Words of the Week

"We moderns are contemptuous of outward appearance; it does not follow that we are humble. Clothes, after all, are only (as it were) a sacramental manifestation of the instinct we all have, to hide our defects from the world's scrutiny. The 'folly of the Cross,' the placarding of our human weakness, is something more intimate than the mere stripping off of outward paraphernalia.

"It means being ready to let the world see you as the fool whom God sees, whenever a suitable occasion arises. And it is humiliating to think how much of our unpublished thought process is devoted to doing just the opposite--trying to put ourselves in the right, to mask our ignorances, to explain away our failures, to pretend that the gaffe meant something else. Oh, we laugh at ourselves in private, that costs us nothing. We even amuse our friends, and cultivate a reputation for modesty, by dwelling on the record of our own discomfitures--afterwards, when we are in safe company. But really to put aside our selfesteem, and follow, stripped, in the footsteps of a stripped Master--that is a rarer gift."

--Msgr. Ronald Knox in Stimuli (Sheed & Ward, $2.25), published this week.

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