Tag: Humility

Acts 21:27-22:29 Fearless Integrity

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Arrested and manhandled by the mob, Paul doesn’t claim the safety of his Roman citizenship right away. How easy it would have been, after having been carried by the soldiers to the barracks, for him to say to the tribune “protect me, because I’m a citizen by birth, and therefore my person is inviolate throughout the entire reach of the Roman empire.” Instead Paul, who is never one to shy away from violent mobs, chooses to tell his story to the very people who are threatening him. He doesn’t use his story to make a case for his defense. Quite the opposite. As soon as he starts talking about his mission to the gentiles, the crowd, which has been relatively calm while listening to him, goes wild again. This storytelling is not meant as a defense, but as an example. It’s possible to live a different life, to undergo conversion from violence and learn love and benevolence towards strangers. He’s presenting his life as an example for others to follow.

As I’ve written in previous posts, I think that personal storytelling is deeply important but I also feel a little cautious about it. We are always part of the audience for the stories we tell about ourselves, and sometimes these stories make us believe certain things about ourselves that may or may not be true. I’m fairly clumsy, but if I only told stories about my clumsiness, that would ignore those moments where I’ve managed some small degree of physical grace, not to mention making me one-dimensional, a person entirely defined by his lack of agility. How much worse it is for people who can only talk of themselves as if they were paragons of virtue, or people who can only tell stories about their brokenness? We are many things and once, and limiting our stories to only one or two things seems a little like limiting grace.

I think that we should interrogate our stories from time to time. How true are they, really? Are they humble? Are they told with integrity? I’ve been thinking about humility and integrity today because I read this in Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation this morning:

In great saints you find that perfect humility and perfect integrity coincide. The two turn out to be practically the same thing. The saint is unlike everybody else precisely because he is humble. As far as the accidentals of this life are concerned, humility can be quite content with whatever satisfies the general run of men. But that does not mean that the essence of humility consists in being just like everybody else. On the contrary, humility consists in being precisely the person you actually are before God, and since no two people are alike, if you have the humility to be yourself you will not be like anyone else in the whole universe. But this individuality will not necessarily assert itself on the surface of everyday life. It will not be a matter of mere appearances, or opinions, or tastes, or ways of doing things. It is something deep in the soul (1).

Paul, in this retelling of his story, is acting out of both integrity and humility. He isn’t hiding his faults or trying to make them seem better than they are. Nor is he emphasizing them too strongly, making it seem like he’s entirely useless, or always the victim, or flawed in such a way that people should always take pity on him. Instead he stands before this crowd as he would stand before God, and the story he tells is deeply honest, because it is the story of how God has acted in his life, and he understands that God is his prime audience. He isn’t just telling his story, but the story of the church, and the God the church knows.

 

(1) Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation.

Acts 12:20-25 Should we welcome humiliation?

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Poor Herod. Back in my post on Luke 23:1-25 I reflected on Herod’s character, how he was a kind of seeker, always wanting to talk to John and Jesus, but never really wanting to take their answers seriously. In fact, when he doesn’t get the answers he likes (or in his encounter with Jesus, any answer at all), he punishes his would-be gurus with torture and death. He is unhappy, discontented, hungry, but he can’t really believe that there’s anything but his own ego to be concerned with. Like most of us, he longs to draw close to divinity, but he is convinced that the best way to do this is by claiming that his ego is divine. In the end, he is so worshipful of himself that he doesn’t correct the people of Tyre and Sidon when they pretend to worship him.

Herod is not a humble man. He would never believe that humility is the answer to his discontent. And yet, as I often said in my commentary on Luke, the contemplative tradition prizes humility above any other human characteristic. Richard Rohr, one of the great contemplatives of our time, says that he prays that one humiliating thing will happen to him every day, so that he’ll always remember to be humble. Humility like Rohr’s is hard to cultivate, because most of us have been conditioned to respond to humiliation with a sense of shame. In fact, it might seem radical to say that we can have any response other than shame. Yet throughout the centuries, some Christians have deliberately sought out humiliation, just so that they can develop other responses to it. They’ve often done so in an attempt to imitate Christ’s humiliation on the way to the cross, but their methods might, to us, seem quite bizarre.

In his book The Mystic Fable, Michel de Certeau writes about such people as Simeon of Emesa and Mark the Mad who, in the 6th century, would make public displays of eating pastries on Holy Thursday and stealing food from the marketplace, not to mention hanging out in brothels and walking around naked in the streets. Some of the things they did are not at all admirable and should not be imitated, but ever since reading about them I’ve been fascinated by this idea of holy men going out of their way to attract shame and derision. It’s like they wanted to be constantly embarrassed, so that they could act without worrying about embarrassment. To me, that’s a kind of freedom. It’s the opposite of King Herod. Instead of worshipping their egos, these strange Christians sought to demean their egos in every way they could.

I wouldn’t act like them, or suggest that anyone else should, either. I think there are easier and more gentile ways to learn to take the ego less seriously. Yet I agree with Rohr that if we want to avoid being like Herod, we need to learn to welcome occasional humiliations. Not one of us can avoid acting silly and absurd from time to time. Can we come to see our absurdity itself as a gift from God, causing us to take ourselves less seriously, and our mistakes as a kind of introduction to grace?

As a brief addendum to this post, I should acknowledge that I presented this idea to my friend Di, and she very rightly pointed out that it might be good for white men like Rohr or myself to cultivate humiliation, but that there are a lot of people in the world who wake up every day in a state of humiliation because the cultures they belong to have a vested interest in humiliating them to keep them in their place. So I want to amend what I said above, and assert that humiliation is not always good, and that shame, in particular the kind of shame that is used to keep people down, can be just plain ugly. Obviously, I need to think more about this, and am so grateful to Di, a member of my own Beloved Community, for challenging me and remaining in deep and meaningful conversation with me about this and many other things as well.

 

Acts 11:19-30 The Son of Encouragement

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Luke likes Barnabas a lot, and for good reason. It was Barnabas who Paul went to when he returned to Jerusalem after his vision on the Road to Damascus, Barnabas who took Paul in and vouched for him to the apostles, and here we see him seeking out his friend in Tarsus and bringing him to Damascus. Although he doesn’t get a starring role, its safe to say that without Barnabas there’s no Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles, and hence no expanding church, no epistles, no Christianity as we know it. Barnabas is key, but unsung. So let’s sing his praises now, and let him teach us something about the spirituality of encouragement.

True encouragement is nearly impossible when people are striving and jealous. As a young man, I wanted to be a famous writer, and consequently I found it impossible to read a book by an upcoming writer without looking for faults in it. “They’re not so great,” I’d mumble to myself as I turned the pages. I was so afraid that I wouldn’t get to be what I wanted to be that pleasure at anyone else’s achievement became impossible. Yet in my early thirties I came to the realization that I was never going to be famous, or even well known, that I was one of eleven billion people, and the chances of my achieving any kind of notoriety were incredible small. At first I was sad about this, and then I began to think about it with an incredible sense of relief. The pressure was off! My family and community loved me even though I wasn’t famous. God loved me. Next to the wonder of those loves, notoriety had very little meaning.

Once I was free (or at least partially, for who is entirely free) of this ego-driven lust for prominence, I found that I could really enjoy the writing of others. Novels became pleasurable to me again. So did many things that fell entirely outside of my talents. I was no longer comparing myself to other people, or trying to prove my worth. I was suddenly free to wholeheartedly embrace whatever was good in others. I found within myself the capacity to encourage.

This, obviously, is the capacity that Barnabas has in abundance. And I think he’s so encouraging because he’s humble. He’s more delighted in the gifts of others than he is in his own gifts. You can imagine him looking at Paul and seeing how remarkable Paul is, and not feeling a jot of jealousy. He doesn’t care what people think of him. And because of that, he can delight in them.

Encouragement like Barnabas’ is a sure-fire sign of the resurrection. How do you know that you’re living in a Beloved Community? Well, such a community will be full of the sons and daughters of encouragement, people who are actively looking for the gifts and talents of others, and promoting those gifts and talents without much thought for themselves. These people will, of course, feel flattered and loved if you acknowledge their own gifts and talents, but they don’t need you to acknowledge them. The sons and daughters of encouragement know that they’re loved, that God values them completely, so they have little need to seek validation. Hopefully all of our communities are full of these people, just like the community at Antioch.

 

Acts 4:1-22 Uneducated and Ordinary Men

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

From the first, Luke was more than aware of the kind of egotism and vanity that can arise in communities. As he traveled with Paul, he was often in small rooms, eating dinner with friends, sharing funny stories, listening patiently to the concerns and worries of his dinner companions, and treasuring the moment when the talk would turn from the general and superficial to the deep, timorous unveiling of the human heart. He was also more than aware of the petty arguments that were arising among the early Christian community, and the characters of those who insisted on being right. He was sensitive to any move to exclude or to try to control grace (after all, in his retelling, Jesus says that blaspheming against the Holy Spirit is the one unforgivable sin). He worried that the Way of Christ might be perverted into the same old religious and political structures that persecuted the disciples and crucified Jesus. So when the high priests and scribes come back into the story after the resurrection, we should prick up our ears and realize that he’s not only talking about the temple authorities, but about the general human tendency to claim power and prominence and exert control.

His worries were well founded. As soon as Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it attracted all sorts of people who weren’t that interested in humility and selfless love, but who saw in the new religion an opportunity to advance their careers and establish dynasties for their families. These people were adept at turning innocent wondering into heresy and establishing their power through persecution and the exposition of ever finer points of doctrine. Fortunately, the Gospels had clear criticisms of this behavior written into them, for anyone who cared to really read them. For every Bishop polishing his crozier and considering his prestige, there was a saint, a contemplative, carefully daring to express that it was not possible to know and understand everything, that, indeed, knowing perfectly hardly mattered. Loving perfectly did.

All of this is laid out at the beginning of the fourth chapter of Acts. Here are the temple authorities, so similar to the prelates and inquisitors of later ages, who are worried about unauthorized miracles. Yet they can’t really take Peter and John seriously, because they are “uneducated and ordinary men.” But they’re worried. They don’t want this unsanctioned hope and faith to spread. It is notable that all of their learning and power can be so easily threatened. It’s almost as if faith that is built entirely on the ego and on control is fragile by its very nature.

Let’s not, however, focus entirely on them, but give a moment’s consideration to Peter and John, the models of faith that Luke presents to us. They are, indeed, ordinary and uneducated men. As I read Acts, I’m also reading Thomas A Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ, a 15th c. instruction manual written for a clergy class that had become too enamored with its own education and wit. The whole book reads like an extension of Peter’s words to the temple authorities. As I peruse it, looking for the perfect passage to end this post with, I find myself stymied by the fact that it all works to one degree or another, and that Thomas A Kempis doesn’t seem that interested in helping me prove my point. But let me offer a passage that balances a critique of the priests and scribes with lovely praise of people like Peter and John:

How swiftly it passes, worldly fame! If only their lives had matched their knowledge! Then they would have worthily studied and read. How many worldly folk are led through vain knowledge to perdition! Little they care for the service of God! And because they would rather be great than humble, therefore their plans come to nothing. He is truly great who has great charity. He is truly great who is little in himself and reckons as nothing the highest honors(1).

 

(1) Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, 1.4

Acts 2:1-13 They are full of new wine

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

In a sense, the scoffers are right. The disciples are full of new wine. Without meaning to, they use Jesus’ own language, when he says that you cannot put new wine into old wine skins (Luke 5:33-39). Their very scoffing in the presence of the miracle of Pentecost shows that they are the old wine skins, bloated and contented with old wine that has never been tapped and drunk for the good of the world, too overfull to allow anything new to enter in. Yet the miracle is there, and what’s remarkable about this passage is that the scoffers get so little attention. Most people, Luke says, can see and at least wonder at the miraculous when it occurs, and they don’t have to be part of any special community to do so. For here are the disciples, holders of a fragile sense of community, recently broken at the crucifixion, gathering in a house with wide open windows instead of a room with locked doors. A rushing wind arrives, tongues of flames settle over them, and passerby on the street gather at the windows. The disciples make no attempt to close the shutters – they are not secretive, nor self-protective. Instead they welcome the interlopers, and their generosity is a translating force. Their words become comprehensible to everyone.

Let’s pause and reflect on how remarkable this is. The disciples have every reason to hate and to be afraid. Their new community has every reason to become a cult, full of secret knowledge and hidden rituals in dark rooms. Instead, from the very beginning, their community is wide open to the rest of the world, regardless of what that brings. Yes, there will be moments when persecution will cause them to gather in catacombs. But here in Acts the message is clear. Esoteric rituals known only to initiates will never be the norm. Instead there will be a widening, a generous invitation to any passerby, a willingness to expose the fragility of community to forces that might be cynical, cruel, and intending destruction. There is so much courage in this, so much willingness to love and to ignore the potential of hate.

There is also a startling willingness to set aside ideas of perfection. No one is asking the passerby who gather at the windows whether they’re worthy of witnessing the miracle. Some of them clearly aren’t. But, of course, the disciples aren’t particularly worthy, either. Throughout Luke’s Gospel we saw them as very flawed – frequently misunderstanding Jesus, arguing about status, running away from sorrow and pain. Their knowledge of their flaws must remain to them. The past isn’t erased by the resurrection, it’s redeemed. It lives inside of them, and makes them humble, and that humility makes them generous. Who are we, they ask themselves, to tell any of these people gathering at the windows that they’re unworthy? We’re unworthy, and yet we’re accepted. We’re unworthy, and yet we’re loved. If this is true even of us, surely it must be true of everyone else.

This will remain one of the most important features of this resurrection community. Again and again, they will be tempted to become insular, to exclude strangers because of  the slights, even the violence, of their enemies. Again and again they will turn away from this temptation and resolve to keep the windows open, which means that both people who scoff and people who wonder will look in. It doesn’t matter. They’ve decided to become a new wine skin, and full of new wine.