When a Prayer Makes You Uncomfortable

Rethinking the Litany of Humility

It began with a familiar warning.

The prayer app I have been using during Lent introduced the Litany of Humility with the same line I have heard many times before, “This is a hard prayer.”

That sentence always lands with a kind of spiritual gravity, as if the listener should brace himself before proceeding. It suggests that the prayer is about to demand something severe from us, something painful but necessary, like a bitter medicine we swallow for the sake of holiness.

So, I began praying it, as I have before.

From the desire of being esteemed, deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being loved, deliver me, Jesus.

Then comes the final movement of the prayer.

That others may be loved more than I…
That others may be esteemed more than I…
That others may increase and I may decrease…
That others may be chosen and I set aside…

And then I realized something. My discomfort with the prayer was not because it was difficult. It was because I wasn’t sure I believed it.

That realization startled me. I am not someone who enjoys criticizing traditional prayers. The Church has preserved many spiritual treasures, and the instinct to approach them with reverence is a good one. But when something unsettles me in prayer, I have learned not to ignore it. Instead, I try to understand it.

Every prayer comes from somewhere. Someone wrote it. Someone prayed it first. Someone had a particular struggle, temptation, or spiritual insight that gave birth to those words.

So, I decided to do what I often do when something in the spiritual life confuses me. I started researching. The Litany of Humility is traditionally attributed to Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, a close collaborator of Pope Pius X and a man known for his deep interior life. By all accounts he was a brilliant church diplomat who moved within the highest levels of ecclesiastical leadership where prestige, influence, and ambition are constant temptations.

When you understand that context, the prayer begins to make more sense. This was not a prayer written in a vacuum. It was the prayer of a man who wanted to guard his soul from pride.

Imagine living in a world where titles mattered, where influence mattered, where every room you entered carried subtle competitions for authority and recognition. Imagine trying to remain spiritually grounded while surrounded by the machinery of power.

Now the litany begins to sound like what it probably was: a personal safeguard against ambition. Cardinal Merry del Val was not trying to erase himself. He was trying to protect his heart. And that insight helped me appreciate the prayer more deeply. But it did not fully resolve my discomfort.

Because the way many people hear the Litany of Humility today can easily lead to a misunderstanding of humility itself. Humility, in the Christian tradition, is not self-rejection. It is not pretending we have no gifts. It is not wishing to disappear. It is not believing that everyone else is better than we are.

Humility is simply the willingness to live in truth.

The great Carmelite mystic St. Teresa of Ávila once described humility in very simple terms: it is walking in truth. Truth includes two realities at the same time.

First, we are not the center of the universe. Everything we have comes from God. Our talents, our opportunities, even the breath in our lungs are gifts.

But the second truth is just as important. We are beloved creations of God. We are not accidents.
We are not disposable. We are not meant to shrink into invisibility.

Each of us has been entrusted with gifts that are meant to serve others and build up the world.

When humility is misunderstood, people begin to believe that holiness requires them to diminish themselves. They assume they must deny their strengths, avoid recognition, or quietly step aside whenever an opportunity appears.

But that is not humility. That is insecurity disguised as virtue.

This is where the Litany of Humility can become confusing if we read it too literally.

Take one of the most striking lines in the prayer:

That others may be loved more than I.

When I first read that line carefully, I stopped. Because desiring to be loved is not a flaw in human nature. It is one of the most basic desires written into the human heart. From the moment we enter the world, we long for connection, affection, and belonging.

Christ Himself desired love. In the Garden of Gethsemane, He asked His closest friends to remain with Him. On the cross He entrusted His mother to the beloved disciple. Throughout the Gospels we see Him forming real relationships with real people.

So, what could this line possibly mean?

Surely it cannot mean that we should desire to be loved less.

The problem, I realized, is not the desire for love. The problem is competition for love.

Human beings have a remarkable ability to turn love into a contest. We compare. We measure. We wonder whether someone else is receiving more affection, more admiration, more attention. Envy quietly slips into the heart.

Perhaps the deeper meaning of the prayer is not, “Let me be loved less.” Perhaps the deeper meaning is, “Free me from the need to be loved more than others.”

Suddenly the line makes sense.

The prayer is not rejecting love. It is rejecting rivalry. The same pattern appears in the other lines.

That others may be esteemed more than I.

That does not mean we should deny the gifts God has given us. It means we should not depend on praise to know our worth.

That others may increase and I may decrease.

These words echo John the Baptist, who spoke them when Jesus began His public ministry. But John did not disappear into nothingness. He fulfilled his mission with courage and clarity.

His decrease was not self-erasure. It was freedom from needing to remain the center of attention.

That others may be chosen and I set aside.

This line may be the hardest of all.

Every person who has been entrusted with gifts wants to use them. There is nothing wrong with that desire. But the prayer quietly asks a deeper question:

If you are not chosen, will your identity collapse? In other words, are your gifts rooted in service, or in recognition?

The more I thought about these lines, the more I realized that the prayer itself was not the problem.

The problem was the way we sometimes interpret it.

If humility is misunderstood as self-rejection, then the Litany of Humility can reinforce an unhealthy spirituality in which people quietly learn to dislike themselves. But that cannot be what God desires.

The Christian life does not begin with self-hatred. It begins with the astonishing realization that we are loved by God.

From that secure foundation, humility becomes something very different. It becomes freedom. Freedom from comparison. Freedom from envy. Freedom from the exhausting need to measure our worth against the attention others receive.

Once I reached that conclusion, I decided to try something slightly bold.

I rewrote a few of the lines. I know—who am I to adjust a prayer that has been prayed for generations? But language shapes the way we understand the spiritual life, and sometimes small clarifications can make a profound difference.

Instead of praying:

“That others may be loved more than I”, perhaps we could pray:“Free me from the need to be loved more than others.”

Instead of:

“That others may be praised and I go unnoticed,” perhaps:“Free me from the need for praise to know my worth.

Instead of:

“That others may be preferred to me in everything,”perhaps: “Free me from resentment when others are preferred.”

The heart of the prayer remains the same. The goal is still humility. But the emphasis shifts from self-erasure to interior freedom.

And that, I believe, is what true humility looks like. Humility is not pretending to be smaller than we are. It is standing before God with clear eyes and saying:

Everything I am comes from You. The gifts I have are not mine to hoard. The recognition I receive is not mine to cling to. The love I experience is not something to compete for.

It is all gift. And when we finally understand that, we are free. Free to serve boldly. Free to rejoice when others succeed. Free to use the gifts God has given us without fear or comparison.

In the end, the Litany of Humility is not meant to make us disappear. It is meant to make us fearless.