Terry Eagleton, in a review of Rita Felski’s book, “The Limits of Critique” in the London Review of Books (January 2017) noted, “The closest one can come to the truth is a knowledge of one’s self-deception.”  The observation of this literary critic is not unrelated to the observation of the Apostle Paul who noted, “We see through a glass darkly.”

This observation is personally relevant to me as I’m now realizing just how much I’ve lived my 66 years (67 tomorrow!) in self-deception.  But it is increasingly nice to understand that this is the human predicament and the lot of us all.  Therefore, when others who are so “stupidly” inured in their own little “bubble” appear on my radar, I am made to realize, “Hmm.  There am I, but by the Grace of God.  And, even with that Grace, ‘There am I.’”  It is not possible to escape the human dilemma that we view the world, including ourselves with a skewed vision, that we see the world, “through a glass darkly.”  This is the world from which Jean Paul Sartre noted, in his play, there is, “No Exit.”

It takes humility to accept this human fate.  But “humility” is so often a commodity that is rife with arrogance and pride.  I prefer the notion of “humility-ization” as the process in which we spend the rest of our lives being disabused of the certainties in which we have smugly been ensconced.