HUMILITY

Several weeks ago I read in the newspaper that, during the 2000 political 
campaign, George Bush had vowed to conduct his foreign policy with 
humility. That is clearly not the attitude with which he has done so. His first 
few months in office, he was indifferent to foreign affairs. Since 9/11, he has 
been forceful and sometimes swaggering with regard to other nations and 
how we relate to them.

Three years ago George Bush believed that humility was a virtue that might 
help him to win the presidency. I do not know if it did or whether he still 
believes in humility. I hope so and I hope he practices that virtue.

His public stances suggest that he does not believe in or practice humility. 
He may be like a lot of people who sneer at humility, confusing it with 
humiliation. A lot of people scorn the humble, claiming that they will always 
be trampled by the strong, the proud, the aggressive. A lot of people believe 
that political leaders dare not live and act with humility.

That may be so, but what then are we to make of Eduard Shevardnadze, 
former foreign minister of the Soviet Union and now president of his own 
country, Georgia, who once offered a heartfelt and detailed apology for the 
actions of his country in various other lands, including Afghanistan.

What shall we say of Vaclav Havel, who for more than a decade was a 
leading voice of dissent in Czechoslovakia and for the first 14 years of his 
liberated country was the president of the Czech Republic. Havel has been a 
model of unpretentious, gentle wisdom.

There is, perhaps most remarkably, the example of Nelson Mandela, who 
was unjustly jailed for 27 years in the prime of his life but who foreswore 
revenge in order to lead his country into a new age. Never boastful, never 
judgmental, always calm, thoughtful, caring, and inclusive, Mandela is a 
humble man whose spirit of humility helped to spare South Africa the 
bloodbath everyone feared when white minority rule ended.

It is possible to conduct the affairs of government with a measure of 
humility. 

Maybe, as George  Bush told us in 2000, that is exactly what our country 
needs.

Maybe humility is important for a nation that the New York Times described 
last Sunday as having moved "beyond superpower."

In a world as dangerous as ours, a world that like it or not is a small 
neighborhood with the destinies of all humanity bound up together, in a 
world whose people are just learning how to talk to and learn from and 
respect one another, maybe a dose of humility would do us a lot of good.

Humility is the beginning of spiritual wisdom, as pride, its opposite, is the 
beginning of spiritual foolishness.

Humility and pride are entangled with each other in our lives as we struggle 
to understand our proper place in the world.

We must have some pride lest we wallow in self-denigration. Humility is not 
humiliation. Pride is another word for self-respect.

But pride can easily slip into vanity and arrogance. Humility helps to correct 
that by reminding us that we are in the end food for the worms.

We are all familiar with the prophet Micah's teaching that what is required 
of us is to do justice and to love mercy, but not to be boastful of having done 
so. Humility matters as much as justice and mercy.

Moses was denied entrance to the Promised Land because of his pride. 
Rather than do as he was supposed to do and tell a rock to produce water, he 
struck the rock with his staff to produce it. He wanted credit for the miracle. 
He paid a high price for letting his ego blot out his common sense.

Pride goeth before a fall. That is why Christianity lists it as the first among 
the seven deadly sins. That is why all religions point to the dangers of pride 
and the wisdom of humility.

How might we think about and work towards humility? Three thoughts.

First of all there is ignorance.

We are all very ignorant. We are all very easily deceived. Our best means of 
figuring things out, our reason, is subject to all kinds of emotional assaults 
that bend it into rationalizing. Fear makes us think foolish thoughts. 
Insecurities cause us to distort what we do know.

There is so much to know that we can never know more than a tiny fraction 
of it all.

The macroscopic universe with its hundreds of billions of galaxies is vast 
beyond our comprehension.

The microscopic world is seemingly infinite in its complexity and variety.

We have only touched the surface of knowledge about the hundreds of 
millions of life forms that inhabit this planet alone and that interact with 
each other and with us in ways only partly known and still largely 
mysterious.

Reality confronts us with paradoxes and puzzles and peculiarities that leave 
us breathless with astonishment.

Consider how complicated a single human being is: your mother, her father, 
his wife, the baby born two minutes ago, Stephen Hawking, Itzhak Perlman, 
a serial killer, Serena Williams. I am not responsible for any of these people 
or what makes them special. Only barely at the surface do I understand what 
makes them who they are. The uniqueness of every human being-of every 
snowflake, of every leaf, of every thing-is cause for wonder.

Isaac Newton, a pretty smart fellow, said late in his life that "I do not know 
what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like 
a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then finding a 
smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of 
truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Knowledge teaches us our ignorance far more than it banishes it. 

We are also easily fooled. 

The most delightful example of this is what magicians do to trick us: make 
rabbits appear out of empty hats, disentangle locked rings, saw people in 
half and then put them together again. Because their hands are quicker than 
our eyes, we see what is not really happening. Most of us are quite easily 
taken in.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote of experiments done with students in which, by 
being asked mildly deceptive questions about a film or some other classroom 
event, the students could be led to give consistently wrong answers. Even 
with straightforward questions, the answers always varied among observers, 
sometimes to the point where the answers seemed to be speaking of different 
films or different events.

Gould then recounted how his own mind fooled him. He remembered-still 
remembered even after he learned he was wrong!-buying bagels with his 
grandfather at a store directly across the street from  Forest Hills and sitting 
on some stone steps leading into the tennis stadium to eat them.. The steps 
are real and so is Forest Hills, but the steps are a good mile away from the 
stadium, as Gould learned on returning to his childhood neighborhood.

"Thus we are easily fooled," Gould wrote, "on all fronts of both eye and 
mind: seeing, storing, and recalling...What remedy can we possibly suggest 
but constant humility and eternal vigilance and scrutiny?"

We are easily fooled and we are vastly ignorant. What better remedy than 
humility as an attitude with which to meet the world?

Secondly, there is vulnerability.

We are mortal. Our life span is very short and passes very quickly. In our 
70-80 years or maybe a few more, how much could we possibly affect a 
universe now some 10-15 billions years old, or even the younger earth of 
which we are a part or the patch of ground where we spend most of our 
time?

Czeslaw Miloscz is right: "To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to 
discover that you are not magnificent. That is enough work for a lifetime."

We control very little. Our power is very limited. Thus the Koran instructs 
its readers, "Do not say about anything, 'I am going to do that tomorrow' 
without adding, 'Insha'llah, if God wills.'" 

The Tennessee version of that on which I grew up is, "The good Lord willin' 
and the crik don't rise."

Plan and prepare as we will, we cannot know every contingency that will 
occur. Life is full of coincidence, serendipity, bad luck, and surprise that 
make a hash of our careful strategies for keeping everything under control.

Coaching a sport has a way of teaching this lesson every game. Players do 
not perform as they are trained to do. A ball takes a funny bounce because of 
uneven ground. Weather intrudes with unexpected cold or rain or heat. A 
key player gets injured early in the game.

The best coaches and the best players are those who can make adjustments 
to the changing conditions of a game. Practice is required, of course, but 
there is no way to know beforehand what will actually happen in the contest. 
It is adaptability that really wins games.

Adaptability is also a requirement for good parenting. As mothers and 
fathers, we are constantly being confronted with situations that do not appear 
in the child-raising books. All the advice of the wisest pediatric experts can 
only take us so far. We have to be able to adjust 
            when our four year old asks some devastatingly frank question about 
sex as we are racing to make an appointment,
            when our seven year old announces that a bully has been stealing his 
lunch money,
            when our ten year old comes home with her first C,
            when illness or accident makes our 12 year old child less able to be 
involved with other children,
            when our young teenager gets in trouble with the law;
            when our older teenager runs away.

Often we do not know what to do because we did not spend the night before 
getting ready for these particular things. How could we? They seem to pop 
out of nowhere at us and demand wisdom beyond our supply. Often we feel 
that we have failed, not done the right thing, harmed our child.

Our children, of course, seem to know how to deal with us very effectively.
Consider the 14 year old who commented that "when your dad is mad and 
asks you, 'Do I look stupid?', do not answer him." Or the wise 13 year old 
who suggested that "when you get a bad grade in school, show it to your 
mom when she's on the phone."

I know of no more humbling experience than being a parent. My children 
were always a step or two ahead of their parents.

There is only so much we can ever do in any situation. Often what we do 
does not determine the outcome. 

This is not to suggest that we should never make plans, never prepare for 
events, never do the best that we can do with the knowledge and skills 
available to us. It only means that we should be humble about our 
contributions and be conscious of our constant vulnerability.

Among the endless jokes that wend their way out of the cyber world into my 
computer was this tale of 11 people being rescued by a helicopter. They 
were all clinging to one rope. As the helicopter rose to pull them to safety, it 
became clear that the rope would not hold all these people. One of the ten 
men on the rope said that someone had to let go.

There was a long pause before the one woman spoke up. She gave a very 
moving speech, saying that she would give up her life to save the others. She 
said that women are used to giving up things for their husbands and children, 
and she would follow that ancient example.

When she finished speaking, the men were so moved that they all started 
clapping.

Our vulnerability teaches us humility.

So does our moral weakness.

The very best among us fall short of doing good all the time. Sometimes it is 
because we do not know what the good is in a given situation. Sometimes it 
is because the work required to do the good is more than we can muster.

How hard it is to know as a parent if we are favoring one child over another, 
an accusation that children frequently make to their parents. Sometimes we 
know that we are favoring one child because that child has special needs, but 
the other children in the family who are getting less attention will still feel 
left out. Sometimes we do not know what to do to do good for all parties..

Sometimes we know what the good is, but doing it is just too hard. It is a 
common failing on all our parts that we will allow racial or ethnic or 
homophobic or other kinds of slurs to pass by without comment in certain 
situations: when it is our boss who makes the comment or her husband, 
when it is a family member and we are trying to preserve peace in the 
family, when we are alone in a group all of whom agree with the speaker. 

We are not smart enough or disciplined enough to do the good always. If we 
have any moral sensitivity at all, that will be painful for us. Humbling.

Phillips Brooks said that humility "is not to stoop till you are lower than 
yourself, but to stand to your real height against some higher nature, which 
will show you what the real smallness of your greatness is."

I.L.Peretz wrote a story about Bontsha the Silent. Bontsha spent his life in 
silence. Born into dire poverty, wounded during his circumcision, bereft at 
an early age of both parents, he thought himself a wretch. Uneducated, 
unskilled, he tried only to be courteous and helpful when possible.

He worked as a porter till one day he leapt into the road to stop a runaway 
carriage, saving the life of the man inside who then gave him a job as his 
driver. He married, but his wife ran away after their baby was born. Bontsha 
remained silent, never protesting the rigors of his life.

He lost his job, he fell ill and no doctor would care for him so he died. He 
awoke in the Great Hall of Eternal Justice, terrified he would be found 
wanting and cast into the fiery pits of hell. But the prosecuting angel would 
not speak against him, while Abraham and the other heroes of faith spoke 
glowingly of Bontsha. He was told by the Great Judge that all of paradise 
was his to choose from, for the Judge knew he would ask only for his fair 
share.

After thinking for a few minutes about his dreams of wealth and luxury, 
Bontsha then tried to evaluate his own moral worth and thus what his fair 
share of paradise would be. Then he said to the Judge, "Well then, well then, 
Your Excellency, what I would like is to have, every morning for breakfast, 
a hot roll with fresh butter."

The Judge and the angels and all the great heroes of faith hung their heads in 
shame at the simple goodness of Bontsha the Silent. He was not a man who 
had a great height but, as Phillips Brooks urged us to do, he stood as tall as 
he could and did not think himself more than he really was.

The immortals bowed humbly before one whose moral nature was even 
higher than theirs.

The great religions of the world teach us that when we judge ourselves 
honestly we shall find, as the Buddhist Shinran teaches, that "deceit and 
untruth are in my flesh, and in my soul is no clear shining...Too strong for 
me is the evil of my heart."

It is a striking feature of the writings of those whom we consider noble-the 
Gandhis, the Kings, the Montaignes, the Lao Tzu's, and others-that they 
speak far more of their failings than they do of their triumphs.

Dorothy Day lived most of her life "with my brothers, the workers, the poor 
of the world." She devoted her life to work against poverty and racism, war 
and despair. She was as good a person as the world has known.

Dorothy Day wrote, "The just man falls seven times daily," and she did not 
number herself among the just.

Dorothy Day wrote that "I am reminded of St.Theresa who said, 'The devil 
sends me so offensive a bad spirit of temper that at times I think I could eat 
people up.' I'm glad that she felt that way too."

Dorothy Day wrote that "We have not yet loved our neighbor with the kind 
of love that is a precept to the extent of laying down our life for him. And 
our life very often means money...We haven't shown ourselves ready to lay 
down our life...We must begin."

Dorothy Day stood to her full height and felt her own smallness in the face 
of the high ideals of Christian pacifism and Christian communism that 
guided her life.

To be aware of our moral weakness is a path to humility.

It must be very difficult to be a good person if you are the president, the 
Pope, the CEO of a large company, a commanding general, anyone in a 
position of great influence and authority. You are inevitably surrounded by 
sycophants, who praise you in order to obtain favors and who are rightly 
timid about mentioning your flaws to you. 

Humility is an especially hard virtue to come by for those who live midst the 
pomp and circumstance of power, for who among your friends will remind 
you of your ignorance, your vulnerability, your moral weakness? Yet 
humility is the root of all the virtues.

Without humility, we cannot be prudent, for we would think we always 
knew the correct answer to every question.

Without humility, we cannot be just, for we would assume that all of our 
actions were just and nothing else would matter.

Without humility, we cannot be temperate, for we would never see the 
excesses to which our passions sometimes drive us.

Without humility, we cannot be courageous, for we would think only of our 
own welfare.

Without humility, we cannot have faith, for we would think we were fully 
self-sustaining.

Without humility, we cannot have hope, for we would never be able to see 
above the horizon of today's comfort.

Without humility, we cannot have love, for we would never be able to 
participate in the mutuality that is love.

I offer these thoughts on humility, the source of all the virtues, as a kind of 
prayer. I offer these thoughts out of a deep yearning for each of us as well as 
our leaders to walk the path of humility, to refrain from pride in doing so, 
and to help one another along the way.

Maybe then the world really will be free and safe and full of justice and 
peace.



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