Of contempt of all temporal honor
1. "My Son, make it no matter of yours, if you see others honored and exalted, and yourself despised and humbled. Lift up your heart to Me in heaven, and then the contempt of men upon earth will not make you sad."
2. O Lord, we are in blindness, and are quickly seduced by vanity. If I look rightly within myself, never was injury done unto me by any creature, and therefore I have nothing whereof to complain before You. But because I have many times and grievously sinned against You, all creatures do justly take arms against me. Therefore to me confusion and contempt are justly due, but to You praise and honor and glory. And unless I dispose myself for this, namely, to be willing that every creature should despise and desert me, and that I should be esteemed altogether as nothing, I cannot be inwardly filled with peace and strength, nor spiritually enlightened, nor fully united to You.
2. O Lord, we are in blindness, and are quickly seduced by vanity. If I look rightly within myself, never was injury done unto me by any creature, and therefore I have nothing whereof to complain before You. But because I have many times and grievously sinned against You, all creatures do justly take arms against me. Therefore to me confusion and contempt are justly due, but to You praise and honor and glory. And unless I dispose myself for this, namely, to be willing that every creature should despise and desert me, and that I should be esteemed altogether as nothing, I cannot be inwardly filled with peace and strength, nor spiritually enlightened, nor fully united to You.
IMAGE: El Greco, Healing of the Man Born Blind (1567)
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