"You learn humility only by accepting humiliations. And you will meet humiliation all through your life. The greatest humiliation is to know that you are nothing. This you come to know when you face God in prayer. Often a deep and fervent look at Christ is the best prayer: I look at Him and He looks at me. When you come face to face with God, you cannot but know that you are nothing, that you have nothing." - Mother St. Theresa of Calcutta
Mother St. Theresa is someone I deeply, deeply admire and respect. Every day she proved what she said she believed through her actions and her life, and she proved the truth of what she believed in them as well. After her death, it was revealed that she had deeply dark moments in her own faith as well where she felt that God might have abandoned her, and yet in spite of this she persisted and finally finished the race so well, God moved the nation of India, mostly polytheistic, to throw her a State funeral. So, when she says something about Christian practice and faith I tend to pay attention.
I don't like being or feeling humiliated. When I am, either intentionally or unintentionally, it hurts and it hurts deeply. Part of this is due to my own childhood woes and insecurities, and part of it is due to the insecure and positive attention loving ego which developed out of them. I wish this wasn't true about myself, but it is and it is something with which I struggle.
I find myself consistently feeling humiliated in one way or another, and have throughout my life. I am sure that part of this is my own fault for asking God to humble me earlier in my life (knowing my own ego and pride), but that does not make it any easier. To feel less than, to feel cast aside, to watch while all of your friends and acquaintances move on successfully in life while it seems like everything you try your hand at somehow gets stopped or malfunctions in some way, all of these things are humiliating.
It makes you want to run. It makes you want to escape or bury yourself in order to numb the pain. It makes you just want to quit trying and walk away from all of it, though you aren't allowed to. And no matter what happens, in the blink of an eye, and just for an instant you are called back to service in some small capacity, and then it fades again.
Jesus Christ was humiliated as well all through his life. He was accused of being an illegitimate child. He became, by his own account, homeless. During his ministry, he lived off the means of three women. This is not to mention his constant belittlement by the religious gatekeepers and his abhorrent execution. The Apostles as well suffered humiliation after humiliation as they attempted to serve and walk their own journey of faith.
I think that somehow we romanticize these humiliations and hardships. We take them and hold them up as shining examples of the faith without going into the dirty details of what it actually felt like. We tend to put rose colored glasses over the fact that the reality was vicious, hurtful, and extremely painful.
It is hard to find peace in being humiliated, especially when you can't see the outcome of it all. And it gets harder to trust that outcome when it continues to seem so far off in the distance. A shield of faith which is continuously bombarded with flaming arrows can eventually show the scars and splinters of intense bombardment in combat. This is also not something Sunday School teachers, caught up in the imagery of Ephesians 6, will tell you about. Though any soldier who has seen combat will tell you of the damage projectiles can do to armor. And I think there must be a kind of fatigue which comes with intense and unrelenting spiritual combat.
To be nothing, the goal of humiliation, there is both an attraction and a repulsion to it. It is something for which to strive, and yet it is also something which the ego desperately wishes to escape from. On the one hand, it means union with God through Christ, but on the other hand it means more painful humiliations and suffering. That suffering, ultimately is caused by attachments to things, people, ideas, etc. All of which are stripped away in humiliation. It is easy to say "Yes, Lord! Bring it on!" (as I did in my youth), but it is a far different thing to experience it. Eventually, you find yourself saying, "Please! No more! I can't take any more!" Even as you know that more humiliations are what is needed to finally destroy the ego which is pleading for the very idea of its existence.
I know I must trust God's process with me. No one needs to explain this or make it any more clear to me than it already is. Everything He does, including when He humiliates me, is because He loves me, not because He doesn't, and because He knows what will best achieve that goal He has for me. But it will never be without costing everything.
