Humility

The other day someone told my wife Lorna that they thought I was ‘very humble.’ When I heard this, I winced, unsure what to do with the information. You know what they say – if you think you’re humble, it’s a sure sign that you’re not.

Recently, Dr Stephen Hutchison wrote on the Hilton Church Facebook page ‘I feel quite apprehensive in a way about the whole trip.’ He asked us ‘to pray that I will be free of anxiety and learn to trust God.’

Before his retirement, Stephen was the Palliative Care Consultant at the Highland Hospice.  He left Inverness last week for a short trip to India where, together with another retired palliative care specialist, he is delivering training to local health professionals.

What struck me on reading Stephen’s Facebook post was his humility. Here is a man of vast experience, no stranger to foreign travel who, when faced with new challenges asks for prayer that he will be enabled to trust God.

I have found a couple of things I’ve learned recently very helpful. I suppose I’d read psychologists’ views of our ‘attachments’ and ‘aversions’ before, but until recently hadn’t understood how these words might apply in my own life.

In my understanding, ‘attachments’ are things we think we need, and must have – such as possessions, or status, career or influence. ‘Aversions’ are the things we are afraid of, strongly dislike, view as threats. We throw all our energies into pursuing our attachments and resisting our aversions.

I now see that maturity means discovering that we don’t in fact need the attachments; nor need we fear the aversions.

I’ve been reading some reflections by Richard Rohr of the American Centre for Action and Contemplation on the 12-step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous. Key to the AA ethos is the understanding that it’s when as an addict I realise that I have a problem, that I can’t fix myself, and that if I am to progress I must invoke the help of a Higher Power – it’s only then that my healing begins.

Many of us are addicts, Rohr suggests – addicted to drink, drugs, sex, power, wealth, or simply to our own way of thinking, our belief that we can create ourselves by pursuing the attachments and resisting the aversions.  It’s when, in a crisis, we realise how fragile the self we are creating is that we turn to God, and discover that in turning to God we find out who we truly are.

When we entrust ourselves to the Higher Power – to God – we find ourselves utterly secure in God. It works something like this: from the rubble of the self I was struggling to build has risen my true self. I have no desire desperately to pursue attachments or fear aversions because everything I need to be the ‘me’ I am called to be is given by the Father.

But doesn’t it sound very passive, this resting in God, not passionate and engaged with life? Here’s Stephen again, writing about his trip:

‘Undertaking something “in faith” does not simply mean waiting for all the necessary provision to miraculously appear. It does mean that the reason for doing this work is because we believe in God’s purpose for those with whom we are connecting and a desire to communicate His love to them. Provision may appear miraculously, but there is still a need for hard work and determination.’

Stephen entrusts himself to God, and drawing on the energies found in that secure place commits himself with passion to the task.

And look at Jesus. Utterly secure, utterly entrusted to Father God, not fazed by threats, nor driven by the pursuit of attachments, Jesus was free to live in the moment, to build deep relationships, to undertake each day the particular work the he sensed himself called to do that day and no more. Yet was there ever a more passionate, dedicated, engaged, loving, gentle, strong, wholly human person?

Stephen and his colleague are delivering training in India to those working in palliative care – travelling alongside people who are terminally ill, sustaining them physically, emotionally and spiritually in the final chapter of their lives, with them as they prepare to die well.

I believe that the last, and greatest ‘aversion’ is death, but I believe also that if we have found our identity and our security in God, then we need not fear dying, because we realise that through death as in life we are sustained by the Father who loves us.

And as we increasingly ‘learn to trust God’ (in Stephen’s words), learn to depend on God for everything and find the freedom which this trusting releases us into, so we can say, to ourselves if not to others ‘Thank God!  I am humble!’

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 26th November 2015)