16th Sunday after Pentecost, 2008

Although I sometimes read in the lives of the saints about some holy person who is said to have / ‘loved humiliations’ / along with fasting and penances, I think that I can report with honesty that I don’t recall in my own experience anyone who enjoyed being humiliated. That might be taken as saying that I have yet to meet a saint, but that’s not what I really mean. There is an instinctive reactive impulse in man / against humiliation: to be corrected by another; to be proved inadequate physically or mentally; to be left out of the circle; to have one’s sins made public; to be ridiculed / even unjustly, that is, where there’s no true cause. Disgrace is afeared universally and no one I-know-of / delights in it. I’m reminded here of a biblical word we sometimes come across in our liturgy and in our prayers: ‘Lord, may I not be / confounded.’ Confounded can mean damned (as in reference to hell), but also ‘being put to shame.’ The prospect of being held “in everlasting horror and disgrace” (words from the traditional funeral liturgy) is dreaded indeed, for it means perpetual exclusion. I think here of the significance of hiding onself when being ashamed, or of covering one’s face, a gesture which children may more instinctively do, like those figures of the damned in the painting of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.

To be robbed of one’s dignity by public humiliation is a huge suffering of the spirit and I would say that it is among the most formidable testings of one’s moral endurance. It’s far easier to endure physical wounds than to suffer from a wounded self-love, the hurt ego which is so sensitive to the stings of humiliation.

It’s sometimes acknowledged that the mental sufferings of our Lord in His Passion were far more poignant than His many and severe physical tortures. Those mental torments would include not only the betrayal by Judas and the fleeing of His disciples, but also the horrible humiliations of being spat upon in the face, blindfolded and struck with blows to the face, stripped of his clothing, and mocked for His kingship weighed very heavily upon His Sacred Heart. The spiritual hurts / cut more deeply.

The opposite of humiliation is–for lack of a better word–self-glory, glorying in oneself. It may seem to be overstating the case to say it so boldly, but self-glory is the very antithesis of religion, which is, fundamentally, rendering glory to God. “I am the Lord, your God; you shall not have strange gods before Me.” Putting oneself before God, or in His place, is the essence of sin.

I turn now to the Gospel of the day. After curing the man suffering from dropsy (a puffing of the body by fluids), our Lord counsels His hearers to seek the last place. This was His way of giving us a different kind of cure, the cure for our own puffed up, self-glorifying tendencies. To kick onself, to avoid being honored or praised, or to have recognition, or be complimented, or thought of as handsome, pretty, strong, smart, appealing, witty, talented–preferring the low place is an exercise of the will, something that needs to be practiced / so that whenever one is humiliated, one is able to handle the blow of embarrassment. The practice of putting down one’s impulses for self-promotion is an imposed discipline that will surely pay off handsomely both in this life and in the next.

We can more readily see the need to curb the pleasures of the body than to curb the pleasures of the spirit, that is, the tendency towards self-glory. Clipping it by putting oneself in the lowest place by voluntary ‘put-down’ (as the modern lingo has it), will help avoid the impact of smarting in times of humiliation, but it will also help us to avoid the tendencies to give in to our prideful inclinations which typically end up in committing our sins.

Just as a student can learn from his mistakes as well as from his lessons, so we can learn a lot in how to become spiritual people not only from the lives of the saints but also from our own past sins and our humiliations; how, that is, to put down the self in order to give glory to God: and these two are in direct contradiction.

Our Savior was not just giving us a lesson in etiquette in how to behave when being invited to a wedding, but drawing up a prescription for the whole health of our souls.