New Year’s resolve: increase in humility.

Huh?

“New Year’s resolve: increase in humility.” What does that even mean?

Indeed.

It was just that suggestion during an Episcopalian priest’s homily that made me walk away from God at the tender age of seventeen. I can recall clearly my thoughts as I left the church for the last time. The language of the sixties:

“I don’t want to be humble!

“I want to be famous……not waste my life like my mother did.”

Webster’s defintion of humility states that “not being arrogant, assertive but submissive” is “chiefly southern.” It’s an Interesting caveat since for the third and I hope the last, time, I’m back in Texas.

All that ambition coalesced into achievements I’d not dreamed of. But instead of pride at the accomplishments and a measure of satisfaction, I felt hollowed out. Rather than enjoying the introductory kudos before my talks, I felt like an imposter–expert? What a joke!

My shock at my serious consideration of the Catholic religion resulted in a conversation with a man who was a spiritual director. It was a term I had never before encountered, but this wise man graciously listened to my story. And seemed to understand my fear that this impulse to become Catholic wasn’t real. After so many years of searching, how could I trust this?

When he told me that the journey was always a masculine inclination, and that the decision to stop and call a place home, always feminine. I wanted to feel baffled by his observation, I needed to resist and discard it.

But I knew what he said was true. The lure of the journey

All of which takes me to another teen, one living in similarly disruptive times. Unwilling to settle for knowledge, this young man refused to waste his time in academic pursuits. Somehow he knew that the “cultivation of reason must be tempered,” for wisdom could be found only in God. And the journey there, lay inward.

The fifteen-hundred-year-old Rule.

We Benedictine Oblates read the brief but dense Rule of Benedict three times a year. On January first, we began anew with the Prologue which contains some of the most lushly beautiful prose ever written.

L I S T E N carefully, my child,
to your master’s precepts,
and incline the ear of your heart (Prov. 4:20).
Receive willingly and carry out effectively
your loving father’s advice,
that by the labor of obedience
you may return to Him
from whom you had departed by the sloth of disobedience.

To you, therefore, my words are now addressed,
whoever you may be,
who are renouncing your own will
to do battle under the Lord Christ, the true King,
and are taking up the strong, bright weapons of obedience.

And first of all,
whatever good work you begin to do,
beg of Him with most earnest prayer to perfect it,
that He who has now deigned to count us among His children
may not at any time be grieved by our evil deeds.
For we must always so serve Him
with the good things He has given us,
that He will never as an angry Father disinherit His children,
nor ever as a dread Lord, provoked by our evil actions,
deliver us to everlasting punishment
as wicked servants who would not follow Him to glory.

Prologue-The Rule of Benedict

Father J. Augustine Wetta‘s eminently readable book on Saint Benedict and his Rule is so readable that I just finished a second read. Wetta writes with a rare combination of twenty-first century sarcastic wit coupled with a testament to the profound wisdom embedded in Saint Benedict’s Rule.

He begins by explaining just who Benedict was:

Saint Benedict “was training for a life in politics, the world seemed to be going down the tubes. There were gangs of kids armed to the teeth in the street; there were endless, bloody wars being fought all over the world; and there was a sudden influx of terrible diseases for which there were no cures.

There were scandals in politics and scandals in the Church. In short, the world was a mess. So he ran away. But he didn’t join the circus or find his fortune in The Big City. Instead, he went to live in a cave on the side of a mountain. There, without all the distractions of family and schoolwork and social life, he figured he could focus exclusively on holiness. He was thinking specifically of Christ’s words: “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and . . . follow me” (Mt 19:21). He wanted to take those words literally.

Saint Benedict spent the next three years just praying. Ironically, all this praying made him famous.”

Benedict’s ladder.

Now it happens that there is a little-known but highly effective twelve-step self-help program that folks all over the world have been using for more than fifteen hundred years. You won’t hear about it on late-night infomercials or read about it in Vogue or Men’s Health because it’s not about beating the competition, getting rich quick, making friends, enhancing your sex appeal, or influencing people. And it doesn’t have many boisterous proponents, because those who have mastered this program tend to be content just as they are. Nonetheless, those people are happy to share what they know if you ask. The program is called “The Ladder of Humility” and it comes from a short book by Saint Benedict called simply The Rule.

Humility Rules: Saint Benedict’s Guide to Genuine Self-Esteem

That humility’s a lifelong battle is conveyed clearly by the young Roman who walked away from the world to become holy. After twenty-plus years of living the school of Benedict, some old and noxious habits of mine are dead, praise the Lord! Others, unfortunately, are excellent at feinting death but awake with the slightest provocation.

L I S T E N carefully, my child,
to your master’s precepts,
and incline the ear of your heart (Prov. 4:20).
Receive willingly and carry out effectively
your loving father’s advice,
that by the labor of obedience
you may return to Him
from whom you had departed by the sloth of disobedience.

To you, therefore, my words are now addressed,
whoever you may be,
who are renouncing your own will
to do battle under the Lord Christ, the true King,
and are taking up the strong, bright weapons of obedience…

Therefore we intend to establish a school for the Lord’s service. In drawing up its regulations, we hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome. The good of all concerned, however, may prompt us to a little strictness in order to amend faults and to safeguard love. Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset. But as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love. Never swerving from his instructions, then, but faithfully observing his teaching in the monastery until death, we shall through patience share in the sufferings of Christ that we may deserve also to share in his kingdom. Amen