’S NOT TALKING.”

The point does remain though, that for an individual to advance in any way, they have to recognize their own error or smallness. Leaving the question of absolute spiritual stature aside, everyone needs to grow all the time. To grow in any way, we need examples and inspiration. But if the devil had us all hiding our greatness under the delusion that to do so is humble, he’d have a very fine trick going on: cutting off sources of inspiration to others. In that situation, nobody would grow. I think one of the most oft-used tricks of the devil must be to get us to think that virtue is vice and vice-versa.. virtue.

The reality is that greatness in anyone liberates and inspires others to be great - and that God gives out the gifts freely. The only factor that limits it is how much we believe, how hard we work, and how much we wish.

I love the film THE NEVERENDING STORY. This thing is pure cheese, truth, and fantasy. Says the Empress in answer to Bastian’s question: “How many wishes do I get?” - “As many as you want.”

[ed. insert My point is that wishes are far likelier to come true - or that we will be satisfied if they already have - if we allow ourselves to be pleased with ourselves, to say we have succeeded where we have, to take praise and keep it, and to share our sense of satisfaction with trusted and interested folks. To do so is not arrogance. It is allowing the Glory and gifts of God to shine in us. What do you think Jesus meant when He said “Let your light so shine..”?]

Arrogance, [ed. then, is to think we are great without God,] to not give Him credit for making us and giving us talent and ability in the first place, the means to do anything with it besides, [or to glut in thoughts of being better than others]. Since God has been removed from public discourse so much, it so often isn’t safe to pronounce our self-satisfaction, because without God in the picture all accomplishments must be of men, who are, after all, inherently flawed - insolvably so if you take God out of the picture; therefore in this view our greatness must all be for vanity and error, and anyone of greatness is automatically viewed as flawed and arrogant for the mere presumption of being of any notice at all.

This may be a main drive behind public figures [and published greatness so often suffering wrath] at the hands of secularists. [Undue suffrage also comes from misguided religious folks who have appointed themselves as judges on the rationale of a “higher” law which they tout hypocritically by abusing it as a means of ruthlessly abasing others.]

The clincher is that the view of greatness being vanity must self-contradict: it cannot be removed even from the most base reasoning that for man to advance in any way, he must somehow grow, which, for our manifest advances of sum knowledge and skill, must mean that we have in some ways become great; [that there are the great among us]. The uncounted masses of men striving for desires is proof that mankind aspires to greatness, whatever they may variously believe that to be. [Those who say they do not wish to be participant in anything great are lying, and I will show this. Meanwhile, my point on the contradiction:] If we view men as godless, we must aspire to greatness while thinking there really is no such thing.

There is a counter to my assertion that a view without God must view men as vain and erroneous, and it goes like this: there can’t be vanity and error in men because there is no absolute right and wrong. The very pronouncement is also self-contradicting: to say that there is no right and wrong is to make an absolute statement. The pronouncement itself is proof of it’s fallacy: men are creatures of absolutes, so greatly so, that even in decieving themselves they mimic the very patterns they would shrug off.

[all the remaining is an ed. insert] The self-contradiction floods me with shock and leaves me balking and blank. It does not work, and it seems that George Lucas is right along with George Soros for the ride of it. Says Soros in criticizing George W. Bush: “.. people have different views.. nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth.” Pens Lucas, in Star Wars Revenge of the Sith: “Only the Sith think in absolutes!” That may be the worst line in the history of cinema. I love my brother’s mockery of it: “Sometimes the Sith think in absolutes!”

That was a tangent, and I promised to say why a declaration of desiring no participation in greatness is a lie. As established, relativism is left to aspire to greatness while believing there really is no such thing. In fact a person doesn’t even say there is no greatness unless they think it would be great if there isn’t any greatness. The self-contradiction is intolerable; it is sick.

The self-contradiction not only canceling itself out, but in the very act showing even erroneous reasoning subsides only in the territory of proposed absolutes, one must be given only to pay respect to this objective universality of absolutes. And if religion for so long has so blatantly pronounced absolutes, it must be that religion deserves some serious attention and devotion. Religion never had to write a treatise to know right and wrong. It simply knows.

As someone said, a person who claims ambiguity about God is lying: they have given up all hope and really don’t believe in God; if there remained in them any hope at all, they would give everything to find God.

Then find Him - His gifts are many, and the sum effect of them surmounts otherwise insurmountable obstacles - and that with an appropriate self-satisfaction.