Many years ago we had staying with us a clergyman to whom I listened with close attention. One day he spoke of someone as “having the rare grace of humility.” I think he must have meant that this person had the real thing that we mean by humility and not the counterfeit. Real humility is always spontaneous and attractive. False humility is easy to detect and is always unattractive.
It is false humility when we pretend we do not have a capacity that we do have. If you can sing, or write, or get through a lot of business in a day, humility does not require you to pretend that you can do none of these things; it only requires you to remember that you did not create these things yourself, and that therefore gratitude fits better than pride.
It is false humility when you mistake an inferiority complex for humility, for many an inferiority complex is only pride backfiring. Most people with an inferiority complex are as proud as Lucifer underneath and love attention and acclaim. You can never have real humility while you are preoccupied with yourself, and an inferiority complex is the most self-centered state of mind in the world.
It is false humility, when you know your religious experience is not sufficient, to play down what genuine religious experience you have had. More people than we often think have had true dealings with God and possess a very real working faith. Let us not claim more than we have, but let us not belittle what we do have. We do not grow in faith by pulling up our faith by the roots every few days to see how it is getting along. Sabatier says that “excellent men religiously betray their own convictions to avoid asserting themselves.”
Some religious assertion is pride; but much refusal to assert our beliefs is cowardice, not humility. The person who sits silently by while God, faith, the Church, take a beating from some loud-mouth is not being humble; he is being cowardly. A good-natured word on the other side need not be pride; it can be necessary courage. It is not humility when honest men say they will not dirty their hands with practical politics. All they do is leave it to men with dirtier hands still. Evil thrives when good men do nothing.
There is often a false humility in too much family acquiescence. Some of the problems ministers are called on to deal with do not stem from situations where there has been a family row but from situations where one of them is due. A dominating mother or father rules the roost. The rest have concluded it is better to give in than to walk into the buzz saw. Many a girl should have married but did not, from false loyalty to a mother. An article in Reader’s Digest called “The Company We Keep” concerns the habits of animals. It says, “One of the most interesting laws we have observed is the finality of the departure of the young from their parents. One October afternoon the fox goes under the fence … and we know she will not be back. The owl circles the lawn, climbs high into a tree, swirls his head and looks fiercely at the horizon. He flies along the path his eyes picked, in a determined, steady flight, and we know he is gone.”
There is a reason why Jesus spoke of leaving father and mother when a new home is set up. Parents must resist the wish to keep the old relation as it was. Children must not be told they are not humble and grateful when they want to leave the nest and make their own way in the world. Love and thoughtfulness can and should remain—but not docility and acquiescence.
We all know that one can become proud of being humble, especially if one has had a genuine religious experience and for the first time seriously takes Christ into daily life. For a time it looks as if this had set aside the old pride and willfulness; but there will probably come a time when these will positively use this religious experience to aggrandize themselves. There is a story about a Carthusian monk who said, “The Dominicans are famous for their learning, and the Franciscans for their piety; but when it comes to humility, we’re tops!”
What True Humility Is
Consider now what real humility is, remembering that it is sometimes hard to identify. There was once a well-known diplomat, our ambassador to a European country, who one of his fellow diplomats said was the only man he ever saw that could strut sitting down. The diplomat was a small man, and was so pleased with the realization of his ability that gratification at his success did not come from a feeling of surprise that he had done so well—which is a kind of humility after all!
Real humility may allow one to have a quite fair sense of one’s own capacities; without reasonable confidence nobody can ever do anything. We must remember at all times, however, that whatever capacity we have, although we may have developed it, came to us as a sheer gift from God. “What hast thou that thou didst not receive?” People who talk about how poorly they do are usually “fishing” and hoping somebody will strongly disagree and give them some praise. If any of us says he does not like encouraging things said to him, he probably lies. But when they are said, there is something we can always do. A friend tells of being in a certain military office in Europe during the war. When mail came in that was intended for some higher command, they had a stamp they quickly put on top of the letter, “Referred to G.H.Q.” That’s a good thing to do with a compliment!
Real humility walks the fine line between self-criticism and self-acceptance. We go for high ground as Christians, and we fall back from it again and again. The two extremes are total disillusionment and despair at one end, and a demand for perfection at the other. Both become in the end impossible. The first puts us out of the race altogether. The second, when successful, is exactly like pride; when unsuccessful it is still like pride, for what hurts is that I—with my noble ideas—have failed again.
Bishop King, a wise spiritual adviser who was one of England’s great spiritual forces in a past generation, said, “You must not over-worry yourself about your advance in the Christian life. It is very simple, the love of God and love of man. That is perfection.” Such counsel may too easily comfort our mediocrities and failings, but it should save us from the perils of perfectionism.
What about humility as touching our church? We Episcopalians are not noted for our humility. And if this means satisfaction with the extraordinary comprehensiveness and wisdom of the Anglican church, we are on solid ground. But this is not the same thing as satisfaction with ourselves. What is given us in our church is magnificent. What we have often done with what is given us is sometimes deplorable. We can love our church, yet keep mindful of our often complacent and stuffy ways. We might well take a cue from that humorous Virginia evangelist, Sam Jones. One night in Baltimore he was giving it to his own people, the Methodists, pretty hard. Somebody said to him, “Sam, why don’t you jump on the Catholics sometimes?” Sam Jones said, “When I get through with the Methodists, it’s time to go to bed.”
And what about humility as touching our nation? When we hear about “the ugly American,” we fly to our own defense and want to tell people how quick this country is to respond to some crisis overseas that affects a lot of people tragically. This is true to some extent. But why haven’t we thought out wise ways to take our technical help to these people so that fewer crises will arise? It could be done. It must be done if we are not to drive more hundreds of millions into the Communist camp.
Again, we can be proud of our heritage. We certainly do not have very much to be proud about in what our half-pagan America has made of that heritage. We must keep these distinctions in our minds and in our policies, for national pride in this day is a very dangerous commodity.
How do we come by humility? None of us has a sufficient amount of it. We can say of ourselves what Churchill said of Atlee, when someone said to him, “Atlee is at least a humble man.” Churchill is said to have replied, “He has plenty to be humble about!” So have we all. It is a strange thing how full of pride the world is, yet how much we dislike it in others and fail to perceive it in ourselves. Pride of place, pride of race, pride of face, and pride of grace—this is the oft-mentioned quartette.
God Speaks Through Life
Life is always a great teacher. Other people and their opinions may most often prove to be the file that rubs down our corners of pride. Do we take umbrage, or do we listen, when somebody comes uncomfortably close to one of our great faults or sins? Many times others hint at these and say as much as they think we will stand; we would often do well to multiply what they say by ten, if we would understand what is really in their minds. Sometimes they will be good enough friends to be frank and say what is in their hearts; we can play dumb and make excuses and be evasive—or we can be honest with the truth, and try to be grateful to them. We can all swell with pride over a great success or promotion, or we can swell almost as much over some minor advancement.
All men are prone to pride. One of the most moving things about the Pope’s enthronement is a little ceremony in his procession to the high altar of Saint Peter’s: he is halted three times by the Master of Ceremonies to receive a small brazier of glowing coals. On this the Pope to be enthroned throws a handful of flax. And as this flares up and is gone in a puff of smoke, the Master of Ceremonies looks into the Pontiff’s eyes and intones the ancient warning, “Pater sancte, sic transitgloria mundi”—“Holy Father, thus passes the glory of the world.” Every Christian ought to be sufficiently under the spell of Him whom we serve (and He on a Cross) to say such a word to himself every time he is tempted to pride.
Sometimes our pride (what the Greeks called hubris) carries us beyond reason and control, and we experience humiliation. We lost a job because of our tempers or meddlesomeness or passions. God and life speak to us through those events that mirror in a terrible way our pride, our faults, our sins. It may be that humiliation is one step in our path toward greater humility.
We ought all to be ever mindful of human fallibility along all lines. Our whole democratic form of life, with at least two parties in politics, is witness to the partialness of all human wisdom and goodness. One man or party too long in power usually incarnates pride, and it is time for a change. We must have convictions and try to live by them. But we must always remember Oliver Cromwell’s warning: “By the mercy of Christ, remember that you may be mistaken.” We must hold by our faith but be always open to the beliefs and methods of others if they are tested by thought and by results. It is ever so easy for men in my kind of work to deify their own aims and methods and even themselves. When any of us is beyond hearing what is to be said on another side, he is really “dead in sin.” Nobody knows as much as he thinks he does. We are not meant to surrender our beliefs: we are meant to surrender our pride in the way we state and carry out those beliefs.
There are two ways, I think, in which our Christian faith can help us to find a greater humility.
Only Christian faith can give a person courage and humility at the same time. Without God our courage becomes pride, and our humility becomes spinelessness. It was said of D. L. Moody that he was as humble as a child before God and as bold as a lion before men. That is what we need. The same God who gives us spiritual victories keeps us from being proud about them. Paul says concerning his spiritual revelations (2 Cor. 12) that “to keep me from being too elated … a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated.” He says three times he prayed it would leave him (we do not know what it was—perhaps malaria or bad eyesight), and God only said, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” He adds, “When I am weak, then I am strong.”
And one final thing. To seek humility is always dangerous. I discovered long ago that the best antidote to pride is not humility but gratitude. The more we cultivate a spirit of thankfulness for happy events and even unhappy ones, seeking not for favoring circumstances, but for grace to meet all circumstances as God wants us to do it, the more shall we be at leisure from ourselves and therefore free to think about God and other people.
I think this is what moves us more and more toward Christian humility.
A Christmas Carol
In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.
Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign.
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty
Jesus Christ.
Enough for Him whom cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk
And a manger full of hay;
Enough for Him whom angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.
Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air,
But only His mother
In her maiden bliss
Worshiped her Beloved
With a kiss.
What can I give Him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb;
If I were a wise man
I would do my part—
Yet what I can I give Him,
Give my heart.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
When invited in 1886, near the end of her life, to contribute to Representative Poems of Living Poets, Christina Rossetti picked “A Christmas Carol” as one of three of her poems to be included.
Samuel M. Shoemaker, who died October 31, was the retired rector of Calvary Episcopal Church, Pittsburgh. Nationally known for his evangelical witness, he had been a contributing editor ofChristianity Todaysince its inception. Beginning Your Ministry, the most recent of Dr. Shoemaker’s books, appeared this year.
