O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, hear me. 

From the desire of being esteemed,  
deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being loved,  
From the desire of being extolled,  
From the desire of being honored,  
From the desire of being praised,  
From the desire of being preferred to others,  
From the desire of being consulted,  
From the desire of being approved, 

From the fear of being humiliated,  
deliver me, Jesus.   
From the fear of being despised,  
From the fear of suffering rebukes,  
From the fear of being calumniated,  
From the fear of being forgotten,  
From the fear of being ridiculed,  
From the fear of being wronged,  
From the fear of being suspected, 

That others may be loved more than I,  
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.   
That others may be esteemed more than I,  
That in the opinion of the world,  
others may increase, and I may decrease,  
That others may be chosen and I set aside,  
That others may be praised and I unnoticed,  
That others may be preferred to me in everything,  
That others may become holier than I,  
provided that I may become as holy as I should.  

– Rafael Cardinal Merry del Val 

I was writing this for someone else, but thought some people might be interested… some background on how I became a churchgoer:

About a year ago, I had an experience which is incredibly hard to describe, but I basically came out of it knowing that my entire way of viewing the world, experiencing reality, thinking, interacting, everything, had drastically changed. Almost overnight, it seemed, I had become happier than I had ever been before, and felt this amazing sense of being constantly connected to something much more vast than I could ever conceive of. It was indescribably wonderful, better than anything I had ever imagined in many years of reading about spirituality, practicing yoga, etc, and yet at the same time it seemed totally ordinary and obvious that things had always been this way.

Coincidentally, I just happened to be assigned to read St. Augustine’s Confessions for a western civ. class shortly after this strange thing happened to me, and was struck by how much his conversion resonated with me. I went to my professor, telling him how much I had enjoyed the Confessions and asking if he could recommend anything else in a similar vein (though I was careful to point out that I did not view my “waking up” experience in any particular religious context), and my professor (now a friend), who just happened to be a Catholic convert, gave me a long list of authors, including a fellow named Thomas Merton, whom I had never heard of at the time. I read The Inner Experience first, and several other of Merton’s works, all of which I’ve loved, though I think The Inner Experience remains my favorite. By this time I had begun going to churches downtown (I live in the west village), but eventually Merton lead me uptown to Corpus Christi, the church where he was baptized when he was my age and a grad student at Columbia.

I fell in love with the place immediately. I could go on and on about how special Corpus Christi is and how important it’s become to my life in the last nine months. I really felt at home from the very first time I went, which is rather surprising considering I very rarely went to any church at all as a child, there are no Catholics in my family, I had no exposure to the Mass, etc. Plus I was just about as biased against the Catholic Church as it is possible to be, though I can, in retrospect, site numerous examples of my being rather fascinated by Catholicism, nuns, rosaries, etc, as a kid.

“A true seeker must transcend those joys and delights that are just the ray and reflection of the glory of God. He must not let himself grow content with such things, even though they are of God, come from God’s grace, and are the radiance of God’s beauty, for they are not eternal; with reference to God they are eternal: with reference to man, they are not.

Think of the rays of the sun shining into houses. They are rays of the sun, and they are light, but they are attached to the sun and not the houses. When the sun sets, their light no more remains.

What we have to do, then, is to become the Sun itself, so all fear of separation can forever be ended.”

– Letters