Hi. My name is Daniel Cohen and I am a bona fide Humility Expert. A Humility Czar, if you will. With all due modesty, I venture to say that I’m one of the humblest writers you’ll read this year. One of the humblest writers you’ll ever read, in fact. Come to think of it, I’m so humble I should get an award for my humility! Yeah, and maybe a crown that says “Humblest man on Earth” and…
You get the idea. To say that I’m a “humility expert” is an oxymoron right up there with “proud Christian” and “happily married” (my wife will get me back for that one). I didn’t create this website because I’m so humble, but because I need humility as much as anyone. In fact, I sometimes think if my ego had applied for statehood before I spent a decade researching and writing a book on humility, it would have become the fourth largest state in the union right after Alaska, California and Texas! (Currently I reckon it’s much, much smaller – you know, maybe only the size of Illinois or Nebraska).
However, there are other times – times which are growing more frequent — when I feel in touch with a humility that is slowly transforming me from the neurotic, selfish and self-centered egotist I can be when I’m “in self” into something much more. For when I’m feeling humble, I am at peace with the world. I’m relaxed, confident and loving. I’m thinking about how I can be a blessing to others instead of focusing on myself and my own needs and wants. Humility grounds me. It helps me appreciate life more. It keeps me from worrying about what others think of me.
An underachiever in a family of overachievers
In addition to being a writer with a master’s degree in journalism, I’m currently a pastor of a modest congregation in Burlington, Connecticut and a licensed clinical social worker in private practice. My father, Lawrence B. Cohen, who passed tragically after a car accident in 2023, was a world-renowned scientist who had labs at Yale and in South Korea whose research has helped save tens of thousands of lives and was actually thought to be a candidate for a Nobel Prize – an honor that eluded him most likely only because he criticized the science of someone who DID get that prize. My mother, who passed several years earlier, was known throughout the state of Connecticut for her work championing the legal rights of nursing home residents.
My grandfathers were both highly accomplished as well. My father’s father founded the national newspaper The Jewish Post and Opinion. My mother’s father was a Chicago lawyer chosen by mob boss Sam Giancana to oversee his legitimate businesses because of Grampy’s impeccable reputation for honesty. Although I have an undergraduate degree from Columbia University and three master’s degrees, I haven’t exactly set the world on fire. Yes, I did write a 35-page article on Chicago’s anti-gang violence program for The Chicago Reader in 1988 (an article that some credited with keeping the program alive for several years), but the two book proposals I wrote didn’t pan out. While I am reasonably proud of my book on humility, it’s still fair to say that when it comes to worldly success I haven’t achieved that much. My spiritual walk with God, however, has been remarkable, as I have been blessed far more than I deserve.
My spiritual walk – my testimony
You see, as I mentioned on my welcome page, I am currently both a psychotherapist in private practice and a pastor in a Protestant Christian Church. However, unlike most Christians I’ve met, I came to God before I came to Christ, having had a religious experience as a freshman at Columbia University back in 1981 where I realized I was a spirit that would live on long after Daniel Cohen’s body decayed.
That summer I would have an experience of Spiritual Reality (a.k.a. God) while looking through water droplets on my sunglasses where each drop took on the shape like a shining thumbprint and tears of ecstasy rolled down my cheeks. That this was indeed a spiritual experience was confirmed that fall when I read a Hindu religious text called The Bhagavad Gita and had the same ecstatic tearing experience. (And, no I was not on drugs at the time).
Similar experiences would come when reading Buddhist texts such as The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, and I soon realized that these sacred texts were designed to get me to this state of enlightenment. This would lead me to become a Zen Buddhist in college where I held the bias that Eastern religions were inherently superior to the “religions of the word” (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), which, in my youthful arrogance I dismissed as unspiritual belief systems designed to tell me how to live my life.
In 1993 that conceit was blown away when I attended a church service for the first time at the age of 31.
I hadn’t gone to church to meet God. Far from it. I’d only come to impress the young lady who’d invited me.
Little did I know what God had in store for me.
The church was Living Word Ministries in West Haven, Connecticut, a church with several thousand members. At the end of the service the pastor asked if anyone had felt anything special, and to raise our hands if we had.
So there I was, head bowed, eyes shut, thinking this is another one of those group participation deals like when we prayed together, sang together and read the Bible together — that everyone in the building had their hands up like me — when I heard the voice of the pastor thundering over the PA system like the voice of Almighty God: “Young man, please step forward.” That’s when I opened my eyes and discovered I was the only person in this great big church with his hand up!
This surprised me, but it did not phase me as it might have. I had, in fact, felt “something,” but, skeptic that I was, I wasn’t sure if the Ministry of the Holy Spirit was not merely some chemical the church had put in its ventilating system to make me feel touched. I knew nothing about churches but what the world had taught me, which was that they were all after my money.
Still, this was no time to air my ventilation concerns. On the spot, in front of all those eyes, I marched up the aisle and repeated after the pastor in a loud, clear voice with all of the fervor and conviction of a Holy Roller, that I believed in my heart that Jesus had been raised from the dead and that I was accepting Him as my Lord and Savior.
Then a nice couple took me downstairs where they categorized my experience.
“How do you feel,” they asked.
“Like I’m tingling all over,” I replied.
After conferring, they checked a box on a card with my name on it next to “received an indwelling of the Holy Spirit.” Then they invited me to attend bible study.
Today I am a pastor who loves the Bible specifically because it tells me how to live my life. That’s the difference between being an immature 31-year-old unbeliever and a 62-year-old who has spent 31 years walking with The Lord.
I feel it is one of the most profoundly humbling acts to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, in that it requires us to bow down to another man, albeit the Son of God. And while I don’t have any heaven or hell to put you in, the Bible says that accepting Christ as Lord and Savior leads to eternal life. If you feel so inclined, recite the following words and you, too, can have salvation.
“I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that He died on a cross to pay the price for my sins 2,000 years ago. I believe that He was resurrected on the third day, and I accept Him as my Lord and savior from this day forth.”