Humility

Archbishop Anthony Bloom has interesting things to say about humility in his book Beginning to Pray. He leads up to it by making a point that is not often heard: that the perceived absence of God (of course, He is never really absent) should be regarded as a blessing, for which we should feel gratitude. To come into the divine presence is to enter into judgement, a judgement most of us could not endure, a judgement that would be condemnation. We should pray like the Publican, aware of our unworthiness to come before God, pleading for mercy, asking that by His grace He might form us into people fit to be received into His Kingdom as friends. He puts it this way:

"What we must start with, if we wish to pray, is the certainty that we are sinners in need of salvation, that we are cut off from God and that we cannot live without Him and that all we can offer God is our desperate longing to be made such that God will receive us, receive us in repentance, receive us with mercy and with love. And so from the outset prayer is really our humble ascent towards God, a moment when we turn Godwards, shy of coming near, knowing that if we meet Him too soon, before His grace has had time to help us to be capable of meeting Him, it will be judgment."

This leads in to his meditation on humility. Not the false humility practised by those who constantly dwell on their sinfulness, and are quite pleased with their own piety. True humility is incompatible with feeling good about yourself, because it is incompatible with thinking about yourself at all. Self-forgetfulness is key. To paraphrase a thought of Simone Weil: it is not our business to think about ourselves, but about God. Leave it to God to think about us, trust in His care for us. This is the kind of humility we should pray for. Here is Father Bloom again:

"The word 'humility' comes from the Latin word 'humus' which means fertile ground. To me, humility is not what we often make of it: the sheepish way of trying to imagine that we are the worst of all and trying to convince others that our artificial ways of behaving show that we are aware of that. Humility is the situation of the earth. The earth is always there, always taken for granted, never remembered, always trodden on by everyone, somewhere we cast and pour out all the refuse, all we don't need. It's there, silent and accepting everything and in a miraculous way making out of all the refuse new richness in spite of corruption, transforming corruption itself into a power of life and a new possibility of creativeness, open to the sunshine, open to the rain, ready to receive any seed we sow and capable of bringing thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold out of every seed... this is the weakness in which God can manifest His power and this is the situation in which the absence of God can become the presence of God. We cannot capture God. But whenever we stand ... outside the realm of 'right', only in the realm of mercy, we can meet God."