Tag: Humility

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Minute Meditation – The Spiritual Virtue of Humility

Humility is the hallmark spiritual virtue of letting go. It’s an open-minded, openhearted, openhanded way to move through the world. To be humble is to make room for life as it comes, without the need to grasp too tightly, even (and especially) to certainty. This kind of attitude is what keeps your vision from clouding up and occluding. No one manages this perfectly, of course. That’s why life seems all too willing to deal us periodic humiliations that knock down our towers of Babel and drop us back onto the ground of our being: the truth that we are held in divine and loving hands, without being able to do anything to deserve or ruin it. 

— from the book Making Room: Soul-Deep Satisfaction through Simple Living
by Kyle Kramer

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Finding Rest in Humility

When we move low, back toward the soil from which we can learn the lessons of our true humanity, we are able to enter a kind of peace. Humility is not about struggle or diminishment but rather is the relief that we are not God, that we are mere creatures. Wendell Berry gives voice to this truth in one of his most popular poems, “The Peace of Wild Things”:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— from the book Wendell Berry and the Given Life 

by Ragan Sutterfield

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Returning to Our Roots

Among the proper lessons of culture is that we remind ourselves of our limits, of our need for community, of our ignorance and the tragic realities of living in such ignorance—lessons, in other words, that help us remember that we are creatures. It is through such recollection, being gathered back to ourselves from the diffuse ambitions that draw us away from our roots, that we are able to begin to heal the damage done to the world and ourselves. “The task of healing,” writes Wendell Berry, “is to respect oneself as a creature, no more and no less.” Humility, by helping to return us to the integrity of our humanity, which involves an acceptance of our particularly human creatureliness, also helps to make our lives more coherent, more integrated. “The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature,” writes Berry, “the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.” 

— from the book Wendell Berry and the Given Life, 

by Ragan Sutterfield

//Franciscan Media//

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The Patron Saint of Televisions and Computer Screens – Saint Clare of Assisi

St. Clare of Assisi is a beloved Italian saint who was born in 1193 to an aristocratic family. She later renounced her wealthy status to follow St. Francis of Assisi’s call to embrace a lifestyle of humility and poverty. She spent several months at different monastic communities before joining other sisters in a small convent at the Church of San Damiano, given to them by Francis’s Order of Friars Minor.

St. Clare was the superior of the convent of San Damiano while still practicing the virtues of humility, charity, piety, and penitence. She cared for the sick sisters and took up basic chores such as cooking and cleaning. Her devotion to the Eucharist was so great that she performed two miracles. On two different occasions, Saracen mercenaries were about to attack the convent and impose a siege on Assisi. St. Clare simply showed the invaders the Blessed Sacrament, and they ceased in their efforts. These miracles led to her canonization in 1255.

Later in her life, St. Clare became too sick to attend Mass, and she was incredibly disappointed. It is believed that one day, she was lying in her bed when a large image appeared across her wall, as if it were a television screen. The image showed her the Mass, so St. Clare was able to watch Mass from her own bed and make an Act of Spiritual Communion. When the television was invented in the 1950s, Pope Pius XII named St. Clare the patron saint of televisions and screens, since she watched television before anyone had likely thought of the concept!

We honor St. Clare because she devoted her life to the wholehearted pursuit of Christ. We may not be called to enter a monastery or convent, but we still serve others as St. Clare did. We can imitate her virtues by visiting the lonely, caring for the sick, or doing our menial tasks with love and without complaint.

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Meditation of the Day – You Cannot Win a Battle by Mere Flight

“Many try to fly away from temptations only to fall more deeply into them; for you cannot win a battle by mere flight. It is only by patience and humility that you will be strengthened against the enemy. Those who shun them outwardly and do not pull them out by the roots will make no progress; for temptations will soon return to harass them and they will be in a worse state. It is only gradually—with patience and endurance and with God’s grace—that you will overcome temptations sooner than by your own efforts and anxieties . . . Gold is tried by fire and the upright person by temptation. Often we do not know what we can do until temptation shows us what we are . . . This is how temptation is: first we have a thought, followed by strong imaginings, then the pleasure and evil emotions, and finally consent. This is how the enemy gains full admittance, because he was not resisted at the outset. The slower we are to resist, the weaker we daily become and the stronger the enemy is against us.”— Thomas à Kempis, p. 32-33

//The Catholic Company//