Mary Betz writes of our opportunities for integrating humility in our lives.

My brother Greg showed brilliance from an early age, but suffered mental ill health and subsequently a life on the difficult and humble margins of family and society. In the last months before his death 10 years ago, he took to phoning me from overseas to ask often probing questions. One day he asked me: “What does it mean to be humble?”

I remember answering that being humble had something to do with knowing one’s place in the world, how we fit in, what our part was. We were not inconsequential, but we were part of something bigger than ourselves. It was the feeling one has when looking up on a really dark night and seeing the heavens pulsating with stars, a glittering Milky Way strewn across the inky blackness of space. Who are we, rooted in our own small places on Earth yet somehow part of this ever expanding universe of swirling galaxies? Greg sounded pleased with my thoughts, but his question has stayed with me.

Humility in Micah’s Context

Micah 6:8 links justice and kindness with walking humbly with God. In Micah’s time, as in our own, these virtues seemed in short supply. There was great political unrest, the wealthy grew more so at the expense of the already poor and too little attention was paid to the common good. “To walk humbly with God” is the focal point of Micah’s answer to his own critical question: “What does God ask of us?”

The Hebrew word used for humble is tsâna`. It is an unusual word, used only twice in the Hebrew Scriptures. In its Micah context, it means humbly or lowly. The other usage is in Proverbs 11:2: “Wisdom is with the humble”.

Connection with Wisdom

The link Proverbs makes between humility and wisdom often becomes truer with increasing life experience — when we learn to learn from others, when we have had to rise up again after adversity, and when we can look honestly at our own strengths and weaknesses.

Half a lifetime ago I was talking with a friend’s mother, Bunty, who was celebrating a senior birthday year. Knowing something of the hardships and adventures of her early life, I commented that it must be wonderful to look back and remember all she had done. To my surprise, she sighed and said, unfortunately, her current recollections were more of the mistakes she had made.

Her candid self-disclosure recently came back to me when I reread Richard Rohr’s Falling Upwards. He says that as we grow older we are better able to embrace the shadow side of ourselves, enabling us to see a fuller picture of who we are: “I am afraid that the closer you get to the Light the more of your shadow you see. Thus, truly holy people are always humble people.”

Bunty’s memories caused her sadness as she acknowledged the mistakes she felt she had made. But, in subsequent years, acceptance of all she was enabled her to become a source of wisdom and a role model for others, including me.

It is humbling to acknowledge the shadows in our lives, but it is a part of growing whole to embrace both our gifts and our weaknesses. Failures can be transformed when self-knowledge and wisdom gift us the ability to be more accepting and compassionate.

Walking with God

Micah offers us a beautifully anthropomorphic image of God in the invitation to walk with God. He uses the Hebrew word yâlak, which has connotations of journey, coming away, growing and prospering. God invites us to “come away” on a journey of growth into honest self-awareness and wisdom, of prospering into kindness and just action.

To walk with God is to learn to be present to people and situations along the way, not just to move through to a destination of our own choosing. It is to see the world through God’s eyes of compassion and hope, and spend time walking with others on their journeys.

The disciples who walked with Jesus began, with painful slowness, to become aware that listening to and watching Jesus was not enough. Their own self-centred concerns about “who was the greatest” needed to give way to the needs of the people and situations they encountered as they walked.

Walking with Jesus meant living into the realm of God, calling out the rich and powerful for ignoring the poor and vulnerable, yet sharing meals with all to teach and to care. It also meant taking time away in the wilderness for prayer, solitude and renewal of strength.

Walking humbly with God today

How we choose to live our lives is a question many of us come back to again and again, especially in the second half of life. What do we want to do with our remaining years? How can we better align our lives with what we continue to learn of Jesus’s values, and those of perceptive prophets like Micah, in whose tradition Jesus walked? Who or what is this God we are called to walk humbly with, who imbues us with dreams of a world of kindness and justice? Why are we asked to walk this path, how do we do it, will it change us, and what will be the cost?

All these questions are asked within our own particular contexts of whānau, geography, culture and personal giftedness; immediate concerns like COVID-19; longer term challenges of socio-economic inequities; and the looming disaster of climate change.

It is overwhelming at times, and yet, we are part of the Earth family on whose behalf humans need to understand the issues and take responsible action. The future of our grandchildren rests on whether we abdicate or accept that responsibility.

There will be a cost whatever our choice, for example, with regard to carbon emissions. We can choose to do nothing and keep living our current lives, with the result that our mokopuna will lose life as we know it — struggling for human survival in a 4°C+ hotter world. Alternatively, heeding Jesus’s warning — that we must lose our lives to save them — suggests our choice must be to change our lifestyles radically so that those who follow us may live.

Walking humbly with God comes from the wisdom and promise we perceive as we attend to God’s presence in us and around us. It calls us to cross over to a more gentle, respectful and humble walk in Earth, sensitive to the needs of others on the road.

I think back on my brother’s half-century of life. It began with such promise, and ended with his having learnt to walk a humble path. That path was not of his own choosing, but it led him ultimately to stand up for justice in a way that once cost him a job, and to show loving kindness to all around him.

We are all called continually to adjust our walk to God’s often unexpected pace and direction. In the words of Joseph Campbell: “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life waiting for us.”

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 253 October 2020: 4-5