Humility, the Most Despised Virtue?
Today, many Christian churches celebrate Holy Thursday. For me and my fellow Catholics, the day commemorates Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist, or Mass, and the priesthood.
Included in today’s Mass is arguably the most moving of rituals, the washing of the feet. The day is also called “Maundy Thursday,” deriving from the Latin “mandatum,” meaning command.
After washing his disciples’ feet – a menial task done by servants and undoubtedly embarrassing for the disciples – Jesus urges them to wash one another’s feet, according to John’s gospel.
“If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.” Later, in the same chapter, Jesus expands on its meaning: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you….”
A Certain Logic
Typically, the priest or bishop washes the feet of parishioners, which has a certain logic because Jesus’ disciples, who would become leaders of his church, were the targets of the feet-washing event. But, of course, the ritual means something only if clergy members have a sense of service to others. In some churches, people wash each other’s feet, which I find more meaningful.
So what’s the point of feet-washing? I think the main message is that faith, and the search for God, can only happen in a spirit of humility – of knowing our place in respect to God and each other.
But is there a Christian virtue more despised in today’s world? Humility implies wimpiness, fecklessness, timidity in speaking and acting on one’s own behalf. It flies in the face of so many messages in our society.
The self-satisfied, over-confident people portrayed in TV commercials – which attempt to mirror, as well as promote, society’s current values – make this point. As opposed to the movie and TV characters played by John Wayne, Debbie Reynolds and other famous people of the past, current actors, politicians, athletes and other celebrities outdo each other in their displays of self-satisfaction and arrogance.
Not About Wimpiness
Christian humility isn’t about wimpiness. Instead, it’s akin to honesty, about yourself, your talents and your limitations. Believers and people searching for God are called to be humble about themselves and about their faith. In other words, trying as much as possible, to see yourself as you are – nothing more, nothing less – and rejecting smugness about being a believer or about virtuous practices.
Two of my favorite writers, Thomas Merton and Tomás Halik, have some relevant things to say about humility and the search for God.
“Humility,” says Merton, the famous Trappist monk who died in 1968, “is a virtue, not a neurosis.
“In humility is the greatest freedom,” he wrote. “As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose a piece of heart. As soon as you compare that shadow with the shadows of other people, you lose all joy….”
Campaigner Against Triumphalism
Halik, the Czech philosopher and theologian, has made a career of studying the subject of faith and trying to get people of faith to include in the command of love people of other faiths and people of no faith. He’s a campaigner against believers’ triumphalism.
As a member of the underground church during vicious anti-religion persecution in his native Czechoslovakia, Halik has written that he is “deeply convinced that the chief task of faith and theology is to teach us the art of living amid life’s paradoxes and the courage to enter the cloud of unknowing.
“My heart is on the side of those who are seekers,” Halik said in an interview. “Among believers there are many people whose faith is not a buttressed fortress but a path. They respond to the call to go deeper and deeper…. Truth, he writes, is a book that none of us has read to the end.”
We can find the path to God only in humility. We have to wash each other’s feet.
