Creatively submitting to truth and love

St. Benedict, whose feast we celebrated last week, wrote a Rule which is still very popular today. In his Rule, the “Founder of Western Monasticism” identified 12 degrees of humility which are necessary to achieve a perfect love for God. One step is that a humble man should “always have his head bowed and his eyes toward the ground. Feeling the guilt of his sins at every moment, he should consider himself already present at the dread Judgment...”

Early in his pontificate, Blessed John Paul II spoke about bowing one’s head in humility:

Bowing the head may be interpreted as a gesture of humiliation or resignation. Bowing the head before God is a sign of humility. Humility, however, is not identified with humiliation or resignation. It is not accompanied by faint-heartedness. On the contrary. Humility is creative submission to the power of truth and love. Humility is rejection of appearances and superficiality; it is the expression of the depth of the human spirit; it is the condition of its greatness.

St Augustine too reminds us of this. In a sermon he says:

"Do you want to be a great? Begin from the smallest thing. Do you intend to construct a large building, which rises up very high? Take into consideration in the first place the foundation of humility" (St Augustine, Serm. 69, 2; PL 38, 441).

This way of thinking is perhaps far removed from many manifestations of the modern mentality. We are often fascinated by apparent values, by exterior grandeur, by what is sensational, what agitates the surface of our psyche. Man becomes, in a certain sense, one-dimensional, detached from his own depth. He builds on foundations that are not deep. And he often suffers at the destruction of what he has built in himself so superficially. Lent calls for a deepening of our internal construction. And it is just this that gives rise to the call to humility, a virtue so significant in the whole Gospel message, the virtue so characteristic of Christ.

Mary is the Queen of Humility. Therefore, let us ask her to pray for us, that we may throw off the world and submit to the power of God’s truth and love.