Good morning…
Walking beside the muddy banks of the Chattahoochee river, I was reminded of a quote from our final book of the semester, Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer. On page 79, Parker writes about the season of spring.
“…before spring becomes beautiful, it is plug ugly, nothing but mud and muck. I have walked in the early spring through fields that such your boots off, a world so wet and woeful it makes you yearn for the return of ice. But in that muddy mess, the conditions for rebirth are being created.
I love the fact that the word humus – the decayed vegetable matter that feeds the roots of plants – comes from the same root that gives rise to the word humility. It is a blessed etymology. It helps me understand that the humiliating events of life, the events that leave ‘mud on my face’ or that ‘make my name mud,’ may create the fertile soil in which something new can grow.”
In the margin of my book, in my own handwriting, I discover a note reading “page 53.” Flipping back twenty six pages, I seamlessly read these words.
“Years ago, someone told me that humility is central to the spiritual life. That made sense to me: I was proud to think of myself as humble! But the person did not tell me that the path to humility, for some of us at least, goes through humiliation, where we are brought low, rendered powerless, stripped of pretenses and defenses, and left feeling fraudulent, empty, and useless – a humiliation that allows us to regrow our lives from the ground up, from the humus of common ground.
The spiritual journey is full of paradoxes. One of them is that the humiliation that brings us down – down to the ground on which it is safe to stand and to fall – eventually takes us to a firmer and fuller sense of self.”
The term “plug ugly” is an adjective describing someone or something as extremely unattractive. Our experience of humiliation is extremely unattractive. Being brought low hurts. Being rendered powerless is painful. Being stripped of pretenses and defenses exposes our vulnerability. Feeling fraudulent, empty, and useless is exhausting. Yet as we live through the hurt, the pain, the vulnerability, the exhaustion, we begin to regrow our lives from the ground up, from the humus of our common ground. Committing to the spiritual journey with God eventually takes us to a firmer and fuller sense of our true self.
Now, concluding my middle-of-the-night meandering, a Richard Rohr quote comes to mind: “I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona.”
Humble yourselves [with an attitude of repentance and insignificance] in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you [He will lift you up, He will give you purpose] (James 4:10, AMP).
…Sue…
