Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

Humility is one of the (several) themes of today’s reading from the New Testament book of James. In it, we read that “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

It may seem a curmudgeonly thing to say, but I can’t help but feel that this virtue, so basic to the Scriptures and to the teachings of Christ and his saints, is lacking in our contemporary culture, that milieu in which we are all formed. Pride of every kind seems to be the currency of the day: pride of accomplishment, pride of possession, pride of accumulation, pride of social standing, pride of intelligence, pride in the cultivation of talent, pride of self-expression, pride of identity, pride of individuality and independence, etc.

How are we to develop humility when our society bombards us with this message of pride, a message that quickly penetrates to every area of daily life? I don’t simply mean that pride makes its way into the advertisements we consume. Pride literally saturates the fabric of our lives. We are taught (and in turn we perhaps unwittingly teach) that an obsessive pursuit of vanity is our reason to be, our great privilege, our destiny as “free” agents in a modern democratic society.

Lest I seem too morose in these reflections, let me point out that I exist in this same milieu. I see the prideful materials in my own soul. All of this seems too real to ignore.

I also have mercifully met a few people who demonstrate humility. It’s a recognizable quality and extremely rare. These are people to whom one feels an inevitable attraction of soul. They are people you would like to emulate, if somehow you could learn to embody their peaceful spirit, their joy, their unselfconscious regard, their clear devotion to God. When you are around them, you feel the gaping divide between their experience and your own, and yet the possibility of bridging that gap. Does that sound familiar?

Hopefully, our local churches can become laboratories for a real countercultural humility—which is to say, hopefully, we won’t all be consumed by the secular culture.

In the meantime, we can throw ourselves into the ancient Church’s traditional activities designed to develop humility: prayer, fasting, repentance, giving to those in need, receiving the Eucharist. True, I’m not particularly good at any of these, but they are the way forward.

Yours in Christ,

—Justin