ITEMS OF INTEREST December 1, 2008 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

with contributions from Carter Heyward, Janice Gilmore, Kim Shippey

GENUINE HUMILITY is a gift from God. ... [It is] living courageously in a spirit of radical connectedness with others, which enables us to see ourselves as God see us: sisters and brothers, each as deeply valued and worthy of respect as every other....

The New Testament suggests that the greatest difference between Jesus and the religious leaders who opposed him was humility. Jesus had a strong sense of his place in the larger scheme of things in God's world. He knew that both he and his adversaries belonged to God. Jesus, not the scribes and Pharisees, had humility—the deep, embodied realization that we all belong to God. ... Humility was a strong, sacred source of Jesus' own capacity for faith, hope, and love, and it is a source of ours as well.

Humility is the root of our compassion ... because we know ourselves as spiritual kin to everyone. No one is beneath us—or above us—in God's world. Let us imagine that humility was God's gift to Paul at his conversion. Let us imagine also that from that moment on, Paul recognized his own true self, his own place in God's world, and on that spiritual basis was able to become the first major Christian evangelist—traveling and teaching among communities filled with people whom he recognized as brothers and sisters. Moreover, like Jesus who preceded him and whose Christ-spirit accompanied him, the convert Paul realized that it is God's presence working through us that enables us to be humble, God's spirit working in us that empowers us to love, God's grace filling our hearts with compassion....

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