There are two ways of feeling small. 

The first way is discouraging. 

It’s when someone more powerful treats you with disdain. Or you find yourself at a party underdressed and outclassed. These humiliating scenarios lead to inner defensiveness and self-consciousness, a bending into ourselves. We feel small in size and in value.

The second way is disarming. 

It’s being underneath a starry sky far from city lights. It’s meditating on the outstretched arms of the suffering Savior, marveling at how God himself is undergoing the process of death. These humbling scenarios lead to inner openness and God-consciousness, an unbending of our soul. We feel small without losing our value. Indeed, if we think of ourselves at all, we feel honored to be present: ​“When I consider your heavens,” the Psalmist ponders, ​“What is man that you are mindful of him?”

Professor and author Robyn Wrigley-Carr experienced this second kind of smallness after discovering Evelyn Underhill’s book of prayers — a lost treasure found in a forgotten suitcase at a retreat house north of London. While copying the prayers out of the old leather journal, Robyn felt surrounded by a cloud of witnesses and had ​“a profound sense of being very small.” (Read her account of the story or listen to it on this week’s podcast episode.)

Well-written prayers — like the Psalms and the ones Underhill collected in her journal from saints through the ages — can draw our hearts and minds to God and give us a healthy sense of smallness. Here’s one Underhill found from St. Teresa of Ávila: 

“We see well enough, O Lord, how little we can do. But now having drawn near to You — having ascended this watchtower from which Your truth can be seen — and while You depart not from us, we can do all things.”

In the coming Holy Week, may you have a holy sense of smallness that enlarges your soul.