Over and over in her writings, St. Teresa of Avila brings up how important it is to develop the quality of humility.

Watching the world go by and struggling my own struggles, I’ve come to agree with her that a healthy humility is truly essential to happiness and to growth in holiness. Its opposite — ego — not only drags us down, it can destroy much that is important in our lives and keep us from recovering and healing after such losses.

True humility is knowing who God really is, who we really are, and who we are before Him. Having a good grasp of the greatness of God and the mixed bag of ourselves provides clarity and a depth of truth that we won’t find elsewhere.

When we don’t know who God is, we run the risk of disregarding Him as we make our important life decisions. Jesus tells us to fear the one who can destroy the body and also condemn the soul — but we will not be in awe of God’s infinity, power and majesty if we don’t give Him our attention on a regular basis. We can’t know God if we don’t ponder Him.

God’s “punishment” for ignoring Him often takes the form of simply stepping back, letting us steer our own life as we wish and letting us experience the consequences of our stupid-without-Him decisions. God appears to do that for society in general, and we may recognize that our communities are suffering the results of decisions rooted in the egos and desires of too many of us.

Even so, we likely are rather blind when it comes to seeing the long-term effects in our personal lives of the selfish actions we have taken in the past. If we start to suspect that we might be the cause of many of our own problems, we’ll be tempted to reject and deny that suspicion, even to ourselves.

A big step toward humility is to resolve to change and to ask God to show us some of those connections, with the goal of doing better from here forward. Once we realize that only God can look around and ahead with accuracy, we’ll be more amenable to trying things His way in the future. Doing so will bring us more insights into His greatness.

Next is the need to know ourselves. This is trickier than it sounds. We are closer to ourselves than any other human can be, but the temptation to be dishonest with ourselves is often overwhelming. We have our own self-images, and those inner pictures are hard to change. Similar to our above-described resistance to acknowledge God’s superiority, we make excuses to keep our false, or at least incomplete, self-visions intact.

We can begin to get past the inaccuracies once we accept that every person is a vulnerable human being — no exceptions. In addition to the perhaps-unfelt fragilities of our physical and emotional selves, all of us — from the greatest to the least — are subject to temptations to sin, and we are not strong enough to resist them without help.

Just ask the saints about the need to call on God every single day. We all need God in order to recognize and resist evil. Not only are Satan and his minions consumate liars, we do a pretty good job of lying to ourselves when faced with attractive opportunities to commit sinful behaviors. We start down those paths in small ways, denying what we know down deep is a wrong-headed direction.

How often have we been taught to trust our instincts, to trust our own guts and hearts? How seldom do we hear that we should trust God in all things and seek His instruction!

As we become more humble, we will be extra careful to guard against temptations. We’ll start trusting the wisdom of the ages more than we’ll trust our own opinions.

To learn who we are before God, we can first bring to Him all that we typically use to define ourselves: our families, our professions, roles and responsibilities, our education and experiences.

Then we must set all of that aside and stand before God, empty of all that defines us here on earth — being present before Him perhaps like a child, or as someone very old and very tired.

What seems like a most vulnerable stance is in fact a great relief and comfort, once we realize not only our great need for God, but also His great love for us. That in itself is humbling.