Humility in Heaven

Is there any place for humility among the Saints in Heaven? Or is it, like faith and hope, a virtue limited to this valley of tears? It might seem that in Heaven there are no motives for humility, no sins, no imperfections, no defects of any kind for which to humble ourselves. Yet only in Heaven will our humility be perfected, for only in Heaven shall we have a thorough knowledge of God and a thorough knowledge of ourselves. This knowledge will make us recognize even more than ever our own nothingness and God's infinite perfections. Our recognition of this will make us forget ourselves, as we never can do on earth, so God will be all in all to us.

Will this appreciation of our own nothingness be painful? No, it will be a source of eternal joy. For then we shall be able to rejoice in God. Our happiness will be unclouded by any interfering thought of self. Our admiration of His perfect beauty will absorb all our faculties. Our absolute dependence on Him will be the truest independence. It will make us conformed to the image of the Son of God, the chief glory in whose Sacred Humanity will be the result of its dependence on His Divine Nature.

Hence in Heaven the angels and saints are represented as casting down their crowns before the throne of God, as falling on their faces and crying continually, "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord, God of hosts." If the highest dignity and chiefest joy of the saints is to be prostrate before the throne of God, we can never humble ourselves enough on earth since those acts of humility will make our life like the life of Heaven and will fill us with a joy that will be a foretaste of the joy of the redeemed.

- text from Humility, Thirty Short Meditations by Father Richard Frederick Clarke, SJ