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Friends United Meeting |
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December 2005
The Path to Christmas
By Amy Runge Gaffney
I was recently thinking back over all the humiliations I’ve suffered in recent years, ranging from the trivial to the significant, from the physical to the emotional, from the real to the imagined. I complainingly asked myself, as I have done many times before, why do these things keep happening to me? Haven’t I been humiliated enough already?
Then I had a new thought—maybe I keep feeling so humiliated because I’m not truly humble.
Could this be? What, I wondered, is true humility?
The next day, I read the testimony of a prisoner at Folsom about how practicing centering prayer while incarcerated had changed him. He wrote of the violence and degradation of prison life, and of the transforming experience of sitting in silent prayer with other male prisoners from many races and religions, as they walked “on this path from humiliation to humility.”
The words struck me. Surely that was the same path I was on! I thought, “If he can do it, then maybe I can, too.”
I wanted to know more about this thing called humility. Searching my daily guide to prayer, I discovered a section titled “True Humility.” Included were the insights of Evelyn Underhill, author of The Spiritual Life. She observed that the development of our spiritual lives involves both mortification and prayer—or, in perhaps less intimidating words—“both dealing with ourselves, and attending to God.” Dealing with ourselves means allowing every aspect of our lives to be transformed “into something more consistent with our real situation as small, dependent, fugitive creatures; all sharing the same limitations and inheriting the same half-animal past…[that] is the foundation of all genuine spiritual life.”
Wow, I thought, that “small, dependent, fugitive” part of me is just the part I don’t want others to know about! I don’t want others to know how inadequate and needy I sometimes feel; how lost and broken I often am. That is the fugitive part of me that tries to stay hidden in the dark. What would it mean to accept and acknowledge that part of myself more openly? Perhaps it would mean resisting the temptation to pride—to appear better in some way than others—whether it be stronger, wealthier, more sophisticated, more intelligent, more accomplished, more virtuous or more kind.
Perhaps it would mean acknowledging the depth of my need for others and for God, as well as the ways in which we are all inextricably linked to one another, dependent on one another and God for our very survival. Perhaps it would mean accepting that, like others, I have both strengths and weaknesses, all of which are (thankfully) limited. Perhaps it would mean realizing how many of my actions arise from an instinctual fear and how difficult it often is to act from a vulnerable center of truth and love.
Is humility the foundation of all genuine spiritual life because only knowing ourselves in this way, for who we truly are, renders us deeply open to God?
The words of Anthony Bloom in Living Prayer reminds us that the Latin root of humility is humus, or fertile ground:
“The fertile ground is there, unnoticed, taken for granted… yet it is always ready to receive any seed, ready to give it substance and life. The more lowly, the more fruitful, because it becomes really fertile when it accepts all the refuse of the earth. It is so low that nothing can soil it…it has accepted the last place and cannot go any lower. In that position nothing can shatter the soul’s serenity, its peace and joy.”
Well, I knew I had not accepted the last place. But certainly God was trying to lead me there! And I liked the idea of being fertile ground—of being ground in which the seeds of love and truth might grow. Perhaps I could trust that my humiliations are nothing more or less than signs that I have yet to become who God calls me to be.
In The Mystery of Holy Night, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: “only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and grand, that he works wonders where man loses heart…God in lowliness—that is the revolutionary, the passionate word of Advent.”
Maybe acceptance of our lowliness is the very path to Christmas—to the birth of God’s new life in us, and to our souls’ serenity.
Amy Runge Gaffney is a lifelong Friend, a former employee of Friends United Meeting and an attender of Chico Friends Meeting in California.