‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’ Luke 14:11
There’s a great deception that humility is something passive. It’s not, it's the most active tendency there is if you’re truly in the business of countering the strength of self-will and we all need more of that.
In case I get praise for this sermon - some of you are very kind to me - the words of Thomas More are at the back of my mind: ‘whoever bids others to do right, but gives an evil example by acting the opposite way is like a foolish weaver who weaves with one hand and unravels the cloth just as quickly with the other’.
Yes, humility is the Christian distinctive and it’s far from making yourself a doormat. It's the day by day struggle for holiness commended by Our Lord in the Gospel as a taking of the lower place where we can, and, by our first reading from Ecclesiasticus, as refusal to forsake the Lord. ‘The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker’.
When people live without God they’re bound to centre themselves on themselves though many I know who live without God show immense kindness to others. I put that down to God giving them a better start than I! As a believer I don’t see myself as the centre of the world in principle but in practice to my dying day I’ll be actively countering touchiness, resentfulness against criticism, impatience when I don’t get my own way, eagerness for fame, anxiety lest I miss being thanked and praised and so on.
‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’
Our Lord mixed with everybody. Today’s Gospel shows him mixing at the upper end of the society of his day at the home of a prominent Pharisee. He felt the need to address people trying to get places near the most famous. It’s a bit like when the Archdeacon visited on the patronal. Over our excellent buffet you couldn’t get near him for clergy - I tried! I wanted to congratulate him on pulling out his finger a bit for us in accepting the PCCs business plan clearing the way for the appointment of a full time parish priest.
What is it about the human condition that makes us so celebrity conscious, wanting celebrity for ourselves and delighting on occasions we meet real live celebrities?
I met Edwina Currie on the train the other week which got my mind thinking about eggs and other things. What really struck me in this face to face encounter though was the caring way she saw onto and off a busy train a frail man I took to be her husband. ‘Judge not and you will not be judged’. How hard it must be to serve in government nowadays with the relentless unforgiving gaze of 24-7 media upon you!
The deception we live under that humility is something passive links very much to the way our media school us unconsciously or consciously in deriding the weak. We need sermons, retreats, books to read that help undeceive us about the truly active virtue of humility. This sermon links a little to my retreat in Lisieux last month where I stayed a few days close to the Shrine of St Therese whose life in many ways was quite unremarkable. Born in 1873 she lived just 24 years, the last nine in a convent. When she contracted TB the Convent superior was concerned to get some obituary together and asked her to write it for herself - it became a bestseller - ‘Story of a Soul’ (show) . The rest is history - do read it - a book I’ve commended to you before from the pulpit! Yes, Therese in a way was herself victim of church celebrity cultus, being made a saint so soon after her death, but many are the wiser through her teaching as a Doctor of the Church.
Engaging with Thérèse last month I found to be primarily engagement with self-acceptance, something built in her by the Lord and her acceptance by a loving family and the community she joined at 15. ‘Story of a Soul’ captures this struggle to welcome God’s love and accept ourselves within its embrace. On my retreat I felt inspired by her to talk with the Lord about my own difficulties in self-acceptance and how my failings can become happy pretext for looking to him. To know this, to accept ourselves and our life circumstances, helps divert us from these towards the addressing of our deeper needs and aspirations. Maybe thanks to Thérèse - it’s still early days - I run less risk of seeing the way to my true self blocked by staying slave to lower impulses though, like her, I can’t presume on Our Lord. As she writes, ‘I am not perfect but I want to become so… effort means more to God than victory’.
It IS an effort to gain humility even if it's also a grace. We need to ask for it again and again as a grace from God. Secondly, we need to accept the humiliations of life though recognising the world of difference between being humble and being humiliated. How many times do we say the wrong thing and feel the hurt to our pride more acutely than the hurt we did to the person we spoke to or spoke about?
The school of humility is a school of self-acceptance impossible without confidence in God. We live as Christians with knowledge of God loving us through and through and his invitation to recentre our lives on him and our neighbour. Putting that wisdom into practice is the action of humility.
One day when Therese was nearing the end of her life and feeling absolutely bereft and forsaken by God, she was in the Convent garden, walking very slowly because of her weakness and constant pain. Suddenly she saw a hen at the side of the path, hustling her newborn chicks out of the nun’s way, protecting them with outstretched wings. Therese writes how she immediately thought how God had loved and protected her all through her life and how God wants to envelope everyone with the tender protectiveness of that mother hen. She writes how she was so moved her eyes filled up with tears and had to look away from the scene.
THAT’S HOW GOD LOVES US TOO - no matter what we feel like, no matter what kind of personal history we have. If we want holiness we build our foundation on this rock of God’s love and acting with humility is the master builder. We may be strong willed but such strength is a perilous gift since it links to the desire for the self to triumph over others including God. In holiness the will yields first place to love by always seeking a lower place so as to put no unnecessary obstacles in love’s way.
‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’
To be a saint - and we should all aspire to be saints - is to keep in tune with our deepest needs and aspirations by actively countering our lower impulses, that attention-seeking insecurity, touchiness, impatience or whatever. We're the ones who block our way to holiness, to the joy of becoming what God made us to be, by remaining slaves to these lower impulses.
With me, I invite you to pray for humility, not to be a doormat people walk over but to have active determination to counter self-centredness and get better centring of our lives upon God and neighbour, whose eternal fellowship in the communion of saints we anticipate at this Mass, with angels, archangels and all the company of heaven.
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