Humility & Ego-Intro
If your mind is inflated by pride or seduced by worldly pleasures, positions, and honors, Or if you crave wealth, status, and the flattery of others, your God-given ability to reason is serving evil. Carmen Acevedo Butcher
Gregg’s Reflection
Sometimes I have trouble letting God be God. I've been working with Mark Ritchie, a spiritual director for nearly fifteen years. He has a similar background, spending decades in a family business and leaving to become a spiritual director, and now, helping train spiritual directors at the Haden Institute. He's also Lutheran with a real passion for discipleship. It's been a journey of learning and growth working with him.
In each of our spiritual direction sessions, we settle on a question to take to the Spirit. I had been working for years to create a leadership initiative in the Lutheran church ELCA. In a session I told Mark, "I'm trying to follow the path God lays out, and this work equipping disciple-making leaders is a leading of the Spirit. I just keep wondering, why is it so hard?” He asked, "Is that your question?" I responded positively, and we began our session.
As I went through a litany of difficulties, one after another, Mark listened. Each time, he asked me what I learned from the experience. He asked whether I was glad to have the knowledge and wisdom that came from the challenge. As I considered whether it had been a good thing to have gone through and learned these things. Each time, the answer was yes.
By the end of our session, the question that formed in my mind was "What's your complaint?" I thought back to the book of Job. Job has everything taken away, is accused by his best friends of bringing it all on himself by his sin, and Job weathers it all while maintaining his steadfast faith in God. Job recounts all that he has done to walk righteously in the path of the Lord, and he can't understand why disaster has befallen him. Finally, God responds to Job's questioning in Verse 40: The LORD said to Job: "Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him? Let him who accuses God answer him!"
In small group, we had recently viewed Rob Bell's video, Whirlwind. In the teaching, Bell looks at Job and works through this text in a very compelling way. As you listen to him recite God's response to Job, the answer is obvious. This is a question of sovereignty and respect for the majesty and mystery of God. We cannot understand, we can just trust.
At the end of my session with Mark, I was left with the question, "Am I going to let God be God?" That was the question that the Spirit had for me that day. If I am really committing something into God's hands, I have to trust His timing. If we are indeed following the leading of the Spirit, it will happen when the time is right. Quit whining about it. God doesn't speak whinese.
Humility: a painful lesson to learn. As a lay person learning leadership in the business world, I did not have many role models who demonstrated humility. During my Lutheran project, I learned a powerful lesson in humility. I had a bulging disk painfully pressing against a nerve root. I got an epidural injection into my spine. I also began daily exercises designed to improve my condition. Within a few days, I was 80 percent better. Our normal routine is to spend a couple of months in Colorado in the winter, so we packed up and went back out in late January.
I was feeling good, and there was abundant fresh snow, and we love back country skiing. So in the first 10 days out there, I skied six times on the mountain behind the cabin. The last day, we pushed too far and too long. The next morning, my back gave out.
I was unable to sit, stand or walk for more than two minutes without the pain becoming unbearable. For a month, I did not leave the cabin except for Genie to haul me down the mountian to the doctor. This was my first experience with disability, and it was humbling. I could do very little for myself. I was totally dependent.
I realized that we experience everything for a reason, and that there is learning in each painful experience if we will look for it. So, rather than ask God to heal me each day, I simply experienced each day, and asked what I could learn. I won't deny I had some bad days. I tried Genie's patience at times. But, for the most part, spending time with God kept my attitude from tanking. I was quite surprised, actually.
It slowly dawned on me that it is hard to learn humility without a humbling experience. For a decade now I've been trying to live a servant leader's life, but humility has been a slow road.
Slowly, after a month, I could stand, walk and sit for longer and longer periods. I told Genie that as soon as I was well enough to ride in the car for the two days back to Atlanta, I wanted to leave. Sitting there watching her shovel snow off the steps and walkway, haul firewood into the house, and do every chore for me, was painful in itself. As someone who the last summer hiked up to the Continental Divide, gaining 2,000 feet in elevation, topping out over 12,000 feet, to be restricted in mobility was a real eye opener.
Before this experience, I've always found it difficult to spend time in prayer, or to sense God's presence during times of illness. It was quite a revelation to see how, in this very difficult time, I was able to find communion with God in the little things I was able to do. What could have been a totally wasted month turned into a time of learning and growth. I have learned the painful lesson that humility can be learned. I slowly understood that for me to be useful to God, humility was a prerequisite.
Journaling Prompts
How has God humbled you? What are you willing to suffer to see the dawning of humility? What are you learning from painful experience? How is God shaping you through suffering, trials and testing?
Scripture
Deuteronomy warns to beware of the complacency of success. God blesses us, and we stop praying or caring about our relationship with God. We become self-sufficient. When life goes well, we forget God because we think we don’t need him. But, life is such that it isn’t too long before our complacency lands us in trouble and we desperately seek God again.
RENOVARE Bible notes on Deutronomy 8:12-18
When pride comes, then comes disgrace; but wisdom is with the humble.
Proverbs 11:2
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Matthew 5:5
All who exalt themselves will be humbled. All who humble themselves will be exalted.
Matthew 23:12
A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher.” Jesus said to him, “ Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.“
Luke 14: 18-19
Paul said, “I planted, Apollos watered, but only God brings the fruit.”
1 Corinthians 3:6
Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by Him.
1 Corinthians 8:1-3
God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Submit yourselves therefore to God. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
James 4:6-10
Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time.
1 Peter 5:6
Ancient Writings
I would rather have nothing than have vanity.
Tertullian
Neither asceticism, nor vigils nor any kind of suffering are able to save, only true humility can do that.
Amma Syncletica, Celtic Daily Prayer Book Two, p. 1435
A man must breathe humility and the fear of God just as ceaselessly as he inhales and exhales.
Abbot Pastor, Thomas Merton, Wisdom of the Desert, p. 53
Humility is the land where God wants us to go and offer sacrifice.
Abbot Alonius, Thomas Merton, Wisdom of the Desert, p. 53
If your mind is inflated by pride or seduced by worldly pleasures, positions, and honors, Or if you crave wealth, status, and the flattery of others, your God-given ability to reason is serving evil.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher, the Cloud of Unknowing, P. 27
It is better to have but little knowledge with humility and understanding, than great learning which might make you proud.
Imaginary virtues are always accompanied by a certain arrogance. The virtues God gives us are unencumbered by pride.
St. Teresa of Ávila. Interior Castle, trans Mirabai Starr, p. 141
Nine-tenths of our suffering is caused by others not thinking so much of us as we think they ought.
Mary Lyon
You are who you are in the eyes of God, nothing more and nothing less.
St. Francis, St Francis of Assisi: Omnibus of Sources, Admonition 20
Modern Writings
When humility delivers a man from attachment to his own works and his own reputation, he discovers that perfect joy is possible only when we have completely forgotten ourselves. And it is only when we pay no more attention to our own deeds and our own reputation and our own excellence that we are at last completely free to serve God in perfection for His own sake alone.
Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation, p. 58
In the beginning, emotional hang ups are the chief obstacle to the growth of the new self, because they put our freedom into a straight jacket. Later, because of the subtle satisfaction that springs from self-control, spiritual pride becomes the chief obstacle. Finally, reflection of self becomes the chief obstacle because this hinders the innocence of Divine Union.
Thomas Keating, Open Hearts, p. 164
Against my own best intentions, I find myself continually striving to acquire power. When I give advice, I want to know whether it is being followed; when I offer help, I want to be thanked; when I give money, I want it to be used my way; when I do something good, I want to be remembered.
Can I give without wanting anything in return, love without putting any conditions on my love? Considering my immense need for human recognition and affection, I realize that it will be a lifelong struggle. But I am also convinced that each time I step over this need and act free of my concern for return, I can trust that my life can truly bear the fruits of God’s Spirit.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 2/4/21
Great people are usually humble. They understand that they draw from another source; they are satisfied to be an instrument. Their genius is not of their own making but a gift. They understand that their life is not their own but has been entrusted to them. Desmond Tutu told me that he and I were mere light bulbs. We seem to be shining brightly for all to see, but we both know that if this lightbulb was unscrewed from its source even for a moment, the brightness will immediately stop.
Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation, p. 352
I need a small humiliation each day to keep me humble.
Richard Rohr, Living School Teaching
Humility. How do we begin to grow in it? We are aware that humility is one of those things we cannot acquire by trying to acquire it! No, it comes indirectly. We receive the grace of humility by applying ourselves to other matters, matters which will place us in a more proper relationship with God, with others, and ultimately with ourselves. With regard to humility we learn:
To contemplate God’s greatness and goodness. This will place us in a more proper relationship with God.
To serve our family, neighbors, friends, colleagues, and even enemies. This will place us in a more proper relationship with each other.
To understand ourselves in light of these more proper relationships to God and others.
Richard Foster, On the Imitation of Christ
Be assured that where there is humility, God will grant the peace that comes from being aligned with his will. The hummus of humility is the good soil in which the Word produces abundant fruit.
Father Bernardo Olivera, Basil Pennington, Lectio Divina, p. 156
Spiritual maturity comes not from self-contempt, but self-forgetfulness, and the object of forgetting oneself is always to seek to be found in the heart of Divine Love.
Carl McColman, Christian Mystics, p. 190
Knowing how valuable we are to God doesn’t puff us up; it settles us down. Knowing our God-given worth doesn’t make us proud; it makes us humble. Humility is to see things as they are. It isn’t to think of oneself as a worthless worm who God reluctantly redeemed. It is to fix our heart on God’s worth which is the literal definition of worship and know our worth in light of God's worth. Jesus could be lowly and humble of heart because he knew who and whose he was. He had nothing to prove, so he could come as a baby and grow into a man who loved freely.
Brian Morykon, RENOVARE Weekly, 12/9/22
