Joyful Self-abasement - The truthfulness of Humility

 

  When I shared my blog post on Friday, which I wrote on St. Crispin of Viterbo. I noticed that in the introductory paragraph, I had in mind to write "The life of a true Christian" but ended up writing "The life of a through Christian." This, however, was made known to me by one of my brother. I was really disturbed because I had already shared the post to many social media platforms. Even though i corrected it in the various platforms, I was still disturbed because of the persons that would have read it. Thus, I shared my plight with my brothers, some of whom sympathized with me but one made a comment that got me thinking. He said, "You are disturbed because you think you are beyond mistakes but you are not God." This statement sent me to meditation and I began to think about myself.

    St. Francis of Assisi once said that, that which we are before God is what we are nothing more, nothing less. Most times humility is seen as self-abasement or taking positions lesser than what we are. Perhaps, this might be the case in the humility of the Son of God. But what do we have to say about ourselves? Can we declare ourselves humble by taking a lower position than what we ought to be? St. Therese of the Child Jesus said that for her, Humility is Truth. Truth because if we are conscious of who and what we are, we will be filled with a mingling of a great self-esteem and a deep self-abasement. We are but dust, our sins are always before us, we are weak, helpless, necessarily dependent. Nevertheless, we are God's children, a chosen race, a kingly people, created in God's own image and likeness. We are intelligent and can know; understand and manage God's creation. 

    How then can we be so helpless and so great at the same time. This is where our humility lies. It is in the realization that we are nothing, we are poor, helpless, dependent but at the same time we have a great God who created us and wills great things for us. Thus, all that is good in us isn't our doing. Sure, we have the gift of free will. We can decide to cooperate with God, to allow his will to be done in us. But what do we have to say about the families we are born into, our family backgrounds, the parents we had, poor or rich, our natural gifts, our natural inclinations, our natural beauty and so on and forth. Do we also cooperate with God's goodness to bring this ones about? All these and many more opportunities and good things we have are just gifts from the Most high.

With these you see that, humility is simple and straight. It only takes us to think deep into ourselves and realize that all we are and we have, both defects that aren't our own doings and the goodness we enjoy, are all gifts from the throne of the Most high. This thought, if well directed, should feel us with a joyful self-abasement because realizing that we are nothing should feel us with humiliation but realizing we have such a caring Father, who loves us more than we love ourselves, should feel us with joy. Only then can we realize that humility is nothing else but truth; truth about our true identity and a proud life is nothing but a self-deception.