Posture.........................

"He came to conclude that the way to inner joy is not through agency and action, it's through surrender and receptivity to God.  The point, according to this view, is to surrender, or at least suppress, your will, your ambition, your desire to achieve victory on your own.  The point is to acknowledge that God is the chief driver here and that he already has a plan for you.  God already has truths he wants you to live by."

     "The implied posture here is one of submission, arms high, wide open and outstretched, face tilted up, eyes gazing skyward, calm with patient but passionate waiting.  Augustine wants you to adopt this sort of surrendered posture.  That posture flows from an awareness of need, of one's own insufficiency.  Only God has the power to order your inner world, not you.  Only God has the power to orient your desires and reshape your emotions, not you.
      This posture of receptiveness, for Augustine and much Christian thought since, starts with the feeling of smallness and sinfulness one gets next to the awesome presence of God.  Humility comes with daily reminders of your own brokenness.  Humility relieves you of the awful stress of trying to be superior all the time.  It inverts our attention and elevates the things we tend to look down on."

"But in Christianity, at least in its ideal form, the sublime is not in the prestigious and the lofty but in the everyday and the lowly.  It is in the washing of feet, not in triumphal arches.  Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled.  Whoever humbles himself shall be exalted.  One goes down in order to rise up.  As Augustine put it, 'Where there's humility, there's majesty;  where there's weakness, there's might;  where there's death, there's life.  If you want to get these things, don't disdain those.'"

-David Brooks, as excerpted from his chapter, Ordered Love, in his book, The Road to Character