Integrity

Integrity New Seeds of Contemplation (use the MIL standard for using references)

Many poet are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to begin the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is c

called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives.

They waste their lies in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint. For many absurd reasons, they are convinced that they are obliged to become somebody else who died two hundred years ago and who lived in circumstances utterly alien to their own.

They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems or possess somebody else's spirituality.

There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular-and too lazy to think of anything better.

Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success and they are in such haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.

In great saints you find that perfect humility and perfect integrity coincide. The two turn out to be practically the same things. the saint is unlike everybody else precisely because he is humble.

As far as the accidentals of this life are concerned, humility can be quite content with whatever satisfies the general run of men. But that does not mean that the essence of humility consists in being just like everybody else. On the contrary, humility consists in being precisely the person you actually are before God, and since no two people are alike, if you have the humility to be yourself you will not be like anyone else in the whole universe. But this individuality will not necessarily assert itself on the surface of everyday life. It will not be a matter of mere appearances, or opinions, or tastes, or ways of doing things. It is something deep in the soul.

To the truly humble man the ordinary ways and customs and habits of men are not a matter for conflict. The saints do not get excited about the things that people eat and drink, wear on their bodies, or hang on the walls of their houses. To make conformity or non-conformity with others in these accidents a matter of life and death is to fill your interior life with confusion and noise. Ignoring all this as indifferent, the humble man takes whatever there is in the world that helps him to find God and leaves the rest aside.

He is able to see quite clearly that what is useful to him may be useless for somebody else, and what helps others to be saints might ruin him. That is why humility brings with it a deep refinement of spirit, a peacefulness, a tact and a common sense without which there is no same morality.

It is not humility to insist on being someone that you are not. It is as much as saying that you know better than God who you are and who you ought to be. How do you expect to arrive at the end of our own journey if you take the road to another man's city? How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading somebody else's life? His sanctity will never be yours; you must have the humility to work out your own salvation in a darkness where you are absolutely alone...

And so it takes heroic humility to be yourself and to be nobody but the man, or the artist, that God intended you to be.

You will be made to feel that your honesty is only pride.This is a serious temptation because you can never be sure whether you are being true to your true self or only building up a defense for the false personality that is the creature of your own appetite for esteem.

But the greatest humility can be learned from the anguish of keeping your balance in such a position: of continuing to be yourself without getting tough about it and without asserting your false self against the false selves of other people.

Perfection is not something you can acquire like a hat - by walking into a place and trying on several and walking out again ten minutes later with one on your head that fits. Yet people sometimes enter monasteries with that idea.

They are eager to get the first available system fitted on to them and to spend the rest of their lives walking around with the thing on their heads.

They devour books of piety indiscriminately, not stopping to consider how much of what they read applies, or can be applied, to their own lives. Their chief concern is to acquire as many externals as possible, and to decorate their persons with the features they have so rapidly come to associate with perfection. And they walk around in clothes cut to the measure of other people and other situations.

If they do this job thoroughly, their spiritual disguises are apt to be much admired. Like successful artists, they become commercial. After that there is not much hope for them. They are good people, yes; but they are out of place and much of their well-intentioned energy will only be wasted. They have become satisfied with their own brand of sanctity, and with the perfection they have woven for themselves out of their own imaginations.

Such "sanctity" may perhaps be only the fruit of mutual flattery. The "perfection" of the holy one is something that reassures his neighbor by confirming them in their own prejudices, and by enabling them to forget what is lacking in their own commercial morality. It makes them all feel that they are "right", that they are on the right way of life. Therefore nothing needs to be changed. But anyone who opposes this situation is wrong. The sanctity of the "saint" is there to justify the complete elimination of those who are "unholy" - that is, those who do not conform.

So too in art, or literature. The "best" poets are those who happen to succeed in a way that flatters our current prejudice about what the standards that they have set up, and we cannot even consider a poet who writes in some other slightly different way, whose idioms is not quite the same. We do not read him. We do not dare to, for if we were discovered to have done so, we would fall from grace. We would be excommunicated.

A clever kind of insolent servility, a peculiar combination of ambition, stubbornness and flexibility, a 'third ear' keenly attuned tot he subtlest modulations of the fashionable cliche - with all this you can pass as a saint or a genius if you conform to the right group. You will be blamed in a way that gives you great pleasure, because the blame will come from an out-group by which to be blamed is praise. You may not be enthusiastically praised, even by your own friends. But they know exactly what you are driving at. They fully accept your standards. They dig you. You are canonized. You are the embodiment of their own complacency.

One of the first signs of a saint may well be the fact that other people do not know what to mae of him. In fact, they are not sure whether he is crazy or only proud; but it must at least be pride to be haunted by some individual ideal which nobody but God really comprehends. And he has inescapable difficulties in applying all the abstract norms of "perfection" to his own life.
He cannot seem to make his life fit in with the books.

Sometimes his case is so bad that no monastery will keep him. He has to be dismissed, sent back to the world like Benedict Joseph Labrre, who wanted to be a Trappist and a Carthusian and succeeded in neither. He finally ended up as a tramp. He died in some street in Rome.

And yet the only canonised saint, venerated by the whole Church, who has lived either as a Cisterian or a Carthusian since the Middle Ages is St. Benedict Joseph Labre.

修養的最基本內容和精神是什麼

尊重別人，就是尊重自己；尊重別人，給別人一個機會，同時往往也給了自己一個機會。
天主教對人的尊重主要基於我們的一個信念：因為我們也稱天主為天父、父親，所以我們相信所有人，不分宗教、種族、美醜，全都是天父的兒女，而我們彼此都是兄弟姊妹，所以一定要互相尊重。

一份尊重和愛心，常會產生意想不到的善果 。

按此處進入聆聽 一份尊重如何造就了一個人的成功。

 

你若不與你所尋覓的君王同行, 就不會在旅途終結時找到祂

無論你往何處去，無論天氣如何， 總帶着你的笑容。

愛而不沉靜是沒有深度的愛

愛從不會失落，假如它得不到回饋, 它將回流, 而後軟化和淨煉你的心。

有勇氣非因不害怕, 而是因為能看出有些事情遠比恐懼重要。