What is humility?

 What draws our attention in our relationships with others? I feel that our relationships are formed at many different levels of familiarity, acquaintance, friendship, and accompaniment. We know that these bonds that are formed affect how we are present to the other and how much their life impacts our own. This relates to how close we feel to that person and how we share our lives with them. It may be good to explore this more fully because it will impact how we relate to them and how we can truly become ourselves.

In a familiar relationship, we see the other person as the person who may be useful to us and we may be useful to them. Thus we enter into a sense of interaction that shares something which seeks an external good that is important to our life. Thus we may know the name of the person in the supermarket, we are conscious of the person we meet on the way to work and we can share a smile with a person who is our neighbor. This is the first entry door to the relationship but it can often seem transitory.

Then there is the acquaintance who we start to know about their lives and what they do has an impact on our own. We notice how what they do has a deeper impact on how we seek to live. This may be because their story resonates with our own. We see this in dramas on television or which we seek in movies that touch on important issues in life. We join with the person to the depth that they help us to see more clearly what we are called to engage with in life. They help us to see our lives differently.

Yet it is the face-to-face encounters with a person that their story interweaves with our own. We start to notice that they help us to know ourselves more clearly. They are willing to share time with us and they help us to notice what is important for us to become who we are called to become. The experience of friendship helps us to drop the mask and become real. We no longer pretend to be somebody we are not.

This helps us to know the person who accompanies us in our life not because we are perfect but because we share more deeply of ourselves. We do not see our greatness in what we own, do or achieve. The first point is that we are met as we are and this shapes who we are called to become. This allows us to be the touchstone of our lives and it does not put on airs and graces. We unfold into the fulness of our humanity in giving glory to God with our lives.

In the same way that we draw into friendship with each other so we draw into a relationship with God. The dimensions draws us closer to being who we are called to be. This is at the heart of being a person who is open to a graced relationship that integrates all that makes us who we are. We do not need to pretend to know God but discover a God who knows us at the most intimate and profound level. We shed the masks of pretending to discover that we are called to be real not an artificial self. We become a person who is loved into being.