Juxtaposition 2014.04.08

Walt Whitman is attributed as having said "If you done it, it ain't bragging." 

Today's meditations share the concept of having to tread the narrow path of true humility while still getting things done. Both seem to say "don't take particular pride in what you have accomplished, but don't hide your light under a basket either." Do the best you can and embrace ownership of what you've done, whether amazing or banal.

A common meditation for all souls:

Humility is often confused with the polite self-deprecation of saying you're not much of a bridge player when you know perfectly well you are. Conscious or otherwise, this kind of humility is a form of gamesmanship. If you really aren't much of a bridge player, you're apt to be rather proud of yourself for admitting it so humbly. This kind of humility is a form of low comedy. True humility doesn't consist of thinking ill of yourself but of not thinking of yourself much differently from the way you'd be apt to think of anyone else. It is the capacity for being no more and no less pleased when you play your own hand well than when your opponents do.
(Frederick Buechner, 1926 - )

Revised Common Lectionary:

Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, "It is written,
`My house shall be called a house of prayer';
but you are making it a den of robbers."
The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did, and heard the children crying out in the temple, "Hosanna to the Son of David," they became angry and said to him, "Do you hear what these are saying?" Jesus said to them, "Yes; have you never read,
`Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies
you have prepared praise for yourself'?" 
(Matthew 21:12-16)