Twenty-Second Sunday Ordinary Time -- September 2, 2007
God’s peace to all of you.
Let’s consider the principle theme of today's scripture readings: humility. However, let me ask you to replace what I believe most people think about humility with a nuanced perception of the concept. For a few moments consider the meaning of humble to be this: being humble means being honest about who and what we are and being honest about the gifts and graces that God has given to each of us.
I believe many miss the magnificent graces that come to them because they possess a weakened sense of a virtue that can make them strong, that can make them upright and can make them quite open to the numerous daily opportunities of God’s graces. To live with the notion that the virtue of humility requires a serious belittling of ourselves, hiding in a corner, as it were, and other personally demeaning actions, is, I believe, a cause for so many people being unable to live with the potential that God has given.
God with the collaboration of loving parents brought you and me, each of us, into this world. He made us quite different from birds, dogs, cats, trees, flowers or flowing rivers. He created us and graced us with particular talents and skills so that we could fulfill his divine plan in and through us and our skills. But, but, but: from our earliest years so many people were taught that more important than growing in true humility was the undermining vice called pride. Unfortunately we learned that pride was not being humble. One way of understanding this is to consider how using all the talents and skills God had given was so dangerous. We could become filled with pride. To this day I can recall the priests and sisters during my early years in school: be careful. Don’t think yourself so great ... it will lead to your downfall! Consequently we were being molded in a way that was teaching us to limit the full use of all the wonderful gifts God had given us.
What I truly believe the virtue of humility is calling us to realize is that by recognizing and using to the fullest the talents God has given us we become more fully aware of the person that God intended us to be. This is why God made some of us teachers, managers, parents, bakers and candlestick makers and so on. To suppress the God-given talents is indeed a genuine way of offending God.
Humility is the virtuous gift of knowing the gifts or talents that God has given me and developing them in ways that bring me closer to an awareness of God’s goodness and of the ways that I can make a contribution to the community in which I live.
Humility means honestly recognizing what talents God has given and how they can be used to reach out to those who can benefit by one’s gifts. Humility does not mean hiding talents, burying our skills. If a person is really good at one thing or another, putting that skill in the closet is far from serving God and our sisters and brothers.
