Ashes and Humility

When placing the ashes on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday, the priest will say one of two things: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” or “Repent, and believe in the Gospel”. Ashes both remind us of our own mortality and call us to repentance. The ashes also call us to be humble and remind us of the humility of God expressed to us in the person of Jesus Christ.  The God who created the heavens and the earth, the God who created the universe and everything in it—the stars, black holes, quantum particles, DNA, and time itself—humbled himself to enter into creation to take on our flesh and our sins for our salvation.

In his book “Life of Christ”, Fulton Sheen talks about how hard for us it is to truly understand the humility that was involved in the Word becoming flesh. In the book, he asks you to imagine a human person divesting himself of his body, and then sending his soul into the body of a serpent.  The person would need to accept the limitations of the creature’s body, while all the while knowing that his mind was superior and that fangs could not adequately articulate thoughts no serpent ever possessed. However, even if we can get a glimpse of the humility of God becoming man through this analogy, it is nothing compared to the emptying of God to become one of us.

Jesus lived his entire life with humility: from his birth in a trough from which animals fed until the final emptying of himself on the Cross between two criminals. As St. Paul wrote, “he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.” (Phil 2:7-8).

So, what does humility mean in the context our relationship with God? St. Thomas Aquinas defines humility this way: “Humility means seeing ourselves as God sees us: knowing every good we have comes from Him as pure gift” (SummaQ161). Perhaps as a corollary to this, we could also say that humility means that we need to accept and surrender ourselves to the fact that God is God and we are not.

Jesus tells us that we need to be like a little child to enter the kingdom of heaven, that is, to accept the kingdom of God with the humility and trust of a child. We need to accept that we are completely dependent on God and trust that God always does what is best for us. We need to be willing to submit to God’s plan for us, especially when it’s not what we have planned.  We need to accept the fact that there are things we can’t control and that we need God’s help. When we rely more on ourselves than on God, we lose the opportunity God is presenting us to grow closer to him. Jesus asks us to imitate him: “Learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart.” When we imitate Jesus’s humility, we approach the fullness of what it means to be human. We share in the life of Christ when we are humble as he is humble. Humility is the path that Jesus lays out for us to grow in relationship with him.

In one of his letters, St. Augustine writes, “The way to Christ is first through humility, second through humility, third through humility” (Letters 118:22). As we begin this season of lent, let us approach our God in humility and surrender ourselves to him recognizing that everything in our lives and in the world around us is a gift. Let us share in the life of Christ by sharing in his humility. Let us grow closer to Christ by being humble as he is humble.