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 21st
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.
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