Humility reminds me that my life is not mine alone. I believe we are all meant to help shoulder one another’s burdens, share one another's joys, and affirm the goodness in one another. This is impossible if my choices and priorities are always made on the basis of what's in it for me. But the more I see of life, the more convinced I am that it's a mistake to take such a self-indulgent stance. “What are we here for?” asked George Eliot in her novel Middlemarch, “if not to make life less difficult for each other?” And several centuries earlier Saint Benedict said something very similar when he urged his monks to bear “one another's weaknesses of body or behavior” with patience (RB 72.5). It is what self-sacrifice is all about.
TRISHA DAY Inside the School of Charity: Lessons From the Monastery