Hammarskjold and the True Meaning of Humility

If you were alive in the 1950s a household name was Dag Hammarskjold, the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Hammarskjold was a man who combined a life of high public office with a life of the spirit.  He died in an air crash while on duty as Secretary-General travelling to a trouble spot in the Congo. Undoubtedly this death has added to his posthumous fame, although I doubt few born after 1980 would know of him.  He discharged his executive life with great inner grace.  I imagine only a few friends would have seen his inner conflicts, the clash between contemplation and action, the private and public. His encounter with the great traditions were his fuel and and his notes were made into Markings (Vagmarken, 1963).  I acquired a translation  of this work early in my life (Faber &Faber, 1963). Markings is a compilation of  part musings, quotations, prose and verse. It is an impression of a life of the mind.  I gave the slight paperback the special treatment of  rebinding in boards.  One wishes that all men of action, the bit-wigs chasing this and that, the hollow men, would  read Markings.  Maybe they would take away a vision of the Life of Action, the life in the world suffused with higher things.  

Here the Secretary-General gives us a lesson on humility -- and doesn't it all start with humility?

To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud, a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable. 

Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons.  Secure in its reality, the self is neither better or worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is --- is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement. 

To be nothing in the self-effacement of humility, yet, for the sake of the task, to embody its whole weight and importance in your bearings, as the one who has been called to undertake it. To give to people, works, poetry, art, what the self can contribute, and to take, simply and freely, what belongs to it by reason of its identity. Praise or blame, the winds of success and adversity, blow over such a life without leaving a trace or upsetting its balance. 

Towards this, so help me God --- 

Markings