Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [80]
Humility allows us to see our true moral and metaphysical condition
He who has the virtue of humility knows that the infinite love and mercy of God “spared not even his own Son, but delivered him up for us all” (Rom. 8:32). He is aware of the importance of each immortal soul before God: “Precious in the sight of God is the death of his saints” (Ps. 115:15). Against the background of what he has received from God, in the light of the gratuitous gifts of God and the high call addressed to him, he comes to understand that he is nothing by his own force, that he has made inadequate use of the natural endowments as well as of the supernatural gifts of grace he owes to God, that he is but an “unprofitable servant.”
Humility is closely connected with that holy freedom in which we acquire the proper perspective in relation to our own person, regarding ourselves no longer with our own eyes but in the light of God. The humble man no longer presumes to determine where he stands; he leaves it to God. The consciousness that God attributes importance to him does not evoke in him a sense of self-importance or a pretension to sovereign autonomy. On the contrary, it makes him see all the more clearly his weakness, and the darkness he represents without God and outside God.
Humility leads us to acknowledge God’s personal call
Finally, a third implication of true humility: our awareness of God’s personal appeal addressed to each of us as to this specified individual In the Prophet Isaiah’s words: “I have called thee by thy name—thou art mine.” There are those who, while they recognize the glory of God as well as the importance of man and the call addressed to him in general, believe, in false humility, that the call is meant for all others but not for their own person. They deem their own person too wretched to dare assume that they may refer the divine call to themselves. They would hide in a corner and play the part of mere onlookers. The sight of their wretchedness impels them to exclude themselves from the great dialogue between God and man.
This ostensible excess of humility, for all the diffidence it involves, is not free of an element of pride. For here, once more, man presumes to decide himself where he stands, instead of leaving that decision to God. Yet, this is precisely the test of true humility, that one no longer presumes to judge whether or not one is too miserable to be included in the call to sanctity but simply answers the merciful love of God by sinking down in adoration.
The question whether I feel worthy to be called is beside the point; that God has called me is the one thing that matters. Having abandoned all pride and all craving for being something of my own resources, I shall not doubt that God, from whom I receive everything, also has the power to lift me up and to transform any darkness into light: “Thou shalt wash me and I shall be made whiter than snow.”
I give up the wish to enlighten God as to the degree of my worthiness, knowing that by myself I am worth nothing; but if He wills to draw me to Him, if He calls me by my name, my duty is to say the one word, Adsum (“Here I am”). Thus did the most humble Virgin answer the highest call merely by the words: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it done to me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38).
The fact that he has been called to a communion with God, that Christ has addressed his sequere me also to him, that he is one of those to whom He speaks thus, “Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect”—this fact, to be sure, must again and again strike man as a manifestation of the inscrutable mercy of God.
He must never take the place which God has assigned him as though it were something evidently due to him; rather he should, on every occasion, begin by saying with St. Peter: “Thou shalt never wash my feet” (John 13:8). With trembling heart, like Zacchaeus, he should stand before the Lord in surprise, as it were, and speak with the tongue