humility | A Catholic Philosophy and Theology Resource Page by Deacon Douglas McManaman

Reflection for the 4th Sunday of Lent

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Many years ago people would often ask me whether I thought this person or that person in the seminary was going to make a good priest, and I would readily offer my opinion. I’ve since refused to answer such questions only because I’ve been wrong far too often. This person, who I thought would make a great priest, turned out not to be, and that person who I thought would not last very long turned out to be a fine and committed priest. The fact of the matter is we simply don’t have all the information required to make a secure and accurate judgment, whether we are talking about the quality of future priests or just people in general. We are always information deficient, but we tend not to realize it. We are inclined to believe that “what you see is all there is” (availability heuristic), which is a very pervasive cognitive bias.

I used to teach the Theory of Knowledge to International Baccalaureate students, and when teaching young adults, one has to provide lots of examples, so I began to pay attention to the mistaken inferences that I would make on a daily basis and would use these as examples to illustrate the precarious nature of inductive inference. It is remarkable how many mistaken inferences we typically make every single day, but without realizing it, and that is another common bias of ours–we tend to quickly forget the times we were wrong, but the instances when we were right stand out in our memory like neon lights. Take a simple matter like forming a judgment on why a student has been late to class five days in a row: “Well, because he doesn’t really care about his education”, or “He doesn’t like my class, he’s bored”, etc., and then a short time later we discover that his mother is dying of cancer and he has to take his younger sister to school every morning, so he just can’t manage to get to school on time, let alone concentrate. These things happen all the time with us.

The first reading is a good illustration of this. David is regarded as having the lowest social standing in his family; his father and brothers thought he was the least likely to be chosen king, so they left him in the fields to do the menial work of a shepherd; he was not even included in the lineup for the prophet Samuel. Of course, this is the person whom God chose to be king of Israel. The Lord said to Samuel with regard to Eliab: “Do not judge from his appearance or from his lofty stature, because I have rejected him. Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the Lord looks into the heart.”

One serious problem with human beings is that we don’t like the feeling of not knowing; we insist on the feeling of possessing certain knowledge, which inclines us to settle upon unwarranted conclusions, only to vigorously defend them even when evidence is eventually brought forth that strongly suggests our judgment is mistaken. And so, it is very important to cultivate a healthy skepticism in the face of our own truth claims and remain ready to alter them if evidence demands it. Openness or open-mindedness (docility) is a very important virtue, one not easy to cultivate, especially for religious people, ironically enough.

Consider the judgment that the disciples pronounced on the man born blind, in today’s gospel reading: “As Jesus passed by he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’” This is a good example of the need to have an answer to a difficult question. Suffering is a great mystery, but it makes things so much easier if we can convince ourselves that this person is suffering misfortune because of his sins or the sins of his ancestors. Suddenly I don’t feel guilty for not making the effort to help this person, after all, his condition is a kind of punishment from God. This is a primitive mode of thinking that has not entirely disappeared. I remember quite clearly a number of people who insisted that the Covid 19 pandemic was a divine chastisement on the world for its sins. But how would one know this? How do we distinguish between the daily misfortunes that befall us personally and those that affect others or the world at large? Is a flat tire a punishment from God? Is a death in the family a punishment from God? Thankfully, Jesus corrected the disciples: “Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him.”

There’s an old proverb: “There are none so blind as those who will not see”. So much of our mistaken beliefs are rooted in a desire for them to be true, and so we attribute great weight to evidence that confirms them. We see this in the conversation between the man born blind and the Pharisees. They asked him how he was able to see. He told them. They asked him what he thought of the man who opened his eyes. “He is a prophet”, was his reply.

But they didn’t quite like what they were hearing. In fact, they began to doubt that was born blind, so they called his parents in and asked them. They, however, were astute and knew that if they said something the Pharisees did not want to hear, they would be made to pay in some way. They acknowledged that this was their son and that he was born blind, but to the question: “How does he now see?” they said: “Ask him, he can speak for himself”. So, the Pharisees called him back again and said: “We know that this man (Jesus) is a sinner.” The man replied: “If he is a sinner, I do not know”. He readily acknowledges his ignorance, but not the Pharisees; in their own eyes, they know. The man continued: “All I know is that I was blind and now I see”. So they asked him again: “How did he open your eyes?” At this point, it is becoming comical. The man said: “I told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples, too?”

The man born blind has a sense of humor, and what he says to the Pharisees at this point is rather brilliant: “This is what is so amazing, that you do not know where he is from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if one is devout and does his will, he listens to him. It is unheard of that anyone ever opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he would not be able to do anything” (Jn 9, 30-33).

Of course, this is not what the Pharisees wanted to hear, so before throwing him out they managed to assure him of his place: “You were born totally in sin, and are you trying to teach us?” Note the irony. Who is really blind here? Those who will not see.

St. Paul says that God chooses the weak of this world to shame the strong. To the Corinthians he writes:

Consider your own calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God (1 Cor 1, 26-29).

And of course, the prime example of this is our Blessed Mother, who was nothing in her own eyes: “The Lord has looked upon the nothingness (tapeinōsis) of his handmaiden” (Lk 1, 48). That is why Mary was able to listen to Simeon and the prophet Anna at the Presentation in the temple. She was impressed by what they were saying to her; she could listen to them, because she was not elevated in her own eyes.

It’s a very dangerous place to be in to see ourselves as something. Like water, God seeks the lowest place–that’s why basements flood, not the upper levels. God is always found in the lowest places. And Mary has the highest place, she is the Queen of Angels, only because she held the lowest place in her own eyes.

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Years ago I was struck by something Gregory of Nyssa wrote in a Sermon on the Beatitudes:

What more humble for the King of creation than to share in our poor nature? The Ruler of rulers, the Lord of lords puts on voluntarily the garb of servitude. The Judge of all things becomes a subject of governors; the Lord of creation dwells in a cave; He who holds the universe in His hands finds no place in the inn, but is cast aside into the manger of irrational beasts. The perfectly Pure accepts the filth of human nature, and after going through all our poverty passes on to the experience of death. …Life tastes death; the Judge is brought to judgement; the Lord of the life of all creatures is sentenced by the judge; the King of all heavenly powers does not push aside the hands of the executioners (Sermon 1, The Beatitudes).

Notice the irony in this. Christmas, the birth of Christ, is a season of irony. For this reason, it is a season of humour; for it is irony that makes us laugh. That’s what makes good comedians, namely, an ability to see and make explicit the irony in everyday situations. Consider the nick names kids give one another; they are often very funny because they are ironic: the tall kid is called ‘shorty’, the short one is called stretch, the weak and skinny kid is ‘hercules’, and they called me “slim”.

If we stand back and think about the irony in the mystery of the Incarnation, it is rather funny. God, who is all powerful, immaterial, and indestructible, becomes flesh; God, who is eternal, is born in time; God, who is all powerful and independent, becomes a weak and vulnerable baby dependent upon a mother and father; God who is the judge of all is judged by a mere human being; God who is Life Itself dies on a cross. This is irony, and there is joyful humour in this. It is as if God is playing a joke on us, one serious to be sure, but a joke nonetheless–and it is serious because love is serious.

The word ‘humor’ comes from the Latin humous, which means soil or dirt. The word ‘human’ is also derived from the same root, because we came from dust and to dust we shall return. And the word ‘humility’ has the same origin, for the humble know they are dust and ashes and they have their feet planted firmly on the ground–they do not walk high and mighty; they realize they are just flesh and blood and are everywhere prone to error. These three words (human, humility, humour) are clearly related. The more humble you are, the more human you are, and the more you are able to laugh, especially at yourself.

This is a problem with our notion of holiness. In movies, saints are almost always depicted as overly serious, heavy, not disposed to laughter, as if laughter is offensive to God. But a truly holy person sees the irony in life in light of the divine irony, which is why truly holy people laugh a lot. Above all, they can laugh at themselves, because they take themselves lightly. I always emphasize to couples taking Marriage Prep that being able to laugh at yourself and taking yourself lightly is the key to conflict resolution–those who cannot laugh at themselves, who take themselves too seriously, will indeed have marital difficulties.

God is joy itself, and you and I are called to enter into that joy, to enter into the divine humour. Grace gives us the eyes to see life’s irony so that we can begin to laugh with God. We cannot laugh, however, if we are afraid, and there is a great deal of fear in people’s lives. Inordinate fear can cause us to do things that only make a mess out of our lives and bring chaos to the lives of others. Human beings are limited by matter, by flesh and blood. Our abilities and our knowledge in particular are terribly limited. When we experience those limits, we typically begin to fear, because we realize there is very little that is in our control, and then we are tempted to make choices that are contrary to the limits that the moral law imposes upon us. In other words, we are tempted to sin, to take matters into our own hands. But this is where we have to trust; for the spiritual life is about learning to trust and to fear less and less. Christians have a unique advantage here, because we have the example of divine irony: God is so powerful that he can defeat the one enemy that man could not hope to defeat, namely sin and death, and he does so not through power, but weakness: the weakness of a child, the weakness of poverty, the weakness of a bad reputation (as a result of sharing table fellowship with tax collectors, sinners, and prostitutes), and the weakness of death on a cross. He rose from the dead. And he gives us his very self under the appearance of ordinary bread–more irony; God, who is extraordinary, allows himself to be consumed under the appearance of ordinary bread, in order to strengthen us, in order to dwell within us. God, who cannot be contained, allows us to contain him. So why are we afraid? “If God is for us, who can be against us (Rm 8, 31).

Finally, the angel says to Joseph in a dream: “Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. The child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit”. Why in a dream? The reason is that when we are sleeping, we are no longer in control. And if we are not in control, we cannot screw things up. We are most disposed to listen when we are not in control. And that’s why God often does speak to us in dreams. But the message in this is that we must learn to relinquish control, more and more, when we are not sleeping, but awake. The more we relinquish control and allow God to be God, the more we will see miracles. We see so few miracles because we insist on managing things ourselves, managing other people, and driving them away in the process. But the more we learn to trust him and listen in silence, the more we will hear him speak to us, and like Joseph, we will know what to do, where to go, and how to get there.