Meekness and Humility

John H. Armstrong February 11th, 2009

One of the most perplexing and challenging sayings of Jesus in the entire New Testament is found in Matthew 11:28-30. Our Lord says:

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

If I put one description upon what this "yoke, is" and the effect has upon a person's life, I would use the word "imperturbable." No matter what was going on around Jesus he was never disturbed by it. He was not a Stoic, not at all. We even see him show emotions like grief and anger in the biblical accounts. But he had within himself a deep Spirit-given treasure. This treasure allowed him to put everything into perspective and to respond to things going on around him with deep and abiding (perfect) peace.

One of the great Catholic saints, St. Francoise de Sales, was said to be able to "impart peace of soul to those who came to talk to him." I think this is precisely what Jesus is talking about giving us here. Those who take this "yoke" upon them have this gift developed within them over the course of time.

In 1615 St. Francois (Francis in English, but Francois to be clearly distinguished from St. Francis of Assisi) responded to a letter addressed to him about the problem of anger. In giving his counsel he referenced his own life and then wrote:

Take reassurance for your spirit for this is not something I haven't experienced myself. I know well that our nature boils with bitterness when we feel ourselves under attack and we let our self-esteem suggest all kinds of bad feelings against those who are doing the attack. With God's help we can try to resist being enraged or at least to give in completely. This then is a good opportunity to practice humility, to confound our enemy with sweetness, and to acknowledge our miserableness.

I thought about this in my morning watch recently. As I reflected on my week to six young couples in a home Bible study group, I considered how I had attempted to tell some of my own story to them. I had been asked to share about my own experience in the writing of my forthcoming book, Your Church Is Too Small (Zondervan, February, 2010). A part of my story includes a deep sense of personal rejection by friends and the attendant emotions that I dealt with in response to this profound rejection. In trying to tell my story I too often come across as feeling and appearing heroic for my response. This then stirs up feelings of "poor me," or pride, because I did what I thought was right. If this is not bad enough there is usually a sense of justice and anger that then develops in me. I have been sinned against and I want people to know this story as much as possible so they will think better of me. The result, I find all too often, is that people will admire me for who I am and for how I responded to a very bad situation. I then feel better about myself in the process, or at least until I deal with my Father in private.

Well, as I read and prayed about this last week I was rebuked again in my soul for all of this false modesty and sinfully human self-defense. I need to acknowledge, to borrow from the words of St. Francois, my "miserableness" and "confound the enemy with sweetness." But how do you do that?

At the root of this struggle is human anger. How does one handle this anger? St. Francois wrote a book titled Introduction to the Devout Life. His advice can be summarized in several helpful ways:

1. Anger is a normal human reaction when we feel we are being attacked or hurt.

2. We cannot control the behavior of others but we can control our reactions.

3. We must recognize our vanity, our self-centeredness, and our pride more than anything else involved in the situation.

4. We can and must pray as we seek for God's help.

5. Try not to let the behavior, or words, of others make you lose control and if you fail learn to moderate your response.

6. Use such occasions to learn to practice the virtue of humility and thus turn a negative experience into a positive one.

7. Confound your enemy by not reacting in kind but rather by reacting with sweetness, recalling Romans 12:20.

8. Allow your propensity for anger to help you recognize your own limitations.

I am personally "burned out on religion." Maybe you are as well. What I need is more of Jesus, his gentleness and true humility of heart. I need someone who is imperturbable, a person who can teach me how to become the same over the long haul. I have learned something of this through "the unforced rhythms of grace." This is a beautiful expression, taken from The Message and its translation of Matthew 11:29, of what St. Francois de Sales is talking about in his classic Introduction to the Devout Life.

St. Francois de Sales said these two virtues, humility and meekness, are the "favorite and beloved" virtues of the Lord himself. He adds, "Humility perfects us with respect to God, and meekness with respect to our neighbor."

The cultivation of this meekness of heart helps us precisely because it directly addresses the violence that is natural to our fallen human nature. Msgr. Charles M. Murphy, a retreat leader and former rector of the North American College in Vatican City, writes: "Sometimes in their effort to overcome anger people become angry with themselves for being angry." That is my problem much more than I care to admit. St. Francois writes, "So too it often happens that by trying violently to restrain our anger, we stir up more trouble within our heart than wrath existed before and being thus agitated our heart can no longer be its own master." What both writers are saying I have often missed due to the misuse of my more Reformed theological paradigm. I have sought to be meek and gentle toward others but not toward myself. I have rejected the idea of loving myself as flawed and psychological mumbo-jumbo. (It can become this in the hands of pop-writers but I am not advocating this extreme as any fair-minded reader will readily see.) St. Francois is right when he counsels: "We must not fret over our own imperfections."

Here is the part of St. Francois de Sales' thought that floored me and then lifted me up to new grace and fresh hope. He suggests we should "love" our imperfections. He uses the word "abjections" but what he means is the same as our idea of limitations or imperfections in the modern sense. (In French, "abjections" signifies miserableness or wretchedness in English.)

Here is where the influence of Puritanism, with its rather harsh condemning sense of the human self (especially in regard to the mortification of sin) did not help me in my battle. I loathed my sin (and myself very deeply) thus I could not humbly and meekly accept my imperfections in the right way. St. Francois is saying that I should love, or delight, in my human limitations, imperfections or "abjections." By such love I can learn true spiritual wisdom. He writes:

There are even faults that involve me in no other ill except abjection. Humility does not require that we should deliberately commit such faults but it does require that we should not disturb ourselves when we have committed them.

Rather than bearing down harshly on myself if I have spoken in anger, or presented myself in the wrong way, as I often find that I do, I should repent before God and then make the best amends that I can make (publicly, if necessary, and privately). Then I should accept the temperament that I have been given by God. In Msgr. Charles M. Murphy's words, "go with it." Yes, go with it. Rest in the Lord and remain calm, unperturbed. Murphy adds: "For someone like St. Francois, who was subject to excessive scrupulousness, this must have come as hard-won wisdom." It comes that way for me too. I am far too introspective and self-loathing in all the wrong ways, ways that do not produce healthy godliness.

St. Augustine wrote, "It is better to deny entrance to just and reasonable anger than to admit it, no matter how small it is. Once let in, it is driven out again only with difficulty." I agree totally. I know that I have been justly angry, but only on a few occasions. Even then anger is a dangerous emotion to deal with over the long term. I do find that it is always better to resist it. St. Francois de Sales adds, "It is better to attempt to find a way to live without anger than to pretend to make a moderate, discreet use of it."

So what is needed in dealing with anger is both humility and meekness but it seems to me that meekness is the greater virtue, at least in terms of calming the anger that burns within us, especially those of us who have a passionate temperament.

What I find stunning in St. Francois's counsel is this matter of loving my abjections. I have, far too late in life, begun to love and live in my areas of brokenness and blindness, areas that seem to remain in me no matter what I do. As I near sixty years of age I am learning to lean into these abjections, not as unwanted limitations but rather as parts of my self life that can be embraced in a healthy way under God's grace and love. I am learning, properly speaking, to love myself as I really am, weak and broken. The modern writer Wendy Wright concludes, "To love our abjections is indeed a sublime spiritual teaching." So it is. And the sooner you embrace it the stronger you will be in dealing with your anger toward others. But even more importantly you will be able to deal with the anger you have toward yourself, an anger that is destructive and unfruitful.

John H. Armstrong is founder and president of ACT 3, a ministry for the advancement of the Christian Tradition in the third millennium. He is a former pastor and church-planter, of more than twenty years, the author/editor of eight books, and the author of hundreds of magazine, journal, and Web based articles. John has served as the editor-in-chief of ACT 3 Review: A Journal for Faith, Church and Culture since its origin in 1992. But most importantly, he is our go-to professional religionist.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 2:56 pm and is filed under ACT 3, ACT3Online.com, Anger, Humility, Introduction to the Devout Life, John H. Armstrong, Meekness, Msgr. Charles M. Murphy, St. Augustine, St. Francois de Sales, Your Church Is Too Small. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.