Humility-Are You There Yet?

25 April 2026  1 Peter 5:5-14

The Feast of St. Mark, Evangelist

“So, humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time.” 1 Peter 5:6

How do you know when you’re being humble?

It is tempting to think it has something to do with thinking less of yourself. In fact, it means not thinking about yourself at all, and that is substantially harder than it may appear.

Humility certainly begins with the recognition of our weakness and insufficiency, our shame and confusion. If, however, it doesn’t advance beyond that, then our humility is just egoism in disguise – dwelling on disgust over our sins is still dwelling on self. On those occasions, our adversary, the devil, may even smuggle into our prayers the soothing realization, “By George, I’m being humble!” and it doesn’t even occur to us that being proud of our humility misses the mark by a country mile.

Real humility starts in those borderlands, where the doors of self open into the High Country, where only God matters, and we dare to step out. Discipleship is learning the way there. Wisdom is finding our way back when we have wandered off. Joy is when that place becomes home.

Remembering to forget yourself is advanced discipleship, rather like the prayer of silence, the prayer without words. The uninitiated think, quite wrongly, that they can begin their prayer life that way, and usually their prayers wind up celebrating what theologians call the “ego-drama” – works of imagination that we write, we direct, we produce and above all we star in.

Those who are most advanced in the contemplative life understand that the prayer of silence is something that God gives once in a while, and it is a great error of pride to think we can always do what we can do sometimes. That is why the prayer that is commended most frequently by Catholics is the Rosary, with prayers that we repeat at length, that call us out of ourselves, that remind us to pray when our minds drift to our next appointment, or the squeaky shoes of the person sitting nearby. On good days our Rosary meditations lead us to moments of enchantment that happen in the borderlands of material experience, where sparks from the High Country can fly across and burrow into us, creating those perfect moments of deep attention, and we get a flash of what heaven is like. But that only happens in the borderlands, when we are near enough the High Country that we can poke our heads tentatively out the door of self into the place where only God matters, and only God is enough. C.S. Lewis was referring to that borderland when he wrote in one of his letters about the “perfect” church service:

As long as you notice and have to count the steps, you are not yet dancing, but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God. (Letters to Malcolm, p. 4).

Real humility starts in those borderlands, where the doors of self open into the High Country, where only God matters, and we dare to step out. Discipleship is learning the way there. Wisdom is finding our way back when we have wandered off. Joy is when that place becomes home.