As I reflect upon many dimensions of our culture including politics, entertainment, sports, the news, and even religious institutions and its leaders, it seems that there is a dearth of a vital virtue, and that is humility.  I’d like to think that humility appears absent because it is a quiet unassuming quality, but I am afraid there is more to it than that simple explanation.  

While not a new thing, at the center of the lives of many, is the unsatisfied hunger for power, influence, control, ego, and financial capital.  Obviously when such things are tempered and used for the right reasons, good things happen, but often when power and the like is used for good, humility, not control, is in the driver’s seat.  

CS Lewis wrote the following.  “According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil is pride.  Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind…It is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.”

Issues of pride and the resultant problems are reflected in story after story in scripture.  In the Old Testament, pride was the root cause of the demise of many leaders.  Pride was at the core of much suffering.  And in the New Testament, specifically it was prideful religious leaders who believed they knew it all that challenged Jesus the most and eventually asked for Jesus to be crucified.  

Thomas Tarrants from the CS Lewis institute wrote, “The desire to lift up and exalt ourselves beyond our place as God’s creature lies at the heart of pride…with pride, God becomes smaller and the person becomes larger.  The center of gravity shifts from God to the person…They become the center of their world, and God is conveniently moved to the periphery.”

As this same writer points out, pride is the not the same thing as being proud of another, like being proud a child for doing something well.  Being proud is all about being pleased about something good and pleased for another person.  

With that caveat in mind, the antidote for much of what ails the world is humility.  CS Lewis wrote, “True humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less.”

Humility is a fundamental quality to pursue as followers of Jesus.  In 2 Philippians we find, “Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God as a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant….and being found in human form he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross.”

And also from Philippians, “Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.”

In reflecting upon this, Thomas Tarrants states, “As we refuse to be preoccupied with ourselves and our own importance and seek to love and serve others, it will reorient us from self-centeredness to other-centeredness – to serving and caring for others as Jesus did. In the narcissistic culture of contemporary America, this is a particularly powerful countercultural witness of Christ’s presence and lordship in our lives.”

As we move into this fall season and as the leaves fall, I invite each of us to ponder, pray about, and explore where we are with humility realizing that Jesus calls us to lives of profound humility.  But as we take the life long journey of learning to be humble, let us not be prideful of any progress we make.