Humility Is Remembering
22nd Sunday of the Year
St. Augustine once told a student how to live the Christian life:
This way is first humility, second humility, third humility, and however often you should ask me I would say the same, not because there are not other precepts to be explained, but, if humility does not precede and accompany and follow every good work we do, and if it is not set before us to look upon, and beside us to lean upon, and behind us to fence us in, pride will wrest from our hand any good deed we do while we are in the very act of taking pleasure in it.1
Humility. Our readings this weekend teach us about the centrality of humility to our Christian lives. The author of the Book of Sirach tells us that through humility we will find favor with God. Our Gospel tells us that the one who exalts himself will be humbled while the one who humbles himself will be exalted. We know as Christians that the model of humility is Christ who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2:6-8). The Christian life is one of imitating Christ, and the life of Christ is a life of humility.
I want to say more about humility and the Christian life. But before doing so, I want to make a claim about how we talk about the Christian life. We are facing something of a crisis in the Church today: we talk all the time about what we need to be doing in order to live good Christian lives, but we often fail to talk about how to do what we need to be doing. And the consequence is moral—sometimes spiritual—ambiguity; we know what the Christian life looks like, but we lack a clear vision of how to live this life for ourselves. Humility is a feature of the Christian life that suffers from just this kind of ambiguity. We know that the Christian life is a life of humility—I have been told this my whole life—but rarely has anyone ever given me clear direction on how to become a humble person.
And I think there is a good reason that so few have given me clear direction on the life of humility: it is hard to explain how humility is a virtue. Virtues are habits of soul—deep interior formations of our intellect and will—that we build up for ourselves through practice and repetitive action. Do you desire more courage in your life? Well, perform brave actions and you will become courageous. Do you want to get better at exercising prudence? Then practice making good decisions and your life will change; you will develop virtue. The problem with the virtue of humility is that we cannot get better at humility through practice and repetitive actions. As one theologian has written: one cannot really strive for humility, for then he is trying to be something; one cannot really practice humility, for then he is trying to attain something.2 We develop virtue in our lives through effort—striving for excellence—but humility is a feature of our lives that by its very nature demands that we forsake excellence for the sake of vanquishing pride. We cannot become humble by trying to become excellent.
And so, we are confronted with a practical problem: we need to possess a virtue that we cannot acquire through effort—striving—labor. How do we solve the problem? The last two days I have spent looking for a solution to our problem and stumbled upon something like an answer by way of asking myself a second question: when have I most keenly experienced humility in my life? There is a question that I can answer easily. I remember sitting on the slopes of Mount Baker in the Cascade Range above a thick blanket of clouds colored pink by a sun that had not yet broken above the horizon, a blanket of pinkish clouds so thick that the earth below remained hidden from view except for the dozens of other snow-capped peaks that jutted upward in every direction and I remember thinking to myself in that moment that my life is a very small part of something very large. I remember hundreds of conversations with the poor and the sick and the addicted and the unemployed and the suffering and thinking to myself that the only Christian reality that matters is gratitude for the lives we have been given. There have been so many adventures during which I have keenly experienced the workings of providence—so many individual moments through which I realized that if God had not preserved my life, then I do not know what would have happened to me.
What I am talking about is contingency. Our human lives are contingent. You can look up the word ‘contingent’ in the dictionary and you will find a definition that says something like to be dependent or conditioned by something else; or to not be logically necessary. Here is the condition of our human lives: we are contingent; we do not need to exist; our lives are not necessary; our existence is completely dependent on the love of a God who creates and redeems. We can say more: not only do we not need to exist, but we also are not God. So many of those experienced moments of humility have to do with me running up against my limits and discovering that there is little in life that I can accomplish on my own. Those moments of clarity in life, when we accept the fact that we are not very powerful creatures—when we accept that we are dependent on others, on God, for our own welfare—those are moments for Christian humility. And for me, those moments in my life when I have run up against my limits, when I have most deeply experienced the reality of my not needing to exist— those moments in life when I have most deeply experienced the reality that everything in my life is a gift—those are the moments in which I have most deeply experienced humility. We do not need to exist, life is a gift, and we are not God: there is a frame of mind for real humility in life.
Here is my claim: humility is not something for which we strive, work, or labor. Humility—unlike every other virtue—humility is something that happens to us. We experience humility passively in those moments in which the realities of life break us down and remind us of our limitations—of our dependency, of our contingency. We experience humility when we most deeply experience the love—the gratuity—of God. And I think that the Gospel for this weekend teaches us that to experience humility in life we must give God the space he needs to work in our lives; we cannot place limits on the ability of providence to work in our lives. Christ tells us that: rather, when you are invited, go and take the lowest place so that when the host comes to you he may say, 'My friend, move up to a higher position.' We take the lowest place at the table not because seeking out the lesser position is a cause of humility but because to take the lowest place is to give God the maximum amount of space in our lives to raise us up—and those profound experiences of divine gratuity in life . . . there is a foundation for real Christian humility.
You can imagine the scene from today’s Gospel. Christ is invited into the home of a leading Pharisee and the guests—we can only imagine these guests to be the privileged of the community—are waiting to see how Christ will act in this situation. And what does Christ tell them? Do not forget your origins; do not forget that you are dependent on God. Take the lowest place at the table so that God might raise you up. Invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind to our banquet so that God—and not your own efforts—might repay you with righteousness. Christ overturns the logic of the world with his parable. The Pharisees go to great lengths to invite Christ into their celebration—to encounter God on their own terms—and Christ responds by telling them to seek out the lowest position so that God might invite them into the joyful celebration of a banquet that endures eternally. We meet God on God’s terms, or we do not meet him at all.
So, how do we grow in the ways of Christian humility? To my mind, humility follows from a two-fold movement. First, we place ourselves in positions that give God space to act in our lives; we do not act from pride and seek the higher, more exalted position. St. Paul’s words to the Philippians make the Christian life clear to us: Christ did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. Christ seeks out the lowest position and enters into the life of the world and we are called to imitate that same action. Christ is exalted because he empties himself. Christ allows the Father to raise him up. And second, when those moments of divine gratuity come to us—moments when we perceive that we are contingent, dependent creatures, moments in which we are made low—then we must remember those moments; we must cherish them. Humility and memory, to my mind, depend on one another. Humility is a frame of mind; a way of understanding, seeing, making sense of our own lives. And because humility is something that happens to us, the essential work of humility is to remember the experiences in life that remind us that we are limited creatures who do not need to exist, and that our lives—and every part of our lives—are a gift. Humility follows from these acts of remembering. And if you have any doubts on that account, consider the fact that pride is the great enemy of humility. Pride is the destruction of Christian memory. Pride is an act of human forgetting: a forgetting of our origins, a forgetting of our dependence on God and one another, a forgetting of the truth that we are small and broken creatures who are a part of something so much larger than ourselves.
Homily preached at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on August 27th, 2022.
St. Augustine, Letters (83-130), ed. Roy Joseph Deferrari, trans. Wilfrid Parsons, vol. 18, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1953), 282.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Light of the Word: Brief Reflections on the Sunday Readings. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993. p. 343.