17th Sunday in Ordinary Time
(B - cycle)  July  26,  2009

St. Paul writes, “I urge you to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received with all humility.” We have some strange ideas about humility. We say, “Pilot Sully, you performed an amazing feat by making an emergency landing in the Hudson River and saving the lives of all onboard.” And we expect him, if he’s humble. to say something like, “Aw shucks, it was nothing.” The English writer C.S. Lewis is known best today as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, but he also wrote a delightful book called The Screwtape Letters. These letters are from a senior devil, Screwtape, to his nephew, a junior devil, Wormwood. In one letter he writes about humility: “[through our efforts]…thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools.”

To do this sort of posturing is to disrespect God’s gifts. True humility means remembering they are God’s gifts. Everything we have, everything we hope to be is a gift of God. Being aware of that keeps us from being puffed up with pride or looking down on others who aren’t as gifted as we are.

One of the great classics of Christian spirituality is the Rule of St. Benedict. What Benedict wrote to his monks about humility has universal application. Benedict says one test of true humility is our willingness to listen to and learn from unlikely people, for example the young. Benedict never made a big decision without consulting the most junior monks. Another group we’re not inclined to learn from is the poor. Did you follow that high profile divorce case in Hartford recently? If a CEO and a countess wrote a book about finding happiness, we might buy it. But those people were haggling over so much money, it was funny. But they didn’t seem to be having much fun. We’d be better off learning from a couple with considerably less of the world’s goods, who found contentment and fidelity. Benedict said we have much to learn from the marginalized and the inarticulate and even from scoundrels, “who often read situations more acutely than those blindly committed to the preservation of the status quo.”

St. Paul, as always, found his model of humility in Jesus Christ, “who thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but humbled himself to become one of us.” The greatest man who ever lived was also the most humble. It figures.