The First great Christian Mystic

When I was a student I stayed with a lecturer and his wife in London. There were six other students and a young psychology lecturer called Mark, all staying in the same house. Mark and I found we had a lot in common and, before I realized it, a deep friendship had grown up between the two of us. He was a brilliant lecturer and I often went with him to the many outside engagements that he accepted. Wherever he went, he would always begin by belit­tling his own competence, assuring his audience that he felt sure they knew far more about the subject than he did. If the contents and delivery of his material hadn’t blatantly belied his preamble, you couldn’t have blamed his audience if they had walked out before he’d finished. I think it was what I originally took for genuine humility in Mark that initially drew me to him. It was only later that I came to realize that he took a morbid delight in denigrating himself. It was only because we had grown close that I was able to ask him why he always had to apologize for himself, run himself down in front of others. “I suppose I’ve got what we psychologists call a security problem,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, as if it wasn’t of any consequence. “I suppose I’m a classic case!”  read on