Eating The Burned Cake

I definitely have an ongoing struggle with pride, and I recently had to "eat the burned cake".

While the details are probably not important, I was reminded that perhaps I ought to be a little more charitable to an arrogant person that I was scolding for his arrogance.  How bizarre is that?

So I backed up and ate my words, and they sure tasted like a big burned cake , lump of charcoal, going down. Eating your words is a really hard thing to do. 

While again, the story of St Alfred and the burned cakes has never been verified by history, it is easy to imagine being a king who was blessed by the pope as a child failing to do the most necessary of tasks, attending to the food.  Of course he wanted to be out and about doing the important things.

But when the wife scolded him for his neglect, he accepted the scolding.  Perhaps he thought that his act of neglect was a consequence of pride.  Perhaps he remembered that the most important tasks of men on earth don't get done if they don't eat and perhaps his pride was endangering his people.  Whatever he thought, he did the right thing, accepting the scolding and probably eating that burned cake.

Now the interesting thing about a burned cake is that it is a lump of charcoal.  Charcoal, you recall, is still used in medicine today to purge our systems of poisons.  Tastes nasty, makes you sick, but at the end of it all, you are shaken but clean again.

St. Alfred the Great, pray for us that we may learn humility.  Pray that we may be helped by the examples of  Jesus, you  and your companion saints to live more humbly and have the courage to eat the charcoal when we are poisoned by our pride.  Amen.