Thoughts on Humility

Ave Maria Meditations

The active nature of humility:

In the account of the life of Saint Anthony, Abbot, it is said that God showed him the world beset with the snares the devil had prepared to entrap men. Following the vision, the saint was filled with fear, and asked, Lord, who can escape so many snares? And he heard a voice that answered, Anthony, he who is humble can escape, for God gives his grace to the humble, but the proud fall into all the traps the devil sets. Yet the devil does not dare to attack the humble man.

If we want to serve the Lord, we must desire ask for the virtue of humility with insistence. To truly desire this virtue, we should keep in mind that the opposite of humility – the capital sin of pride – is the greatest obsta­cle to the vocation we have received from the Lord. It is what harms family life and friendship, what opposes our true happiness most of all. It is the devil’s foremost ally in our soul, with which he tries to undo the work that the Holy Spirit is constantly carrying out. 

Living the virtue of humility is not only a matter rejecting the motions of pride, selfishness and vanity. In fact, Jesus and Mary, who possessed the virtue of humility to the full, never experienced any inclination toward pride. The word ‘humility’ comes from the Latin word humus (soil or earth). Etymologically, ‘humble’ signifies inclined towards the earth; the virtue of humility consists in bowing down before God and everything that is of God in creatures. In practical terms, it leads us to recognize our inferiority, our littleness and indigence before God. The saints experience great joy in becoming nothing before God, recognizing that only He is great and that all human greatness is, by comparison, empty and a lie.           

Humility is based on truth,  and above all on the great truth that the distance between the creature and the Creator is infinite. That is why we should frequently take time to remind, and persuade ourselves that everything good in us is from God; that all the good that we have done has been suggested and brought to fruition by him, with the help of his grace. We do not say a single aspira­tion without the impulse and grace of the Holy Spirit. Ours are the defects, sins and selfishness. Grace, on the other hand, makes our soul shine so that even the angels are awed by the brightness of the divine gift.

Humility has nothing to do with timidity, with fickleness or with a mediocre life lacking in ambition. Humility discovers that everything good in us, both in the order of nature and in the order of grace, belongs to God for from his fullness we have all received.  And such pro­fusion of gifts moves us to be grateful. 

The road to humility:

To the question, ‘How shall I become humble?’ corresponds the immediate answer, ‘Through the grace of God’ …. Only the grace of God can give us a clear vision of our true condition and the awareness of the dignity that comes from humility.  That is why we should desire this virtue and ask for it incessantly, convinced that with it, we shall love God and be capable of great enterprises despite our weakness … 

Together with this petition we should accept the humiliations – usually small – that may arise each day in different ways: during our work and in our dealings with others, when we are conscious of our weakness or make mistakes, great or small. One day, it is said, Saint Thomas Aquinas was pulled up for a supposed grammatical error while reading. He corrected it as indicated. Later, his com­panions asked him why he had made the correction since he himself must have known that the original text was faultless. Before God, the saint replied, better a fault of grammar than a fault of obedience and of humility. We walk the way of humility when we accept humiliations, great or small, and when we accept our defects and strug­gle to overcome them.

He who is humble can do without praise or flattery in his work because his hope is in the Lord, who is truly the source of all his riches and happiness and gives meaning to all he does.

One of the reasons why men are so prone to praise one another, to overestimate their own value and abil­ities, to resent anything that tends to lower them in their own eyes or in the eyes of others, is that they see no hope for hap­piness outside themselves. That is why they are often so hyper-sensitive, so resentful when they are criticized, so upset by anyone who contradicts them, so insistent on getting their own way, so desirous of being well known, so anxious to be praised, so determined to control their surroundings. They secure themselves to themselves like a shipwrecked man holding on to a straw. And life goes on, and they move further and further away from happiness.

He who struggles to be humble does not seek out praise, and if praises come, he tries to refer them instead to the glory of God, the author of all good things. Humility does not consist so much in despising oneself as in forget­ting oneself, joyfully recognizing that we possess nothing that we have not received. It leads us to become God’s little children, who find all their strength in the strong hand of their Father.

We learn to be humble by meditating on the Passion of our Lord, by considering his greatness in the face of so many humiliations, allowing himself as He did to be led like a sheep to its shearers, as had been prophesied; by considering his humility in the Holy Eucharist where He waits for us to visit him and speak with him, to be received by anyone who wants to attend the sacred Banquet He prepares for us daily; by considering his patience in the light of so many offences. We will learn to walk the path of humility if we pay attention to Mary, the handmaid of the Lord, who had no other desire than to do the Will of God. We can also approach Saint Joseph, who spent his life serving Jesus and Mary, fulfilling the task that God had entrusted to him.

Fr. Francis Fernandez