The readings today speak to us about an important virtue-the virtue of humility. It was the Blessed Mother who said to St. Faustina, the apostle of Divine Mercy, that the three most important virtues in the Christian life are: number one-Humility; number two-humility; number three-humility.
However for the most part, it seems humility is not a very popular virtue these days. In fact, I wonder if most view humility more as vice, as a type of weakness. In other words, the more humble we are, the more others will take advantage of us. Surely, in our world there are many people trying to take advantage of us (fraud is a common crime these days), but true humility is not this. Humility is not being a floor mat; it is not a weakness, but instead a great strength.
Humility is of course, the virtue that opposes pride in our heart. Humility comes first and foremost with our correct relationship with God and then flows out to our correct relationship with others and then ourselves; it is knowing the truth about ourselves and about God.
Simply, Humility recognizes that God is God and we are not. He is our Creator and Lord, and as such we must come to know Him in order to love Him by serving Him so that we may be happy in this life and in the life to come. This begins by knowing and obeying His Commandments and His teachings in our lives. And perhaps most difficult, to be humble we are to obey those whom God has placed in legitimate authority over us, as well as serve and love others for Love of God whoever they may be.
Perhaps to better understand humility we can compare it with its opposite-the vice of Pride. While humility is the truth, pride is a lie. Pride can manifest itself in a couple different ways.
First, pride can lead us to think ourselves above God and that we know better than God. We place ourselves above His Commandments and the teachings of His Son, Jesus. There are of course innumerable ways people justify this, like saying God doesn’t exist, or the Commandments are just a religion thing so don’t push your beliefs on me, or the Church needs to get with the times; after all, everyone is doing it.
In this first manifestation of pride, it is the self that becomes the determinant of the truth. But in the end, it is an act of pride, because it is lie. This was the real temptation in the garden, the devil said, you will know the difference between good and evil, in other words, you can choose for yourself what is true and false what is good and evil apart from God and His truth which is proclaimed by His Church.
The truth is of course that God is the only one who determines truth and He has revealed it to us in its fullness through His Son Jesus Christ. Jesus is the Word of God, and so He is Truth Itself who continues to speak to us through the teaching office of the Church He founded. And so, humility recognizes that Right is right even if no-one is doing it, and wrong is wrong even if every is doing it.
The other manifestation of pride is the opposite of the above; it is when we judge ourselves to be less than the dignity that God has given to us as His beloved child made in God’s own image and likeness and redeemed by the precious Blood of His Son. 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 to follow, so why even try.” This manifestation of pride is a type of false humility in which we look at our weakness more than we look to God’s mercy and His grace in order to over come our weakness. This can also lead us to deny any good work that through grace, God has accomplished through us or can accomplish through us.
In contrast, true humility recognizes that we have all sinned, and we continue to sin and so fall short of the glory of God in our thoughts, words and deeds. We are all too weak on or own power to live our lives according to the truth, but we are indeed nevertheless 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 accept His mercy by truthfully, sorrowfully and humbly ask for His forgiveness by confessing them fully before His personal representative in the Sacrament of confession as we make a firm purpose of amendment with the help of His grace to sin no more. And God is always ready to give us the strength we need to humbly follow Him if we but, in humility call upon His Holy and Powerful Name through prayer and the Sacraments of His Church, which are the sources of grace for us.
Pride in all of us can be very strong. Just when we think we have lost some of our pride, it is then when pride can be the most powerful in us. Those who don’t think they are prideful are in fact the most prideful. Humility is the only antidote to pride. Humility is truth; it is being truthful about ourselves, both in what is good about us, and in what is bad about us. As someone once said, “True humility is being aware of our self worth, but not our self importance.”
Humility is actually an internal choice we make in the silence of our hearts. The essence of this choice & act of humility is adoration. We bow ourselves under the hand of the Creator, we submit our wills to His, we die to our self, that is to our self-will, our self-reliance and to our own ideas. We have received everything we are and everything we have from God, so we desire to offer it all back to Him in a loving sacrifice of thanksgiving. We bow our hearts, minds, and yes even our bodies, bending our knees before the majesty of the Almighty, all Powerful, and ever-living God—this is humility!
Humility then, always starts with what is most basic, adoration. The deeper our adoration of God, the more we realize our complete dependence on God, the greater we grow in our relationship with God & hence the more we grow in humility. This brings us to why we need the holy Mass.
It is at Mass that we can approach without terror and trembling but nonetheless with great humility “Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and countless angels in festal gathering (Heb. 12;22) . However, just like we can’t not pray as we ought with out the Holy Spirit, so too without Him we cannot adore the Father as we ought without the Holy Spirit.
At Holy Mass, Jesus-“the mediator of the new covenant, and the sprinkled blood that speaks more eloquently than that of Abel” (Heb. 12;24), through the power of the Holy Spirit working through the sacred priesthood, Jesus comes down onto the altar anew and offers His self-same sacrifice of Calvary to the Father as a perfect act of adoration on our behalf. We for our part, with the power of the same Spirit can offer ourselves in an imperfect act of adoration to the Father, through, with and in the perfect offering and adoration of Jesus. Let us turn to the spouse of the Holy Spirit, the Blessed Virgin, to help us place our hearts humbly, that is, totally, completely and with great trust and love on the paten at this Holy Mass.
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