I quote Richard Rohr more than any contemporary spiritual leader. Once again I strongly recommend that you subscribe to his free daily blog as it is always very insightful and very encouraging. He says everything I could ever say and says it much better and much more succinctly.

In his book, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, he noted, “I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then I must watch my reaction to it. In my position, I have no other way of spotting both my well-denied shadow self and my idealized persona.”

Rohr is very attuned to the pernicious presence of the ego in all spiritually-inclined people and is forthright about wrestling with his own ego daily. I think that his daily prayer for “one good humiliation a day” is his way of asking for his eyes to be opened daily to his own frailty and egotism. For, it is often very humiliating when this happens to someone, especially one who holds himself/herself forth as a “spiritual person.”

I do not think he is calling for us to deliberately go out and humiliate ourselves each day. He is merely asking us to pay attention, to be honest with ourselves, to practice “mindfulness” and be prepared to embrace the subjective experience of a sudden illumination about our own “flesh” being hard at work in our spiritual practice. This might be merely being taken aback, or given pause, or embarrassed, or yes it might be occasionally humiliating. It might even be as simple as a “Rick Perry moment” when we have to say “oops” to some obviously self-serving spiritual enterprise.

T. S. Eliot noted in The Four Quartets:

Oh the shame of motives late revealed,
And the awareness of things ill done
And done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.