First Sunday of Lent – 6 March 2022
One of the most influential texts in the spiritual life of the Church is actually one of the smallest. It is the Rule of St Benedict written at the dawn of the 6th century, and is the guide of life followed by Benedictine monks and nuns and which I followed, myself, for the twenty years I lived in the monastery. It is still at the centre of my own spiritual perspective on life.
The Rule of St. Benedict is divided up into 73 small chapters, many so small in fact to be only paragraphs. However, one of the longest chapters is the 7th. It is here that Benedict sets out the heart of his vision, and it is called the Twelve Steps of Humility. What makes this chapter interesting is the way in which St. Benedict imagines we grow spiritually. Unlike other spiritual writers of his time, Benedict does not imagine that we set out to build some kind of spiritual skyscraper getting higher and higher, more and more proficient. No, for Benedict, we go in the opposite direction. The spiritual journey is not one of ascent. Rather it is one of descent. We start at the top of the skyscraper as it were, and we allow the events and the experiences of our life to strip us of the illusions that we might have of ourselves so that we come down, floor by floor, to the radical truth of ourselves before the sheer mercy of God on which, in the end, we are simply dependent. Truth, not pretence, is the way of holiness for Benedict.
For Benedict the truth of our selves lies ultimately in the recognition of our complete dependency on the mercy of God. It’s not that we are getting holier and holier by escaping the reality of who we are. Rather we become holier and holier by entering into the truth of ourselves, and this truth becomes disclosed to us by our readiness to enter into those situations in all of their messiness, contradiction and ambiguity, which demonstrate that we are at our limit. For St. Benedict life is a constant negotiation of our limits. It’s what we do precisely at these moments that enable our growth or otherwise. It is this which St. Benedict imagines as humility. It is a much harder way of holiness than those schemes by which we might seek to be flattered by the mirror of ego, for if in the end we only have our ego, how lonely would the future present itself.
We can tend to think of humility as something meek and passive. However, that is not the way that St. Benedict understands humility. If humility is about entering into the limits of our situation in which ever way they present themselves and making what we believe to be the right choices in them in full cognisance of those limits, then humility actually has an incredible strength and power about it.
It is that strength and power that we touch in today’s gospel. The temptation put before Jesus is to deny, and to ignore the limit of his humanity. The temptations are of inflation, exemption, and presumption. But in the face of each of these temptations Jesus, with utter simplicity and clarity, responds with the truth of his own limits. He keeps asserting the fundamental truth is his own radical dependency on the Father, someone other than himself. The temptations manifest the boldness of his own humility.
Each of us too is led by the Spirit in the context of our own lives to learn the same lesson as we confront the tendency towards inflation, exemption and presumption when we come up face to face with our own limits however they might present themselves in our own situation. Might we too learn what bold humility is all about?
Can we as Church also learn what it is about?
At the Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelisation some years ago one of the most impressive interventions came from Cardinal Tagle of Manila. He said if the Church is to be a place where people meet God, it needs to learn three things from the example of Jesus: humility, respect for others, and silence.
“The Church must discover the power of silence. Confronted with the sorrows, doubts and uncertainties of people, she cannot pretend to give easy solutions. In Jesus, silence becomes the way of attentive listening, compassion and prayer. It is the way to truth.”
St. Benedict’s ancient teaching about humility may never have had more contemporary relevance.
