What about humility?  The other day I was talking with someone about Jesus' parable in Luke 14.  It is the account of a person who, when entering a banquet room, immediately sits himself next to the host.  But when someone else enters the room, someone of higher social stature than he, he is asked to go to the end of the table.  Jesus' point is that if we assume we are great, we will always be disappointed.  Better to be realistic about who we are, he suggests, than elevate ourselves for no valid reason.
     Living in a world, particularly its West, in which many people are bent on hyperactive achievement, we often forget who we are.  We come to measure ourselves by what we do, not by who we are becoming. We forget that, at the end of our days, the latter will be far more important. When we live to achieve, we subsist on evanescence.  We'll never be satisfied.  Not that achievement is wrong, just that it can become a bottomless pit, never offering complete solace for the challenges and vagaries of existence.  When we live to love, and when we live to give, however, we actually achieve far more.  We infuse our world, and everyone in it, with the presence of what humanity can most be:  beacons of hope in an often very dark cosmos.
     The apostle John tells us in the initial verses of his gospel that in the  Word [Jesus] was light, and this light was the life of the human being.  Whether we know or believe it or not, when we shine with love and sacrificial giving, we attest to the origin and meaning of all creation.
     It all began with light.