For a long time I debated whether I should include the word "humility" in the heading.  Has this word which was formerly used with understanding become so discredited today that one hardly dare speak it?  Certainly everyone who takes the spiritual life seriously experiences how important the attitude is which this word seeks to describe.

From where does this inner resistance come?  Many of us have had experiences with people who have spoken much about humility, but who in their behavior have demonstrated something unhealthy, even something unworthy of being offered to another.  "Every false humility is a slap in the face of God's love", said the Dominican Priest, Gordian Landwehr.  Within the church today we experience many endeavors that are in the direction of leading people to a healthy self confidence rather than to "humility".  This is based on the important discoveries of psychology.  The concern is to free Christians from an attitude of failure which would have negative effects on them as well as on others.
When a word has been misused over a long period of time, it often grows out of use in a language and is consequently excluded from the vocabulary.  That applies also to the term, "humility" (as well as, "self denial").  Whoever listens carefully to the New Testament and desires to enter into the deepest concerns of Jesus, realizes that this involves an inner posture that cannot be written off without the danger of forfeiting something substantive from the Good News.  Perhaps the old spiritual mentors emphasized the concern for humility too one sidedly.  Nevertheless, they experienced accurately how important it was to deal with this dimension in realizing the Christian life.

Was is actually meant?  To be humble means nothing other than to be truthful before God, before others, and before oneself.  The truly humble person in the Gospel meaning does not artificially make one unimportant and bad, but rather one who practices dispensing with all "roles"  (cf. we must learn to accept ourselves.) and seeing her/himself more and more with the eyes of God .  In this way we get to know ourselves more accurately as we truly are.  Therefore, humility is not a "virtue" which we acquire with greater effort, but becoming humble is a process which we enter into so that God can direct us more and more into our own truth.  It is precisely in the experience that God loves us just as we are and graciously bestows gifts on us, that the awareness grows of how little of this we deserve.  This does not lead to despair.  Rather, we recognize this as the incomprehensible gift of God's overwhelming love.  With hardly any other mentor of the spiritual life is it so clear as with Meister Eckhart that true humility does not make a person insignificant, but great: "The height and the depth are one", he says. "The deeper the well is dug the higher the water spouts upward."  In this image it is clear how far the attitude mentioned here is from everything that we know as false humility.  Humility is the way of deepest fulfillment. "Whoever will receive from above, must necessarily be below with proper humility and know in truth that whoever is not completely underneath will not receive their portion regardless how insignificant it may be." (Meister Eckhart).