The Astonishing Joy of Humility | Word and Songs

with Sr. Lines Salazar

The first experience of humility happens when we open our hearts and contentedly say yes to our Creator. We then see in God’s inexhaustible love the source of our being and the benevolent decision about who and what we are. This yes lays the foundation of mature discernment, which cannot go on without it. It is a very concrete yes. We accept the place where God has put us, the time in which God creates us (which we did not exist to choose. We accept the real skills and qualities in our character (which I did not create but God is creating; we accept our parents (whom we did not select but God selected); we live content in the world’s current (which we cannot govern but God governs). In this mindset and heart set, I put God before all else—before all pleasure, profits, successes, and anything else in this world.

Our failures and sins also lead us to an occasion for discovering the humility which is one of God’s essential features, and which is part of God’s DNA. This is an astonishing thing to say and it brings us up short. Who thinks of God as humble? But what else can we call a God who loves his chosen people, decade after decade and century after century- even when we do not love him back? Doesn’t “Humble” describe a God who has loved us into existence although we barely return his passionate personal love? A God who creates any, many hearts who willfully ignore him or proudly deny him? And a God who keeps on loving us. Friends, this is the humility of love. A person without spiritual maturity cannot comprehend this. The sinful will reject it as absurd. Humility clears the way for Jesus’ disciples to learn to love, as we mature and our love grows to be like his in its deepest reality. We accept who we are, not envious or jealous of anyone else. We recognize the gifts given us our intelligence, talent, and opportunity, and we enact those gifts. We will face trials and failures- even the ones that threaten who we are. If we have humility like Jesus’, we will embrace those trials and failures, humbly acknowledging that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love had been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

The way of humility shapes our hearts to put things in perspective and proper order. As we endure in love, we find ourselves having to yield, to re-order, to let go. A humble person is as content after yielding and letting go as when she gets what she preferred. Sometimes, we can be proud, insisting our own way, willfully. Pride always costs us. Clinging to what we have achieved when we are invited to move beyond it, is one way to refuse the humility that will make us more Christ like. As a humble believer, we claim that God always enters clothed in poverty, in littleness”. So when we decide to admit our offenses to the Lord, he will forgive the humbled heart. This is the astonishing joy of humility. - Script Writer:  Sr. Niña Lorilla, FSP