Humility

Humility

During this Lenten season, we have spent time each week considering the seven Christian virtues.  We have in turn focused on chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience and kindness.  These simple concepts are marked in some ways by how archaic they sound.  We have stepped away from the concern of the production of virtue and instead concerned ourselves with the production of wealth.  Education is not undertaken as it once was in the liberal arts to nurture the process of creating good human beings to focusing instead on creating a marketable person who can find employment.  To speak of chastity or temperance truly sounds as if words are being channeled from another age.  In order to appear relevant and modern, even the church has moved away from seeking to produce virtue and has instead tried to make its life meet the felt needs of its people.

The final of the seven Christian virtues is humility.  One only needs to look at the sham that is modern resume writing to see that humility is seen as a bygone virtue of another age.  We live in the age of self-promotion, self-agrandizement and self-esteem.  When we speak of humble, it tends to be a negative.  This person or that gets their comeuppance and they are “humbled.”  When we get the best of someone else they are humiliated.  We have turned what the church has considered one of the seven most important virtues into either a quaint nostalgia or not a virtue at all.

The word humble means literally modesty or lowness.  The word itself comes from the Latin word “humus” which means earth.  To be humble is to identify with the ground beneath your feet.  As a spiritual virtue, it is to remember that from dust we have come, to dust we will return.  As a spiritual virtue, it is to remember that we all have feet of clay.  As a Christian Virtue, humility is most precisely the recognition of three truths.  First, that God is perfect—thus not of earth.  Second that others often have skills we lack.  And finally that we are imperfect and ought to submit to God.

Humility is not self-deprecation, which is often merely a disguise for a sizable ego.  In an effort to win praise, we act as if we aren’t able just so that others will tell us how wonderful we are.  True humility is an accurate understanding of the self, neither too high or too low an assessment of who we are.  C.S. Lewis suggests:  Humility is not thinking less of yourself its thinking of yourself less.  Frederick Buechner puts it in the following way:  True humility doesn't consist of thinking ill of yourself but of not thinking of yourself much differently from the way you'd be apt to think of anybody else.

It is appropriate that on the day we consider the virtue of humility, the church celebrates the final meal and Jesus washing his disciples feet.  Imagine for a moment, Jesus, God in  human flesh, kneeling before each of his disciples.  What other picture is necessary to communicate humility.  If Jesus would wash the earth off the feet of his followers, how can we do anything other than wash the earth off each other’s feet.

We will let St. Augustine have the final word.  A reminder that until we are ready to embrace our earthiness we will never approach heaven.  He writes, “ Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues hence, in the soul in which this virtue does not exist there cannot be any other virtue except in mere appearance.”