Humility-Relying-on-God

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins, and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful.

My Immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my Father and Lord, my Guardian Angel intercede for me.

The whole world spoke the same language, with the same vocabulary.

Now as people moved eastwards, they found a valley in the land of Shinar where they settled. They said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks and bake them in the fire.’

For stone they used bricks, and for mortar they used bitumen. ‘Come,’ they said, ‘let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top reaching heaven. Let us make a name for ourselves so that we do not get scattered all over the world.’

Now Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower that the people had built.

‘So, they are all a single people with a single language,’ said Yahweh. ‘This is only the start of their undertakings. Now nothing they plan to do will be beyond them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, and let us make a name for ourselves. Now nothing they plan to do will be beyond them.’

Yahweh scattered them thence all over the world, and they stopped building the city.

That is why it was called Babel, since there Yahweh confused the language of the whole world, and from there Yahweh scattered them all over the world.

In this passage from the book of Genesis, we read how men began the colossal enterprise of building the city of Babel and its great tower. It was to be a symbol of human solidarity and a center of unification for the whole human race.

But the work was never brought to completion, and men found themselves alienated from each other as never before. They could no longer understand each other's speech and were incapable of reaching any sort of agreement.

John Paul II in his apostolic exhortation, Reconciliatio et Penitentia, Reconciliation and Penance, says, ‘Why did the ambitious project fail? Why did the builders labor in vain?’

He said, ‘They failed because they had set up as a sign and guarantee of the unity they desired - a work that was to be of their own hands alone and had forgotten the action of the Lord.’ And so, in commenting on this text, Pope St John Paul links the sin of those men who tried to be powerful and capable without God, while not being precisely hostile to him, but the sin of our first parents, who were deceived and seduced by the promise that they would become like God. This is the sin of pride, he says, which is at the root of all sin and shows itself in many ways.

In the story of the Tower of Babel, the exclusion of God from human affairs is presented not so much under the aspect of opposition to him, as simply leaving him out of the account, of indifference towards him, as if God were of no relevance in the sphere of man's cooperative undertakings. But in both cases, that of our first parents, and that of the constructors of the Tower, the relationship to God is severed with violence.

We should always try to remember to bring God into whatever we eagerly plan, or are working to achieve. Because the tendency to let ourselves be led astray by pride lurks in the heart of every man and woman and doesn't leave us right up to the very last moment of our life.

This pride urges us to be like God, even if only in the limited area of our own concerns, and to cut ourselves off from him as though he were not our creator and savior, and the one we depend on for our very life and existence.

As we see from the story of the Tower of Babel, one of the first results of pride is disintegration, a lack of unity, primarily in the family itself, and then in those more extensive relationships with other people, with friends, with colleagues, and with our neighbors.

Proud people, like the builders of Babel, tend to rely on their own strength and are incapable of looking beyond their own abilities and the successes they seem to achieve. As a result, their structures are insecurely based, and never in any real sense get off the ground.

A proud man shuts God out as not being worth his consideration. He never asks for his help and never thinks of being grateful to him.

Such a person never feels any need to seek support and advice or spiritual direction though it's often by this means that God gives strength and light to a soul.

In the letter to St James he says, the proud man does not see himself as ineffectual and helpless, but as strong in his self-reliance and capable of great things. Because of this he is rashly imprudent and fails to avoid occasions of sin that put his salvation at risk.

St James the Apostle points out that God floods the scornful and gives the humble man his grace. Cardinal de la Grange likes to say that we are told repeatedly that pride is the great enemy of holiness, because it gives rise to very many sins, and deprives the soul of countless graces and merits in the sight of God.

St John Chrysostom says it's also the great enemy of friendship, of fortitude, and of true happiness. We can never, without inviting disaster, leave God out of any of our projects.

He is the foundation, and we are what is built on that foundation. He is the foundation, He is the vine, and we are the branches.

He is the life, and we live through Him, the light that drives away our darkness. And so our life makes no sense without Christ. We cannot build it on any other foundation. Unless we have constant recourse to Him, what faces us is nothing but discord and ruin.

Humility, on the other hand, is found at the root of every virtue and provides the support needed for living a Christian life. This is the virtue that opposes pride, and the inevitable selfishness that goes with it.

St Augustine says, the self-centered person evaluates everything by the effect it will have on him personally, and this hardens into a mental attitude, which St Augustine identifies as the origin of all moral deviation. Self-love in contempt of God.

St Thomas Aquinas says egocentric people simply do not know how to love. They are always out for what they can get, because the only love they understand is self-love.

They have no capacity for generosity or gratitude. And when they do give, it's because they calculate the giving is likely to benefit themselves in the long run.

Self-interest, he says, lies behind their apparently generous action. They cannot comprehend the sort of giving that looks for nothing in return.

Basically, the egotist despises everyone else. Pride is the real cause of egoism and selfishness.

All wickedness has its origin in this particular vice, and self-love is one of its first products. Selfishness consists in looking at everything from the point of view of personal advantage.

Pride generates an inflated idea of one's own abilities and qualities and is invariably accompanied by an inordinate desire to be the center of attention. I heard of a little boy once who for Christmas gave his mum and dad a present of a drum, a small tin drum.

And his mother asked him, ‘Well, what can we do with the drum? What do you think your dad and I can use this drum for?’

And the kid said, ‘Well, that's what I thought, you wouldn't really want it, so you give it to me.’ We can all be devious in that sort of way.

Pride generates an inflated idea of one's own abilities and qualities. There are two vices that often run in tandem, says St Thomas, and between them, they provide the ground for that radical disorder from which all sins spring. Because of all sin, pride is the root. And pride's beginning is man's revolt against God.

St Catherine of Siena tells us that it's impossible for the soul to live without love and that if it will not love God, it will necessarily love itself in the wrong way. She says such love will be a graceless love, a cloud that blots out the light of reason, taking for its object only passing things, and drawing from them nothing but pride and impatience.

And so with the help of God's grace, we must be always on the alert, and ready to attack pride in all its different forms. We have to watch out for signs of vanity and boastfulness, and for those useless fantasies, we're prone to weave, where we are at the center of everything and in command of every situation.

We need to guard against being scornful of others, avoid all scoffing and sarcasm, and any tendency to judge other people adversely. We can't be numbered among those who are forever butting into conversations, who always know what's best, and who simply have to have the last word.

Proud people are apt to be discontented. They can talk about nothing but themselves and their own doings because there's nothing else that really interests them. And so we should beg God not to let us fall into this temptation.

In Friends of God, St Josemaria says, Pride is the worst sin of all, and the most absurd with its multiple delusions. If it manages to get a hold, the unfortunate victim begins to build a façade, to fill themselves with emptiness, to become conceited like the toad in the fable, which in order to show off, puffs itself up until it bursts. Pride is unpleasant even from a human point of view.

The person who rates himself better than everyone and everything is constantly studying himself and looking down on other people, who in turn react by ridiculing his foolish vanity.

And so we can ask our Lord never to let us get into that state of mind, where I neither see your loving face, nor the many virtues and good qualities of the people around me.

And so if we want to build up our Christian life, we must have a great desire of developing in ourselves the virtue of humility, pleading with our Lord for it, and facing up to our failings in this area, while trying by our actions to root out our self-love.

Humility produces countless fruits and is linked with all the other virtues. It's associated in a special way with cheerfulness, fortitude, chastity, sincerity, simplicity, affability, and magnanimity.

A humble person has a special gift for friendship, and because of this, for being apostolic. Without humility there's no chance of living a life full of charity, the theological virtue prerequisite for being an apostle and a friend.

And in point 153 of the Forge, Saint Josemaria says, ‘To become humbler, you have to be ready to accept the humiliation of finding victory elusive in our struggle to conquer our defects, and of being reminded of our weaknesses day by day. Often when we examine our conscience, especially on those occasions when we can do it more thoroughly, we can ask questions like, have I managed to offer our Lord an expiation? The very sorrow I feel for having offended him so many times. Have I offered him the shame of all my inner embarrassment and humiliation, seeing how little progress I make along the path of virtue?’

There was an important race at an important venue in Spain many years ago, and there was a Kenyan running, it was a long-distance race in a stadium, and the Kenyan was way out in front.

And on the last lap, he mistook the finishing line, and so he started walking much earlier than the actual finishing line. But the guy who was second came up to him and pointed this out to him and helped him to finish first so that he won the race.

The guy who finished second was a Spanish man who was interviewed afterward and said, ‘Well, why didn't you just pass the guy, and you could have won the race?’ And he said, ‘Well, I could have done that, but I wouldn't have been able to live with myself for the rest of my life. I did the normal, natural thing to do in helping this other person to realize his mistake and to in justice win the race that he was set to win.’

It was a very beautiful story and a gesture of sportsmanship, charity, generosity, and also of humility.

This a great example to all the young people of the world of how to run the race, not just thinking of ourselves, helping other people around us in all sorts of situations, and thereby fostering so many other things like justice.

In The Way, in point 594, St Josemaria says, ‘Then there are the humiliations inflicted on us by others. The ones we were not expecting, or the ones that seem unfair or downright unjust.’

Do we bare these well for our Lord's sake? St Josemaria liked to say that, you're humble, not when you humble yourself, but when you're humbled by others and you bear it for Christ.

Possibly when some driver unknowingly cuts in in front of you, or somebody gets ahead of you in a queue, or somebody makes a mistake that causes some problems for you. These are basic matters of ordinary administration every day. Things we have to take in our stride without losing our peace. Accept the little humiliations. This word, this piece of news, this assignment that comes our way. If we're searching for the firm rock of our Lord's own humility in order to build on it, we're bound to find countless opportunities every day.

To remind ourselves that we're here to serve. Christ washed the feet of the apostles. A very menial task. Didn’t wash their hands or their earlobes, but their feet.

He said, what I have done to you, do you also to others. He emphasized the importance of serving.

That has great relevance for the mother in a family, for the father of a family, for children in the family, for any person working in any organization. For each one of us in the society where we live, we serve by taking care of the environment, not throwing papers on the floor or banana peels or banana skins or other such things, or plastic bottles.

We serve the whole of humanity by taking care of the atmosphere, and the gifts that God has placed around us. We are the stewards of creation.

We should try and talk about ourselves only when it's really necessary. Try and see how frequently the word I appears in your conversations. And even on those occasions, do not talk too much.

We can be grateful for the little good turns that people do for us. Some of the most beautiful words in the English language are the words thank you. Everybody appreciates it. We can spend our day saying thank you to people for the little things they do for us. It makes everybody's day a little better.

Someone told a story once of how they were with Blessed Albert del Portillo, and he had to change his glasses at one moment, and he had, I think, two different pairs of glasses, and he forgot his glass case. And so somebody lent him a glass case, and for the rest of the day, he thanked him very frequently for lending him his glass case. Small little thing, but he went overboard in saying thank you.

If we keep in mind that we deserve nothing, that helps us to see how we have to thank God for the countless benefits we receive.

St Paul says, what have you that you have not received? Our shoes, the clothes on our backs, the bed we lie down in, the roof over our heads, and every piece of food that we enjoy.

We own nothing. We have a right to nothing. We merit nothing. Everything is a gift.

And so humble souls are grateful souls. And if we live in this way, we can make the world a more pleasant place for those who come in contact with us throughout the day.

And those useless thoughts that revolve around us, well, they can be cut off at the start. We solve all our own problems by thinking about other people and spending our day thinking about others.

And if we do that, well, then we won't miss any chance to lend a hand at home with ordinary little chores that have to be done. Washing up, laying off a table, putting order in our cabinet, leaving a room tidy after us.

And the same thing at work, wherever we may be, thinking about the people around us who may be sharing this public transport, whether it's a train or a boat or a plane or a bus or a matatu or wherever it may be.

Instead of trying to be too independent, well, sometimes we have to allow ourselves to be helped. And we may have to ask for advice, sometimes even to people younger than us, because maybe they know more, or maybe they have more experience in that particular area.

And if we're sincere with ourselves, we can ask our Lord to stop us from finding excuses to explain away our sins and failings, those defects that may humiliate us, and for which sometimes we have to ask other people's forgiveness.

I was wrong. I'm sorry. These are words that make social life pleasant.

And all of this is done with God's help and with the help of spiritual direction, which is another way of coming in contact with Him, listening with humility to the things that are said to us, the home truths that may be spoken to us, those deep things that are said to us with the grace of God, by the Holy Spirit in confidence, for us to try and improve the light of God that comes into our souls. And fixing our gaze on Christ, we can have enough humility to admit our mistakes and set about putting them right.

There may be blunders that we make because of a lack of information, because things change, or simply because we fail to appreciate the seriousness of the problem. One time at a get-together in Rome after lunch, St. Josemaria made a certain statement, but then an hour later he got another piece of information that changed that whole situation.

And so he called together everyone who had been present at that get-together at three o'clock in the afternoon and said, ‘Well, another piece of information has come to my knowledge. If I'd known that when I said what I said, I wouldn't have said what I said, but I want to correct in front of all of you what I said, because now I realize that it was not correct.’

And so he publicly put right that statement that he had previously made. We make up for our blunders, we admit them humbly, we go forward.

And if we keep our eyes on Our Lady, we learn an awful lot about this virtue. Because her life was full of humility.

In number 289 of the Furrow, St. Josemaria says, God has done great things for her because he has looked graciously upon the lowliness of his handmaid. I'm more convinced every day that authentic humility is the supernatural basis for all virtues.

Talk to Our Lady so that she may train us to walk along that path. We could ask Our Lady that we might look at her, look at her humility in a deeper way, in a constant way, so that we also can learn how to rely more on God in the ordinary things of each day.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice.

My Immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my Father and Lord, my Guardian Angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

GD