humility - 26th week Monday 2013 2

Humility is the root of all virtues, as its opposite, pride, is the root of all sin.  When a person is not humble, when a person is full of himself he cannot truly serve others for he will always be thinking about what’s in it for him.  When a person is full of himself he cannot truly love others because he will always prioritize his desires rather than sacrifice for the sake of the other.  When a person is not humble, when a person is full of himself he cannot tell the truth except when the truth is to his advantage.  Otherwise he lies.  When a person is full of himself he cannot have real friends.  He will try to buy them, he will try to bribe them but they will not stay for long, for real friendship requires an emptying of self, when a person begins to think of the good of the other. 

Today the Lord gathers his disciples to teach them the humility.  Humility is a virtue because there is in us an undying desire for greatness, a desire for popularity, a desire to become the center of attention.  But true greatness is not something that we do or something that we acquire on our own, but something which the Lord confers in us, something the Lord alone can do for us.  Mary realized this in her magnificat – the Lord has done great things for me, holy is his name. 

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Jerome.  He is one who learned humility quite painfully.  Jerome was the most learned among the Latin Church Fathers even outranking Augustine, whose writing he criticized, Ambrose and Gregory the Great.  But Jerome never became a bishop.  He was just a priest in Rome, one of its most prominent because he became the secretary of Pope Damasus, the Pope who declared that the liturgy should be said in Latin instead of Greek.  He earned many enemies not just because of his high position but also because he was sarcastic, kasakit manghambal.  So when his patron died he was driven out of Rome, humiliated.  From there he went to Bethlehem and lived there as a recluse, an ascetic in a cave.  There he would receive his fame, the fame reserved for him by God – not as prominent priest in the eternal and cosmopolitan city of Rome but as a humble priest who lived in a cave translating what we now call the Vulgata, the Latin Bible translated from Greek and Hebrew.  Jerome would be known to us and receive prominence because of this.  Not in Rome but in a humble cave in Bethlehem.  prominence and greatness is not something you acquire on your own, it is something which the Lord alone can confer on us.  Be humble always.