Homily

In all the public speeches and chanting and editorializing and broadcasting and demonstrating and Facebook/Twitter/Reddit posting this past year one virtue that is very rarely seen is the virtue of humility.

The old Catholic Encyclopedia says that "the virtue of humility may be defined as, 'a quality by which a person, considering his own defects, has a lowly opinion of himself and willingly submits himself to God and to others, for God's sake.'" I like the part about submitting ourselves to God, and to others for God's sake, but there are other definitions for humility.

St. Bernard says humility is "a virtue by which a man, knowing himself as he truly is, abases himself," or humbles himself, lowers himself. In his definition I like the idea of a person who truly knows himself. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that, "The virtue of humility consists of keeping oneself within one's own bounds, not reaching out to things above one, but submitting to one's superior." Here I enjoy his description of keeping yourself within your own bounds, so if I may, I'd like to translate that into a slightly different way of defining this virtue: Humility is knowing your place and living it.

The expression, "knowing your place," has a bad connotation, a bad association in most people's minds, because it is most often used in a bad way. When we say that somebody doesn't know their place, we always mean that in a negative way. When we talk about, "putting somebody in their place," it always means putting that person down and often doing it in a harsh and unkind manner. But leaving that aside, I think that this is in fact a good and helpful definition: Humility is knowing your place before God and before other people.

Too often, it seems to me, people think of humility as a kind of self-criticism, a way of putting ourselves down and seeing ourselves in a bad light, as unworthy, insignificant, and bad. It means bowing and scraping and declaring how unworthy we are before God and probably most of humanity and it seems to me that while that may be true, it is also not the whole truth.

I am totally unworthy to stand before God as a mere mortal man, as a sinner. That is very true. And yet at the same time, I am also God's son by adoption in the waters of baptism, and I share in His divine life, and I am loved by God above all of His creation. Humility should not be just and only about my lowliness before God. It should also be about my glorious status as a child of God, in Christ, which is not of my own doing but a gracious gift of God to me. I should not take the attitude that I am nothing in the eyes of God because although that lowliness is true on the one hand, it is also true that God has raised me to the highest of heights by sharing with me His own divine life. So, when St. Thomas talks about keeping ourselves within our own bounds this is what he is talking about. We need to know our place, in an honest and genuine way.

Pride pushes us to go beyond or outside of the boundaries of our own place, as we see in the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel, where the people did not care to give God His proper place. Instead, they would grab their own glory by reaching up to heaven on their own. Pride is a distorted understanding of reality which does not listen to the truth of God but relies on our own understanding in place of God's truth. Pride is the attempt to make myself what I can never be, and deluding myself to believe I am more than I am. This is the push of sin and temptation: to substitute my version of reality for the one that God has placed in this world. So, it is no wonder that pride leads people to disaster in their relationship to God and to other people. Can we find this in our society today? But it is humility which allows people to come together.

Humility is to know my place. And that is to say indeed I am nothing before God, and yet because of His loving-kindness, I am everything to Him. Humility is also to know my place among everyone else. I am, as a human being, as a creature created by God, I am by nature, no better than any other human being for we are all created equal in His sight. At the same time, we have all been given different abilities and natural gifts which we ought to use to give glory to God, and to serve one another. As Christians, we have additionally been given supernatural gifts which we also are bound to use, to give glory to God and to serve one another. So when it comes to other people, I don't think it is necessarily a good idea to believe that humility is thinking that I am less than other people, or that other people are better than me, because we are in no position to judge such things. Instead, it seems to me that a better way of understanding humility is to know my place, to be willing to serve others according to that place, my place, whether or not they even seem deserving or worthy of my help, because I am not deserving of God's mercy.

If I want to be humble, I need to know my place. So, what is my place before God? I suggest that the saints are people who really understand that, recognize it and live according to it. The saints sometimes seem so strange and even maybe a little crazy to us not because they actually saw life in a strange way, but because they saw life more clearly than we do, they knew their place better than we do. (And I admit that some of them may also have been a little crazy, but that should only make us feel better for ourselves.) Increasingly, there are a whole lot of people out there today who do not know their place, but have created and are living in their own places instead, and they refuse to move from there to a genuine reality. The disorder this creates in families and between people not only causes great damage to us as a society, but it obscures the truth of who we are, why we're here and what life is all about.

The Lord doesn't want to put us in our place. He won’t force us to see reality more clearly and to live according to the truth. He wants us to go to our place on our own so that we can find Him most clearly there and see one another there with the same clarity, knowing where we stand. Humility is never a put-down or a degradation unless pride has led us astray. Humility is the place we should always consider to be "home."