We have a crisis on our hands.

Sadly, the above phrase has lost almost all its power through overuse in a world of voices seeking our attention.  Perhaps to say that we currently stand in the midst of a crisis of humility is an overstatement, especially considering that the enemy of humility is pride, and pride is the root vice behind all sin, and human beings have been sinners from the first.

On the other hand, I also believe that the word "crisis" does apply in a very specific way to the idea of humility in this historical moment.  One strong voice on behalf of human wisdom regarding this "mother of all virtues" has lost much of its ability to communicate with the world at large, mostly by forgetting its own identity.  I refer here to the Catholic Church – not in its teaching authority (for this has the guarantee of the Holy Spirit to defend it), but in the laypeople who form the face of the church – the face of Christ – to individuals the world over.  We are surrounded in this age, as in any age, by people who seem to be making a mess of their own lives. This is nothing special. What is lacking in the secular mindset of today is the same thing that was lacking in the corruption and cruelty of the Roman Empire, or in the rise of the European nation-state coinciding with an increase in personal poverty, or any number of movements we can identify in the historical tableau:  an impoverished wisdom about the meaning and value of the human person.  In other words, a lack of understanding about how to be human. If Christ is an example for us of anything, he is an example for us of what the human person should be and how to be it. He was willing to die for sins, even if they were the sins of others. True humility calls us, in the earliest stages of our life journey toward unity with God, to acknowledge our own sins in honesty, day in and day out.

Logic dictates that it is impossible to conceive of a four-sided triangle.  It violates the very definition of a triangle for a figure named as such to have anything but three sides.  As I see it, the person who would call himself or herself a "Christian" without constantly acknowledging the need for an intense, consistent awareness of personal faults and acknowledging the need to take responsibility for them has also contradicted the definition of "Christian." Perhaps it is another overstatement to say that this attitude creates a logical impossibility, but at the very least it blurs the image of the God who humbled himself to come among us and suffer with us that we should be trying to show to everyone in our lives.

I write this post as a man who has recently realized how little attention I paid to how much of Christ I was truly showing to others.  After a long self-assessment, I came to the conclusion that it was my own thinking about myself that not only impeded me from showing Christ to others, but also prevented me from being at peace with myself in my life and situation.   As I explore the concept of humility in these posts, I hope to provide an opportunity to think about and discuss this critical human virtue, always with a mind to how it can bring us closer to the lives we want to live, to the lives we should be living, and to the life we have been made to live by the God who loves us.