Humility…8 – 25 August 2017

This, at last, is the final instalment of our tour through St Benedict’s Twelve Steps of Humility.  We have visited all twelve steps, with the help of Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, who has an approach more accessible to people of the 21^st century.  It may be still a bit of a muddle.  What about people who seem to be naturally humble, with or without religious faith?  When someone commented to Churchill that one of their colleagues was “a very humble man”, Churchill growled, “Well, he has a lot to be humble about”.  I don’t know that anyone ever called Churchill humble… and yet there are indications that privately he was anything but arrogant and confident.  What are Donald J Trump’s inner fears and demons?  Does he know himself? Regarding arrogance, I enjoy the story of Cosmo Gordon Lang.  When he became Archbishop of Canterbury he had to have his portrait painted.  But when he saw the portrait the archbishop said, “I don’t like it – it makes me look domineering, tyrannical and piratical”.  To which the Bishop of Durham asked, “To which of those epithets does Your Grace take exception?”

We have not asked the question, Why does humility matter?  Why was it rated highly by Jesus: 

Blessed are the poor in spirit – theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are the meek – they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness… the       merciful… the pure in heart… the peacemakers…

The experience of encountering real arrogance goes some of the way to answering the question why.  I have a memory of radio’s Kim Hill after about 30 minutes with Jeffrey Archer, Lord Archer the novelist – she sighed and said, “And there ends a bruising encounter with the ego of Jeffrey Archer.”  One answer is simply that humility fits better in the presence of God, and as part of a creation in which we are both finite and infinitesimal, and also disposable. 

By humility we do not mean cringing subservience or powerlessness, we do not mean self-abasement.  Real humility has its own dignity and integrity, and we know it when we meet it.  On the personal level, humility is a truthful estimation of ourselves, whereas arrogance is almost certainly less than the truth.  One of Joan Chittister’s points was to the effect that, in humility we discover how to be happy with what we have, or even with less if we have to.  We have learned the perils of possession, ownership and control – what with care and toil he buildeth, tower and temple, fall to dust.

However it would be wrong to go away from here vowing that from now on I will be humble.  It won’t work, and it’s beside the point.  The point is to be always strengthened in our silence and stillness of prayer to be true, to be what God makes us, along the way.  The self that needs to pose, or to pretend, is finding itself diminished, attenuated – and we may indeed surprise ourselves at the changes that seem to be happening, gently and without bother.  The real gifts of grace are not anything we have achieved.  Simply realising that, with wonder, is a foot on the ladder of humility.

Humility…7 – 18 August 2017

…and finally we come to numbers 11 and 12 of Benedict’s Twelve Steps of Humility.  In Sister Joan Chittister’s rendering these last two are:  Speak kindly… Be serene, stay calm.  I thought a good way to approach this would be in Sister Joan’s own words, in one of her weekly internet postings:

The hard truth is that humility is a lesson that can take a lifetime to learn.  Yet, in the end, its great reward is contentment, serenity, trust, and a sense of the success that comes from having arrived at the fullness of the self by understanding our own smallness.

Humility is the great liberator in life.  No one and nothing can undermine the humble person’s confidence in God.  Nothing can deliver us from committing ourselves to the will of God for the world.  Nothing can convince us to adapt ourselves to a world whose greed is crushing and whose arrogance is smothering.  We will be happy with what we have.  We will not live pretending to be what we are not, forever worried that our masks… our cosmetics and costumes will come off in public.  Everything we do will speak of kindness, of acceptance, of care for those in whose presence we stand.  We will have put down all the trappings that are meant to hide our real selves from the world.  Freed from pretensions now, I will be honest, open, and my authentic self to all people and in all situations.
It is the work of a lifetime, yes, but it is a lifetime that gets quieter, calmer, kinder, and more satisfying as we go.

So humility, she says, is the product of pilgrimage, part of the fruits of the journey.  We learn it on the way, and typically in the later times of life.  It is not so much that we admired humility and tried to imitate it – much more, it is what begins to happen in us when we are learning to be still and accepting of God, handing over our fear, learning to recognise and smile at our fantasies and pretensions.

The 12^th and final step is expressed as: Be serene, stay calm.  We can look at this flippantly, rather as Jones the Butcher, in Dad’s Army, in a crisis, jumps around shouting, “Don’t panic, don’t panic…!” – or we can see at it as an inner effect of a true spiritual journey over the years.  I would imagine we can all think of people who routinely produce a meltdown when something goes wrong, or simply looks threatening.  Dealing with official bureaucracy, for instance, can be a serious test of humble serenity.  Bad news and crises may do it…  I am sure the serenity of which Benedict writes depends on the contemplative walk having led us, perhaps long ago, to come to terms with our own frailty, our own mistakes, and our mortality, and with the fact that life is in many respects unfair.  We have made terms with the increasing limitations of age, with the facts of human variety and difference, the fact that we may not and cannot control others… and we have acquired a keener sense of what actually matters and what does not. 

Humility…6 – 11 August 2017

The 9^th step of humility, in Benedict’s own words, is that we control our tongues and remain silent.  And I don’t have the courage to give you the 10^th step in Benedict’s words, because I would have to spend the rest of the morning defending him – Joan Chittister renders it better as… Never ridicule anyone or anything.

Control our tongues…  Humility understands that a quieter world will tend to be a wiser world, a quieter church might understand itself and other things better.  It is simply not necessary to voice every thought or to respond out loud to every event, or statement we hear, or stimulus we receive.  Listening has priority over telling.   Two desert stories: 

Abba Theophilus the archbishop came to Scetis one day.  The brethren who were assembled said to Abba Pambo, “Say something to the archbishop so that he may be edified.”  The old man said to them, “If he is not edified by my silence, he will not be edified by my speech.”

Abba Macarius the Great said to the brothers at Scetis when he dismissed the assembly, “Flee, my brothers!”  One of them asked him, “Where could we flee beyond this desert?”  Macarius put his finger to his lips and said, “Flee this” – and he went into his cell, shut the door and sat down.

The words listen and silent, you may have noticed, are spelt with the same letters, anagrams of each other.  Of course we enjoy lively conversation, especially if it is thoughtful and ordered, and if listening is practised (and interrupting is not) – but not, it seems to me, when it is not much more than occupational therapy for the chattering cabal, swapping what happened to me and what she said and what I said and how I felt, and you’ll never guess...   The contemplative’s discipline of humility – and humility is our subject -- simply thrives on silence and space, and on simplicity.  Esther de Waal, one of our contemporary teachers, wrote some time ago about the grace of entering a room.  We pause at the threshold, take time to sense the atmosphere, observe and listen, before saying anything much.  She had a friend whose normal practice was to make an entrance, loudly, up-front, and cutting diametrically through whatever may have been happening there before she/he arrived. 

Then Benedict instructs us about ridicule.  We do need to be clear about this.  Benedict was not against humour or laughter -- the Rule of St Benedict contains some lovely humour.  The humourless monk was a problem in the monastery.  But Benedict forbids ridicule.  Ridicule entails humiliation.  Gentle and witty criticism of people is not the problem here.  The problem is a form of bullying, attacking someone’s dignity and decency, shaming or degrading – and our censorious self-righteous society does it all the time.  Studied humiliation was a recognised procedure at Auckland Grammar in my day.  It sickened me then, it sickens me now.  Ridicule is a largely unquestioned weapon in our culture, even more so in election year.  It is intended to wound, to disable.  It is a weapon unavailable to disciples of Christ.  We learn other ways to respond.

Humility…5 – 4 August 2017

In our pursuit of humility we come to numbers 7 and 8 of Benedict’s Twelve Steps of Humility.  Summarised by Joan Chittister they are:

Let go of the false self.

Preserve tradition and learn from the community.

Perhaps “false self” is a somewhat unfortunate term.  A woman who assiduously attended a meditation group I once led flatly refused to entertain any notion of a false self.  Herself, as she experienced herself, no more, no less, was the only self she consented to recognise.  “False self” is nonsense, she said.  Well, we go over this ground fairly frequently, do we not.  St Paul writes about what he calls in Greek sarx (σαρξ, σαρκος), translated “flesh”.  He says we can live either according to the flesh, or according to pneuma (πνευμα), Spirit.[1]  They are not the same thing, and Spirit, in this sense, is not simply some improved version of the false self.  They are different.  The False Self, Thomas Keating for one teaches, is the self we normally assume is the authentic me, which I maintain as presentable and which I hope other people see.  Keating calls it the accumulation of all our personal strategies for daily management, happiness and security – while the True Self is the person God sees, created and knows, the person open to God’s spiritual gift in Christ, humbly and gratefully.  I think the term “false self” gives the wrong impression, and along with others I prefer to talk about the ego, the persona we wear and adjust from time to time, if we can.  Fr Laurence Freeman points out that Jesus had an ego.  The ego is not necessarily bad – indeed it’s essential – but the ego may not usurp the place that belongs to God.  In contemplative life and prayer we are ready and willing to see the ego peeled back in favour of the True Self which is always there, always was, abiding in Christ as Christ abides in us.  Humility, teaches Benedict, requires that we consent to the diminishing of the ego.  He must increase, said John the Baptist, referring to Jesus, but I must decrease.[2]  Humility requires kindly understanding of the difficulties and pain of this, in ourselves as also in others.

Number 8 counsels us:  Preserve tradition and learn from the community.  This counsels the humility to observe and learn, even from what we might find outmoded, past its use-by date.  Learn history…!  Wisdom counsels the humility therefore to learn how to listen, sometimes especially to what we believe we disagree with.  Wisdom can emerge in strange old-fashioned clothes.  Now I can imagine one or two of my colleagues and friends from years ago, people who suffered my bright ideas and new strategies, saying today, “Well, listen to you…!”  But age and reflection are useful.  Tradition endures for a reason.  Do not remove an ancient landmark, counsels the Book of Proverbs.[3]  Humility then entails the inner discipline by which we listen to the past, and to the different voices in the community, before starting to reform everything in sight.  Such humility is learned in silence and stillness, the disciplines of waiting and the readiness to watch the ego attenuating in the light of Christ.

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[1] See for instance Romans 8:1-17.

[2] John 3:30.

[3] Proverbs 22:28; 23:10.