Lenten Humility

By my guess, the gentleman is right around my age. Watching him walk - he avoids curbs and sharp turns, I appreciate his arthritis and day-to-day aches and pains. Yet, what is most fascinating is to watch what he does in those three-hundred or so feet from his car to the Wellness Center. 

There’s a slow stop, gym bag in one hand, then a careful bending of arthritic knees and a painful back and, with the other hand, he grabs a discarded soda can or plastic bottle, one of those slurpy juice boxes or a random piece of metal or paper. At the door of the Center, he tosses them into the appropriate – recyclables or trash - containers and walks in to his workout. 

One morning, a student stopped the pick-‘em-up-man and asked “Why? Why do you do that?” as he held open the lid to the recycling bin.

The answer was little short of amazing: “This University, this campus was mine before your parents were born. I take pride in it. I want it to look good for visitors and their families. But do you see the canal over there?  Sure, the big lawnmowers will chop much of this to shreds but, big pieces or small, a lot of it will wash into the canal, and then into the bay and then into the ocean and it will become microplastics; it will end-up in the flesh of fish or killing  mangroves or in that giant plastic blob that’s floating out in the Pacific.

“So, young Sir, I do it for you. My little effort to keep that canal and the bay and the ocean clean for you, and maybe your children. And maybe keep the blob from growing.”

I don’t remember when I heard what I consider the best definition of Humility. It was years ago and I have no idea who was being quoted or paraphrased. I’m almost certain it was a great female saint of the Church, but the quote went something like this:

Humility is the knowledge and acceptance of the truth.
The truth that God created you in His own image
and breathed into you the gift of His divine life and 
called you His beloved child.
He graced you – through genetics or nurturing 
or just really good breaks –
with your own particular skills and abilities,
with your personality and intellect.
Sure, you’ve worked to develop those 
skills and abilities, that personality and intellect.
But the truth begins with God’s gifts to you.
Humility begins with recognizing God has been good to you,
and knowing and accepting that.

Born just years before France’s anticlerical Reign of Terror forced loyal priests into hiding and the faithful to travel secretly to receive the Sacraments, he grew up admiring the courage of those priests who risked their lives to serve their people. John Vianney received his earliest religious education from nuns whose religious order had been dissolved under the revolution and received his first communion at age 13 – not in a church, but in a neighbor’s kitchen with curtains drawn lest the others suspect an illicit mass was being celebrated by priests on the run. At 20, he began truly formal education at a “presbytery-school” – seminary – under the tutelage of Abbe Balley, the parish priest of the neighboring village, studying arithmetic, geography and Latin. Only with Balley’s perseverance did he mange to continue, until his studies were interrupted by a draft into Napoleon’s armies. 

First illness and later a fortuitous encounter with a stranger who led him – apparently without Vianney’s initial recognition - to the protective company of a group of deserters in the village of Les Noes, keeping him from military service. Vianney spent fourteen months in Les Noes, under the assumed name of Jerome Vincent, hiding in haystacks and barns when gendarmes raided the village searching for deserters, and resumed his studies in 1810. In the major seminary of Lyon, he was considered too slow to succeed academically and was entrusted to the care and direction of Abbe Balley, who considered his piety a compensation for his academic weaknesses.

Envy, my children, follows pride; whoever is envious is proud.
See, envy comes to us from Hell;
the devils having sinned through pride, sinned also through envy,
envying our glory, our happiness.
Why do we envy the happiness and the goods of others?
Because we are proud, we should like to be the sole possessors
of talents, riches, of the esteem and love of all the world!
We hate our equals, because they are our equals;
our inferiors, from the fear that they may equal us; 
our superiors, because they are above us.
St. Jean-Marie Vianney

Ordained in 1815, he served initially as the assistant to his mentor and then, in 1818, he got lost and had to rely on the directions of two young shepherds as he travelled to his appointment as the parish priest of Ars, a town of 230 inhabitants. By 1825, he had become an internationally renowned confessor and, by 1855, 20,000 pilgrims a year travelled to Ars to go to confession to this simple priest. In the years before his death in 1859, he spent twelve to sixteen hours a day celebrating the Sacrament of Reconciliation. More than 6,000 lay men and women and three hundred priests joined the bishop in celebrating his funeral mass. He was recognized as a saint of the Universal Church in 1925 – sixty-six years after his death. 

A pure soul is like a fine pearl.
As long as it is hidden in the shell, at the bottom of the sea,
no one thinks of admiring it. 
But if you bring it into the sunshine,
this pearl will shine and attract all eyes.
Thus, the pure soul, which is hidden from the eyes of the world, 
will one day shine before the Angels
in the sunshine of eternity.
St. Jean-Marie Vianney

Too unlearned and slow to “make it in seminary,” consigned to a parish of 230 (where, almost certainly, the bishop thought he would do neither much harm nor much good), the Cure d’Ars is recognized as the patron saint of parish priests.

In a way, my friend of the journey through the parking lot shares little and much with the Cure d’Ars. Beyond well-educated, living in a metropolitan community and hardly hidden away, living and serving in a secular world, he labors quietly and behind the scenes to make the world different, better – for this generation and the next.

It may be true that some people, by the grace of God, are genuinely humble. For the rest of us, like “the mustard seed,” humility is a virtue to be nourished and nurtured.

Patron saint of mixed-race people, barbers, innkeepers and all those seeking racial harmony – Marin DePorres; honored in the Latin and Eastern Rites and in the Anglican Communion as the spiritual patron of leprosy and outcasts – Saint Damien of  Molokai; patron saint of AIDS patients and missionaries, despite never having moved more than a few miles from her hometown, she died of tuberculosis at age 24 after barely nine years in a Carmelite monastery - St. Therese of Lisieux; U.S. Navy chaplain, beloved as “the Grunt’s priest,” shot in the back 27 times by an enemy machine-gunner in Vietnam and posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor  for his heroic service, he awaits canonization as a Martyr of Charity– Father Vincent Capodanno.

The saints of the church are honored for their humble services – tending the sickest of the sick, the poorest of the poor, the lowest ranks of Marines. 

We reject the idea of “giving up” something for Lent. “Giving up” rarely teaches humility.

Perhaps the Lenten lesson of Humility can be learned simply: By picking-up the insignificant trash in your pathways through life and, when Easter has come and faded again into the past of the liturgical calendar, to continue picking-up the insignificant trash for years to come.