Smallness of Soul

Your ten dollar word for the day is: pusillanimity. 

I am beginning in new book in the Renovare Book Club by Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung called Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies. 

She writes in the introduction of her beginning time in graduate school and feeling a sense of lostness. She felt like she didn’t belong in that program. She wasn’t smart enough.  It was in reading Thomas Aquinas a few years later she could name the feeling she was having in that time of her life. 

“…I happened across a vice he called pusillanimity, which means ‘smallness of soul.’ Those afflicted by this vice, wrote Aquinas, shrink back from all that God has called them to be. When faced with the effort and difficulty of stretching themselves to the great things of which they are capable, they cringe and say, ‘I can’t.’ In short, the pusillanimous rely on their own puny powers and focus on their own potential for failure, rather than counting on God’s grace to equip them for great work in his kingdom — work beyond anything they might have dreamed for themselves.”