It’s been quite awhile … that is, if anyone is still out there! As I’m sure I said or alluded to many times during those months in the first part of 2016, my writing was really a response, without a clear idea of where it was all going. In my experience, this was a response to a call and without that call, the writing would have been a chore or a kind of duty. Instead, it sort of flowed, without substantial effort other than a commitment to listening and of the time to see where that listening led. With the medical cure and the nearly simultaneous conclusion to my two years of regular work at the church … as well as our wonderful trip to Europe, the call to write sort of dried up, whatever the reason. I occasionally tried to find it but it didn’t appear. A practical way of saying this is that I didn’t find I had anything worth saying that would be of real interest to anyone else. Nor, did I find anything worth saying that I felt would help me in my own journey. I’ve wondered in the past five months or so whether there would be anything from a trickle to a flood in the future. But, I’ve been patient. 🙂

OK, with that out of the way … My friend Shack asked me the other night at a wonderful dinner with our First Friday group, if I would be posting again. He said this without any sense of pressure but it was timely. I had actually written something a week or so previously in response to a discussion in our Monday morning men’s group. The call had actually arrived unbidden. One moment it wasn’t there. The next: Hello.

Checking for understanding as we teachers do, I remember pausing briefly to see if I “heard” right. “Yes, you need to sit down and write. The words will come.” OK, I obeyed. And, they did.

I sent the resulting piece off to the group who processed it in my absence last week as Diane and I were camping at our favorite beach spot on the Camp Pendleton Marine Base. Shack’s question prompted me to consider what had happened and to see if it was time to get back on the horse, so to speak.

The message at church yesterday sealed the deal. It dovetailed perfectly with what I had written, although approaching it from an entirely different direction. Whatever the approaches were, they ended up in the same place. One again, Hello. (Sorry for the digression, but if any of you saw or remember the great first Back to the Future movie, the bad guy “Biff” would rap Marty McFly’s father on the head and say, “Hello, McFly!” as if to say, “are you getting this??” I sometimes feel that rap on my head. Good to pay attention but maybe that’s fodder for a different post.)

So, the message said, “post what you’d written. Maybe see if you have anything else to add. I expect you will.” (Another aside, this kind of exchange can occur within schizophrenia or between God and person or as some kind of internal debate, among other things. You know where I stand.)

And, here we are, dear reader.

You will have noticed the title. When this came to me yesterday, I knew it was time to get out the old (and I mean old) laptop, sit down in my favorite arm chair in our office/study and trust the process.

Because, I believe so much in the message contained in those words. They are actually pulled from one of my favorite songs, titled Beautiful Things by an artist with the name of Gungor. The lyrics are simple and the music captivating. (I apologize if I’ve shared this before.)

They articulate the Gospel perfectly. On so many levels. One can live for hours and days and years in those lyrics. What is dust and what is beautiful? How do we encapsulate both and what does God have to do with any of this?

What is the pain? What if we don’t feel much pain or see ourselves as broken? Are we open to an awareness of pain in others or to going deeper into our own lives? Why or why not? Do we seek to be made new? Why or why not?

For me to say that these simple words represent the very foundation of why Jesus came, who he is and what our lives are about is quite a challenge, I suspect.

We are reading a book by a man well known in many Christian circles by the name of Eugene Peterson. He assigned a chapter apiece to the fifteen Psalms that make up what are collectively called the “Songs of Ascent.” For those unfamiliar with the psalms, they are really songs or prayers … all 150 of them in the Hebrew bible or what Christians commonly refer to as the Old Testament. These fifteen were regularly sung by the tens of thousands of Jews as they made their thrice yearly pilgrimage up the mountain to Jerusalem (the City of Peace, as translated). They knew them by heart and they are deep and profound. These psalms hit on the fullness of life in all of its majesty and depravity. Peterson attributes a theme to each one. They include such light topics as Worship, Service, Help, Security, Joy, Perseverance, Hope, Obedience and the one that precipitated my return to writing, Humility.

Humility is a curious topic, especially in an age that elevates narcissism (its opposite) to the highest levels. Another quick aside: I would imagine that many would say the opposite of humility is arrogance but I’ll throw out that narcissism is the insidious and purest form of arrogance.

One of the problems with this topic is that humility is actually not realized as a virtue (good thing) in any practical sense by many in our modern or post-modern world. If the metric of success is achievement, then any tendency to humility is either ignored or drowned out or certainly not considered worthy of a lot of our limited attention.

Unless, of course, we’re talking about a new pope who is surrounded by opulence but comes in and wants to drive an old used car and live simply, interacting with staff as an equal. Or, for a Mother Theresa, God bless her, who lives a life of deep integrity, serving the most needy in our world. There, we explain, are model people. Wow. Aren’t they amazing! But, of course, that is them and they are different. Nevertheless, something in us connects with that … as opposed to say, the people who often grace the covers of our magazines or who say “look at me!” on reality shows. So, we play a kind of game, pulled in one direction or the other, wondering about the relative value of these lives to our own life and what they have to teach us about our significance in the scheme of things.

What is humility anyway? Is it truly a virtue, a universal good? Or, as Nietzsche argued so effectively, the greatest of weaknesses? I expressed the common joke to Diane yesterday that there are two things we should be careful about asking God for: Patience and Humility. Because he might just open the flood gates to give us a reason to be humble and patient, tough as that could be!!

(I’m thinking this may be a multi-part topic.)

Allow me to explore.

While I have dealt with this topic a lot, both in theory and practice, I just now clicked on my handy dandy little dictionary app to get a formal definition. It reads, “a modest or low view of one’s own importance.” Hmmm.  Before reading on, what is yours?

Pause.

OK. Is it something like not thinking so highly of yourself or your skills all of the time? Does it have anything to do with having deep compassion and empathy for and with others less fortunate or who are on a different economic, social or professional plane than you?

I’ll hazard that any definition will fall far short of getting to the crux of the issue. What is humility? Is it a good thing? Always? Never? Sometimes? In what cases? What does it look like and what role should it play in my life?

As we explore the topic, we can dance around the edges before diving in to get more than our feet wet.

In describing what it’s not, the very wise Tim Keller says that humility is NOT thinking less of one’s self but thinking of one’s self less. Now, there’s something to focus us.

The Bible is very complicated. I thought I basically got the gist quite awhiles ago. Pretty arrogant and naive of me. While we may point to this passage or that as uncomfortable or threatening or not in line with modern realities the thing is jam packed with deep truths. Really jam packed. Anyway, most people are at least somewhat familiar with Moses’ transcription of God’s ten commandments. The principal dos and don’ts to living a life of virtue. How many people have used them as a measuring stick to see how we’re doing? (Of course, in our current framework of relative truth, these virtues are deemed anachronistic, discarded in favor of a a morality that is self-defined and needs to align with what we perceive our personal needs to be.) But, I digress.

I bring up the Bible and the Ten Commandments because Jesus (who most Christians believe is the true God come to form in a human body)  basically said it comes down to just two things. Two foundational virtues or ways to organize our entire lives. Love God and love our neighbor (others). He actually adds some language to clarify by saying we should do the first thing with ALL our heart, soul and mind. And, we should do the second thing with the amount of attention and care we give to ourselves. Wow.

If you’re at all like me, that can kind of stop us in our tracks. As in, nice to know that’s what he’s preaching but that bar is so high there’s no way I’ll ever reach it, even if I thought those two things were actually good things. Come on. OK. I get the first one. Sort of. If there really is a God and God has something to do with love then I can see why he’s asking us to really love him … however that’s supposed to play out for someone or thing I can’t see, not to mention understand . But the neighbor thing? I don’t even like my neighbor, not that I really know him/her. And, that guy who is always running the red light or cutting me off? Or that woman who is spiteful and mean? Or that really bad guy bent in doing really bad things? Come on. Nice try but as organizing principles for my life, I have problems.

Enter Keller to give us a starting point. Contrary to my app’s definition, humility is NOT having a low opinion of one’s importance. After all, I am worthy of the most glorious unconditional love in all of creation. I AM somebody!!  Humility is not being a doormat. Humility is not being passive and allowing others to dominate me or use me. It is not flagellating myself so I can identify with worthlessness. Not in the least!!

It is, as Keller says, paying less attention to myself: What I want. What I need. My RELATIVE importance to others. In fact, we are all infinitely important and no one is greater or lesser in importance than any other.

This is where those two commandments are going. It’s what and who we are paying attention to.  And the key is love. Do we love the what over the who? Do we love the how over the who? I plead guilty.

Humility is a posture and a set of behaviors that sees us and others through an objective lens outside of us all. Without that lens, we lose perspective and our life is a battle of dominance. And, in the battle of dominance, there can be no peace. Those two are anathema.

(Another aside: Whatever one thinks about the theory of evolution … the really complicated things of natural selection/survival of the fittest … I suggest that the adoption of that particular form of biological analysis to social settings … Social Darwinism, it’s called … is one of the most abhorrent and destructive forces that mankind has unleashed. The most extreme versions have been used to support eugenics and Nazism, as well as somewhat less virulent aspects of political and economic philosophy. It’s impossible to be a social Darwinist and a believer in the Gospel or Good News. My opinion.)

All of this brings me back to the title. I think there’s a key here. We are both a pile of dust and beautiful. At one level we are relatively microscopic organisms in a vast universe and on another level we are absolutely important. It’s in the resolution of these apparently diametrically opposite things that I feel we can understand what humility is and why it’s something to think about.

Put simply, in what ways are we or our lives dust and in what ways are we or our lives beautiful? Are we connected to both?

I’m going to begin wrapping up this first installment.

There’s so much to explore here. Who am I, really? How should I view others? What is most deserving of my attention? What occupies my bandwidth of attention, however narrow or wide? And, oh, the traps. We can get so caught up with doing “good” things we miss the mark by a mile. I should know. We can even be considered “good” people by others but still miss the mark. And, here’s the thing about marks. When we set off on a journey, if it’s a really, really short one, we can be off by a very small margin on that compass and still probably arrive at or close to our destination. But, if that journey is really long … say across thousands of miles of ocean or in space or in life or eternity, you name it, being off by a small amount is not a good thing. (But, not to worry, there’s a solution, so long as we seek it.)

Humility is NOT thinking less of myself but thinking of myself less. Where does that take us?

Jesus said “whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me.” Matthew 25:40 lightly paraphrased. Who are these least and what should I be doing?

I need to admit that, while I spent nearly every day of the last 20+ years of my professional career surrounded by many “leasts,” wrestling with how to serve them in every way possible, not just their educational needs, I still struggled with incorporating the wisdom of Jesus, Keller, Peterson and others into the intimate fabric of my life. That struggle continues daily but I do it with the perfect knowledge that he makes beautiful things out of the dust.

To Be continued …

Lord, please help us know who we really are. Please help us to understand our ultimate value but in a way that we see others as you see them, not through just our own somewhat cloudy lenses. Help us understand the nature of virtue and how we can live a virtuous life, knowing we will always fall short. Help us to have the eyes to see others as you see them, the heart to love others as you do, and the hands and feet and will to bless others as you intend. Thank you and amen.