If we knew what to pray for, every prayer would be answered. But we don’t. And they aren’t. Knowing that we don’t know is love’s first humiliation. It doesn’t mean we stop praying. It just means that henceforth we pray silently, without any words.
Being profoundly misunderstood, humility exists in the collective mind as a set of self-effacing behaviours. But humility has no qualities; gives us nothing to look at. Humility is the radical absence of self-concern.
Enneagram teaching posits nine passions (from passio, meaning ‘to suffer’). These are anger, pride, deceit, envy, greed, fear, gluttony, lust and, taking up the rear, sloth. Most men assume their dominant passion is lust. Most men are wrong. Fear-based men vastly outnumber men who love to fight. We dance with each other. Lust leads. Fear follows.
The virtues are an absence before they are a presence. Courage is the absence of fear, innocence of lust, humility of pride. And what is this purifying fecundity, this mothering absence? Love, actually.
It is not necessary to renounce anything. All that does is inflate a saggy sense of self. Just stop acquiring things.
Men's Work 