"Humility is being aware of your self worth but not your self importance"

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time August 29th, 2010

The readings today speak to us about a very important virtue-the virtue of humility. It seems humility is not a very popular thing these days. In fact, I wonder if many view humility more as a vice, that is as a type of weakness; in other words, the more humble we are, the more others will take advantage of us. While it’s true there are many in our world trying to take advantage of us, true humility is not this. Humility is not being a floor mat allowing others to walk all over us; Humility is not a weakness. No, humility is a strength. One priest summed up Humility in this way, "Humility is being aware of your self worth but not your self importance"

Humility is of course, the virtue that opposes pride in our hearts. Humility comes first and foremost with our correct relationship with God and then flows to our correct relationship to others. It is knowing the truth about yourself and about God. Humility recognizes that God is our Creator and Lord, and we not only depend on Him, but we must, if we are to be happy, obey Him, His human representatives and His Laws.

Perhaps to better understand humility we can compare it with its opposite vice, Pride. While humility is the truth, pride is a lie. Pride is disobedience to God, to His Laws, and to those He has placed in authority over us. We can think ourselves above God, that we know better than God.

In pride, we then place ourselves above the teachings of Jesus, which He gives to us without through the Church He founded to proclaim His truth. Pride denies the truth that Jesus gave the Catholic Church His authority and promise to be with Her till the end of time so that we could be sure Her teachings were indeed His teachings, “and the gates of Hell will not destroy her.” Without the Church the "self" becomes the determinant of the truth. Then each person, not God, decides what’s true. In the end this is an act of pride, because it’s a lie. This was the really the temptation in the garden, the devil told the first humans, “you will know the difference between good and evil; in other words, you will be able to choose for yourself what is true and what is false, what is good and evil. Pride leads to disobedience to the truth, so disobedience to God. This is the same temptation the devil still uses against us.

Humility, however, recognizes the truth that God is the only one who determines truth and He has revealed it to us in its fullness through His Son Jesus Christ who is Himself the Truth. He personally founded the Catholic Church on the apostles with Peter as their head to be His audible voice throughout the ages; Jesus gave the truth to the twelve and the authority to teach it; Guided by the Holy Spirit which leads them into all truth, they then passed Jesus’ teachings down through the centuries through their successors, the Bishops.

Humility recognizes the teachings of the Church come from God, not from man, and so man is not free to pick and chose, or change them. Can we question them? Yes. But not question them in the way of denial, but in the way of trying to understand them more deeply, to understand why and how they are true in order that we can live them obediently in our life and so be happy both in this life and in the life to come.
Another manifestation or type of pride is the opposite of the above; it is when we judge ourselves to be below the dignity that God has given to us as His beloved child. This pride is called false humility and it leads us to give up in the struggle to love and follow God by obeying His commands, His human representatives and His teachings. Here again we play God, because just as we are not to judge where another’s soul stands before God, so too we are also not to judge ourselves before God. This type of pride can come out like this, “how could God ever love me, I did this terrible thing and he could never forgive me.” or “The teachings of the Church are too hard, so why even try.” With false humility we look at our weakness more than we look to God for strength to over come them.

In contrast, true Humility recognizes that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God in our thoughts and in our words, in what we have done and what we have failed to do; we are all indeed too weak on our own power to live God’s commands; but indeed, we are still loved by God more than we can imagine. He desires to forgive us of any or our failure to live the truth—our sins, if we but truthfully and sorrowfully and humbly ask for His forgiveness by confessing them before His personal representative in the Sacrament of confession and make a firm purpose of amendment to sin no more. God is always ready to give us the strength we need to humbly follow Him if we but, in humility call upon His name through prayer and the Sacraments of His Church, the sources of grace for us.

Speaking of confession. I want to share with you a very special story, which I think is a very good example of humility. Two religious brothers were in Rome to meet personally with John Paul II; they were walking the streets waiting for the time of their own person meeting with his holiness, when they happened upon a homeless man. After talking with this man and sharing with a holy card with him the man revealed to them that he was actually an ex-priest who left the priesthood and was now homeless. The brothers quite saddened by this priest’s plight left the man and met with the Holy Father. They immediately share with him the fact that they had met this homeless priest.

The Holy Father commanded them to immediately go back into the streets, find this man and bring him back to him. They obediently did as they were told and brought this homeless man to the Holy Father. The Holy Father spoke to this man ever so lovingly, ascertaining that he was indeed an ex-priest. The Holy Father then told the two brothers to wait, while he took this priest into another room to talk to him in private. The Holy Father took the man into the room and reached into a pocket of his white cassock and pulled from it a purple stole. He place the purple stole around ……the neck of the homeless priest, knelt down before him, and the Holy Father said, “bless me father for I have sinned.” And then in a moving display of humility and obedience to the priesthood, which the homeless priest later shared with the two brothers, the Holy father, John Paul the second, the vicar of Christ on earth, proceeded to give his confession to this priest of God, who although homeless still maintained his dignity as a child of God, and priest of the Most High, Jesus Christ. Once a priest, always a priest.

The Holy Father showed us, by example, true humility. One of the greatest acts of humility we can perform is when we go to confession in obedience to Jesus command to confess our sins to a priest. There the priest who is acting with the authority and in the person of almighty God, we can truthfully confess our sins, confess that in our pride we have been disobedient to His teachings, the teachings of His Church and disobedient to those he as place in authority over us. We can confess the many times we have failed to give the glory to Him for all our gifts and so claim His glory for our own. In our humility we will then be able to accept His infinite mercy and forgiveness and with the help of His grace amend our lives by living in obedience to His truth so that we may be united to Him more fully in love.

Pride in all of us can be very strong. Just when we think we are not prideful, it is then when pride can be the most powerful in us. Humility is the only antidote to pride. Humility is truth, it is being truthful about ourselves, not only about those things we do wrong, our sins, but also in what we do good through God’s grace. Again, Humility is the truth about God and about ourselves...There is a God and we are not Him!

(((Humility is actually an internal choice we make in the silence of our hearts by adoring God. In the act of adoration, by the help of His grace, we choose to bow ourselves humbly under the hand of the Creator, we choose to submit our wills to His, we choose to die to our self, which is to our self-will, our self-reliance and to our own ideas and opinions; we submit ourselves to God's truth in humility. We are his and we acknowledge our complete dependence upon him. In other words, God helps, not those who help themselves, but only those who realize they absolutely need God’s help and so take the posture of a beggar before Him; but a beggar who is loved infinitely by Him.

In Adoration we bow our hearts, minds, and yes even our bodies, bowing and kneeling before the majesty of the Almighty, all Powerful, and ever-living God. Then, in this position of humility, we offer to God everything we are and everything we have, and entrust it to Our Heavenly Father to take care of it all for us…what could be better than this?

The deeper our adoration of God, the more we realize the truth of our complete dependence on God, the more deeply we grow in our relationship with God & so the more deeply we grow in humility. He who exalts himself shall be humbled, he who humbles himself shall be exalted. In humility we open our hearts more fully to His truth and so live in humble obedience to His Church, her teachings and her representatives all with the help of His grace. )))

Let us turn to the Virgin to help us to be humble. We pray for an increase in the virtue of Humility when we meditate on the First Joyful Mystery, The Annunciation. We see the humility of Our Lady when she gives her yes to God. But even more we see the humility of our God when He condescends Himself to come down from heaven in order to be Conceived in the womb of the Virgin and become man. In His divine Humility Jesus the God-Man is still with us in the Holy Eucharist. Are we too prideful to kneel or even bow down before His true Presence? Through Mary may we like her strive to imitate the divine humility of her Son. Amen.