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.