Every conversion story has its honeymoon phase—those first luminous months when prayer feels electric, when Scripture verses leap off the page as if written just for you, when even sacrifice carries a romantic glow. The newly devout move through the world with the earnest intensity of first love, eager to share their discovery, hungry to prove their zeal.
This is as it should be.
God, like a wise parent, indulges the spiritual toddler’s first steps, smiling at their exaggerated fervor, their delight in small accomplishments. He gives them milk before meat, consolation before the cross.
Before the soul is stripped, it is swaddled. Before it is tested, it is indulged. Such is the divine economy at the beginning of the interior life: God condescends, with unspeakable tenderness, to nourish the newly awakened spirit with sweetness and light.
Yet beneath this holy enthusiasm, almost imperceptibly, something else stirs. A subtle pride begins to weave itself through our devotion like a golden thread—not glaring, not malicious, but quietly distorting. We do not see it yet. The beginner’s soul is still too young to recognize its own reflection in every act of piety.
We start meditating. Reading old spiritual texts. Not just reading, but devouring—lectio divina via Kindle. The ancient words speak with uncanny precision, as if written for their specific existential unrest. Prayer—though still awkward—feels honest. Mornings become sacred. Walks alone become luminous. Even our Spotify playlists start leaning contemplative. It’s as though the universe is finally leaning in, speaking our language.
We’re not sure how to explain it to anyone. We’ve found something—or rather, it feels as though something has found us. And for now, it meets us where we are, generously. God doesn’t hide. Instead, He seems eager, present, flooding our inboxes with serendipities, threading meaning into our daily commute, our coffee rituals, our moments of stillness. It’s maternal, almost: a divine tenderness that comes low and slow, asking little, giving much.
We think: I’ve changed. And in many ways, we have. We’ve shifted lanes, reoriented the compass. But the roots are shallow still. The self—old, cunning, undeterred—has merely put on new robes. Now it fasts from social media, attends retreats, buys incense and bookmarks Julian of Norwich. It quotes scripture and feels just a little superior for doing so.
Pride doesn’t need ambition to thrive. It thrives just as well on enlightenment. On virtue. On being the one who gets it. We volunteer, and feel profound. We pray, and feel awakened. We give, and feel chosen. It’s not performative—we’re sincere. But beneath the sincerity lies an echo: I am no longer like them. The skeptics. The distracted. The unawakened. We believe we’ve crossed a threshold.
Pride in the Guise of Depth
Soon, we start talking about the journey—not out of desperation to understand it more deeply, but out of a growing desire to be seen as someone who already does. We name-drop mystics, recommend books to friends going through rough patches, share quotes on social media with just enough ambiguity to sound profound. But we rarely share our own confusion. Our own contradictions. Our own quiet hypocrisies.
We gravitate toward those who admire our apparent progress. Our spiritual vocabulary deepens, but our honesty shrinks. We speak of surrender, but practice control. Even in small gestures—lighting a candle before meditation, pausing for silence before meetings, bowing our heads in public—there’s a faint awareness of being watched. Not performative, exactly, just not entirely free. When someone comments on our “calm energy” or “spiritual depth”, something in us exhales—not with humility, but with satisfaction. We needed that. It confirms the narrative we’ve been building: I’m becoming something rare.
And this is where the counterfeit sneaks in—not to crush the awakening, but to hijack it. The ego is more than happy to wear linen and quote Teresa of Avila. The ancient enemy does not discourage spiritual practice; he merely reroutes its energy. He whispers: Pray more. Share more. Go deeper—so long as it leads you back to your own reflection. He’s fine with our mystical longings, our candlelit hours of contemplation, our fasting and silence and spiritual disciplines—so long as they culminate in a deeper admiration of ourselves.
And so, the soul begins to orbit its own image in the mirror of sacred things.
Then, one day, friction arrives. A spiritual director suggests our spirituality might be compensating for something unacknowledged. A friend gently points out how we tend to talk at people, not with them. A counselor asks if maybe we’re pushing too hard, too fast.
It stings. Deeply. Instead of hearing the invitation to surrender, we feel misunderstood. Threatened. We wonder if our mentors are just less awakened. Less devoted. Maybe even jealous. So we pivot—quietly. We find another teacher, someone less confrontational, more affirming. Someone who celebrates our trajectory without challenging its orientation. We avoid the voice that urges refinement and seeks out the one that validates our exceptionalism.
And just like that, the soul trades fire for comfort. The crucible for applause. It tells itself it is chasing truth, when in fact it’s chasing a curated image of itself—dressed in spiritual garb. The hidden path—the narrow, refining, ego-dismantling path—is quietly declined.
“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.” —Jesus Christ
The Collapse of the Image
At this point, the intentions multiply. Noble, ambitious, finely crafted. We journal new routines: waking at dawn for meditation, cutting out caffeine, volunteering weekly, digital detoxes, twenty-one-day fasts. We imagine a rhythm of sacred mastery, a life tuned to higher frequencies. But the follow-through—so often—falls short. We skip a day. Break a promise. Numb out on a screen. And when we do, our reaction is not gentle repentance—it’s agitation. Shame. Even a flash of rage.
Not because we’ve grieved the heart of God. But because we’ve fractured the image we were crafting. What we don’t yet see is that the real threshold lies ahead, and to cross it, something in us will have to die.
We’d assumed, somewhere deep down, that spiritual growth would be smooth. That holiness was a deliverable. Our disappointment is not humility—it’s pride in disguise. We don’t mourn the fault itself. We mourn the break in the story we wanted to tell: I am changing. I am different. I am rising above. We don’t long for transformation so we can love better—we long for it so we can feel at peace with the person we believe ourselves to be.
Praise only reinforces the illusion. When it comes, we demur, but we notice. It stays with us. But when others are praised—especially those less “serious” than we imagine ourselves to be—something in us recoils. A quiet competitiveness creeps in. Sanctity begins to feel like a shrinking commodity. Like a spotlight with limited reach. We hide our failures, curate our image, and let small victories shine—humblebragged or implied, always just enough to be noticed. When we tear up in a moment of worship or awe, a small part of us registers who else is watching.
But underneath it all is a haunting fragility.
When failure truly arrives—when we relapse, explode, ghost someone, give in to an old temptation—it doesn’t just hurt. It unravels. We spiral not because we have sinned, but because the scaffolding collapses. The story breaks. We are not the sage. Not the mystic. Not the transformed soul we’ve been selling to ourselves.
We wanted to be the icon in the stained glass, not the flawed human in the seat with nothing to offer but need. We haven’t yet learned to live spiritually bankrupt. We haven’t tasted the strange grace of powerlessness.
And yet—even this collapse is gift. Even this dust is holy.
If we will let it be.
Because the false self must break before the true one can be born. The soul must be stripped not only of sin, but of its addiction to seeming sinless. Only then can real love enter. Only then can the scaffolding fall away and the soul begin, for the first time, to stand on something real.
The Hidden Ones
Now contrast beginner souls with another kind—the kind the world rarely notices. You won’t find them leading retreats or posting luminous reflections online. They aren’t the ones with the aesthetic morning rituals or spiritual reading lists on their bios. These souls have quietly passed beyond the early glamour of divine capture. They have begun, gently and without fanfare, to descend into depth.
There is no spectacle here. No emotional fireworks. No desire to be seen as wise, enlightened, or evolved.
They move quietly through the world, their hunger for God sharp and unrelenting—not because they seek the feeling of holiness, but because they seek the reality of Love. Their prayer is not dramatic. It often feels dry. But they show up, again and again. Not to chase an experience, but to be faithful. Their fasts go unnoticed. Their service is quiet. They don’t keep score—not because they’ve transcended pride, but because they’ve finally seen how little they’ve done.
Praise embarrasses them. Recognition throws them off. They would rather be overlooked than overestimated.
They welcome correction like water in a dry land. They’d rather learn from someone imperfect than wait for the perfect teacher. When they engage in spiritual conversation, it’s not to sound insightful—it’s to seek understanding. They’re not threatened by others’ gifts. In fact, they celebrate them as if they were their own.
Their humility isn’t curated. It’s lived. They don’t talk much about love—they just live love, in ordinary ways, at quiet cost, with no need to narrate it.
And when they fail—and they do—they don’t spiral. They don’t catastrophize or spin it into existential drama. They simply confess, grieve, and trust. Because they know what they are: dust, carried by mercy. They no longer depend on their own goodness. They’ve stopped expecting perfection from themselves. Instead, they lean—completely—on the One who holds them, even in failure.
Alma Rivera
Take Alma Rivera. She’s in her late 50s. She works the night shift at a memory care facility just outside Albuquerque. Her job title is unremarkable—“overnight support staff”—and most people assume she just hands out meds and monitors vitals. What they don’t see is that she often sings softly to the residents who wake in confusion at 3 a.m. They don’t see her kneel by their bedsides to pray when they’re restless, or how she holds their hands until they fall asleep again, whispering fragments of old hymns they once knew by heart.
She lives alone in a small adobe house with a backyard garden where she grows marigolds, rosemary, and tomatoes in the summer. No one really visits. She doesn’t post online. Her phone is ten years old. She doesn’t attend big conferences or speak at church events. Most people at her parish wouldn’t even know her name—though the priest does, because she’s the one who always volunteers for the things no one wants: cleaning bathrooms after funerals, quietly refilling the holy water fonts, setting out prayer cards at 6 a.m. on Holy Thursday.
Alma has suffered in ways no one would guess. She cared for both of her aging parents until their deaths, lost a child to cancer before he was ten, and went through a painful, quiet divorce in her thirties that she rarely speaks of. But she doesn’t wear her wounds on her sleeve. She carries them like pressed flowers between the pages of a sacred book—hidden, weightless, fragrant with memory.
She prays the Jesus Prayer when she can, often in silence, sometimes while folding towels or feeding a resident who can no longer chew. She’s stopped expecting spiritual fireworks. Most days feel dry. But she shows up anyway, not because she feels God, but because she loves Him. She confesses her sins quickly, regularly, with no drama. She calls them what they are and moves on. When people compliment her kindness, she smiles politely but changes the subject.
Alma doesn’t think of herself as holy. In fact, she worries she’s never done enough. She’s deeply aware of her impatience, her hidden judgments, her fatigue. But when she sees others rise—young people on fire, gifted preachers, dramatic conversions—she rejoices. Truly. She prays for them like a mother in the shadows.
She is the kind of person who will never trend, never be platformed, never be quoted. And yet the light in her eyes, when she prays alone before her shift, flickers with something eternal. Something unmistakable.
She will enter the Kingdom without announcement. No spotlight. No fanfare. Just a bowed head, a hidden flame, and a life quietly poured out—drop by drop—for love.
These are the ones who carry oil no one sees. Their lamps stay lit not through noise or performance, but through hidden surrender. When the door opens—whenever that may be—they won’t step forward with credentials or stories. They’ll enter quietly, without defense or explanation. Just a heart, burning. Just a life, given. And then they’ll disappear into the light that has been calling them all along: away from self, and into the mystery of the One who sees in secret and rewards in silence.