Benedictine Spirituality 2

Benedictine Spirituality 2: Humility

By Judith Dunham

Tom and I have continued our readings in the Rule of Benedict, which for the last month have centered on humility. Although contributed by a fifth century monastic, St. Benedict’s wisdom applies to our lives in the twenty-first cemtury. Sr. Joan Chittister, author of the commentary we are using, observes:

Each of us, monastic or not, deals with the same elements in life. We are all bound to the Gospel, under leadership of some kind, faced with the dictates of tradition or the cautions of experience and in need of direction. (p. 49)

Benedict grounds his admonitions in the Gospel, especially in Chapter 4 of the Rule. He writes, “First of all, ‘love God with your whole heart, your whole soul and all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself’ (Matt. 22-37-39; Mark 12:30-31; Luke 10:27) …and… ‘never do to another what you do not want done to yourself’ (Tob. 4:16; Matt. 7:12; Luke 6:31)” (p. 50)

While Benedict calls the monastic community to contemplation, nonviolence and peacemaking, St. Joan gives us modern examples of the Rule, It doesn’t talk about conflict resolution; it says, don’t begin the conflict. It doesn’t talk about communication barriers; it says, stay gentle even with those who are not gentle with you. It doesn’t talk about winning; it talks about loving. (p. 51)

The twelve rungs of humility outlined by St. Benedict are difficult to summarize and, taken out of context, lose much of their meaning. He spends s full chapter on humility, with much exposition. At its core, humility is centered on obedience to God as exemplified in Christ’s example. John Forman, a Benedictine Oblate, summarizes the twelve rungs as: 1) always keep the fear of God before [one’s] eyes; 2) the renunciation of self-will and desire; 3) submission to one’s superior in all obedience; 4) patience in enduring hardship with equanimity; 5) self-revelation and the acknowledgement of sinfulness; 6) contentment with the least; 7) the awareness of one’s own liabilities; 8) the avoidance of attention-seeking behavior; 9) the radical restraint of speech; 10) not ready and prompt to laugh; 11) being mild and speaking in a few reasonable words; and 12) embodiment.

Forman also contrasts humility with humiliation. He explains, “One key to differentiate life-giving humility from negating humility is the focus: Grace-given ‘humility’ acknowledges both the individual self and the Self that transcends each of us, while hostile ‘humility’ is entirely self-focused and, ultimately, consuming.” Through grace-given humility, “we discover the human dignity in understanding that we were called to live for God, and how to respond to that understanding so that we are a God-story worth telling.”

In commenting on rung six, Sr. Joan observes, “In a classless society status is snatched in normally harmless but corrosive little ways. We are a people who like embossed business cards and monogrammed leather briefcases and invitations to public events. We spend money we don’t have…We have lost a sense of ‘enoughness’…Benedict tells us to quit climbing. If we can learn to love life where we are, in what we have, then we will have room in our souls for what life alone does not have to offer.” (pp. 69-70)

Sr. Joan calls humility “the lost virtue of the twentieth century” in great need of rediscovery. She writes,

Benedict is telling us that true humility is simply a measure of the self that is taken without exaggerated approval or exaggerated guilt. Humility is the ability to know ourselves as God knows us and to know that it is the little we are that is precisely our claim on God. Humility is, then, the foundation for our relationship with God, our connectedness to others, our acceptance of ourselves, our way of using the goods of the earth and even our way of walking through the world, without arrogance, without domination, without scorn, without put-downs, without disdain, without self-centeredness. The more we know ourselves, the gentler we will be with others.