NOTES for Co2 12:1-10
Paul, as always, expresses very deep and at the same time very ordinary things in an emotional and paradoxical form. And the point here is not only that the apostle simply gives vivid form to the most banal thought: "Well, pride is bad, while humility and sorrow are good." That is hardly the essence of the passage. After all, not all pride, or "boasting, self-exaltation," is the same, nor is all humility. The same is true of sorrows.
But the fact that various human achievements, even the most elevated and well-intentioned, very often can lead a person into the thickets of arrogance and conceit is well known. And all because these great accomplishments, whether the conversion of nations to Christianity, the building of almshouses and shelters, or the deepest mystical illuminations, mean nothing in themselves for the person carrying them out or participating in them. Only what changes the heart, making it more sensitive to evil and to good, to the pain and joy of each individual person we meet on our path, only this has any value. Thanks to this alone a person gradually becomes truly human, a person capable of becoming like Christ, the Universal Man and God-man...
Our own pain or life's hardships, received as a gift from God, bring us closer to ourselves and lower us from the clouds of fantasy to the ground of reality. They show human limitation and smallness and, at the same time, the great power of human courage and trust: everything that helps us sense, as fully as possible, the presence of the Other both amid gray everyday life and in extremely modest living conditions, in communication with the most ordinary people, during exhausting workdays, in every insignificant moment...