• What is the pattern of true humility?
• Does humility mean thinking less of yourself?
• Why was Moses called meek?
• The seamstress who was not tired
• What did Francis Borgia give up?

What is the pattern of true humility?

The pattern of true humility is Christ himself. That is the Collect’s first sentence, and it is worth slowing down for: Domine Jesu Christe, verae humilitatis et exemplar et praemium, O Lord Jesus Christ, both the pattern of true humility and its reward. The prayer does not define humility as a feeling or a rule. It points to a person.

Exemplar is the word for a model you copy from. So the pattern of true humility is not whatever makes you smallest. It is whatever makes you most like him, and that is a very different measure.

That matters because the word humility has been made to carry almost anything. It has been used to mean shyness, self-dislike, a refusal to accept praise, and silence in the face of wrong. The Collect cuts through all of it. If you want to know whether something is the pattern of true humility, put it beside Christ and ask whether he did it.

The word itself helps. Lewis and Short derive humilis, humble, from humus, the ground. To be humble, at the root of the word, is to stand on the ground. It is not to be buried in it.

The Introit says the same thing from another side. The mouth of the just shall meditate wisdom: and his tongue shall speak judgment. The just one in this Mass is not mute. The pattern of true humility has a mouth, and it uses it.

The Collect also speaks of a reward. The pattern of true humility is also its praemium, its prize, and the prayer ends by asking to share Francis’s glory, gloriae consortes. On Friday the Epistle called glory a weight. Today the Collect makes glory the reward of the pattern of true humility, and humility, in this prayer, ends in glory rather than in smallness.

The Gradual agrees: The just shall flourish like the palm tree. Humility, in this Mass, is the ground a life grows out of, not a ceiling held over it.

Does humility mean thinking less of yourself?

No. The pattern of true humility is Christ, and Christ never pretended to be less than he was. At the supper where he took a towel and a basin and washed his disciples’ feet, he said this: You call me Master, and Lord; and you say well, for so I am (John 13:13).

Hold both halves of that scene together. He has a towel tied round him and is doing a servant’s work, and in the same breath he tells the truth about who he is. If then I being your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; you also ought to wash one another’s feet. The pattern of true humility serves without lying about itself.

Here is the counterfeit. It says humility means accepting whatever account of you other people prefer, and that insisting on the truth about yourself is pride. It sounds devout. It turns the pattern of true humility upside down, because it asks you to do the one thing Christ would not do.

You may know the counterfeit by its sentences. Don’t make a fuss. Be grateful you are here at all. Keep your head down and let others decide what you are. None of those sentences comes from the pattern of true humility, and every one of them would have silenced the man with the towel.

I want to name who this lands on, because the Collect’s own claim requires it. Trans people are told, again and again, that humility means accepting the account of their lives that others hand them, and that saying who they are is pride. The pattern of true humility answers that. Christ took the towel, washed their feet, and said so I am, all at the same table.

If that has been your life, hear this from a ministry led by trans people. You have not been proud for telling the truth about yourself. You have been doing what Christ did at that table, and the pattern of true humility is on your side.

This is not the claim Tuesday’s offering made, that sin attaches to what we do and never to who we are. Nor is it last Saturday’s claim, that humility must be chosen rather than imposed. Today’s claim is narrower: whatever humility is, it is measured against Christ, and Christ told the truth about himself while he served.

Test the counterfeit by what it grows. It grows people who apologize for existing, and churches that call that holiness. The pattern of true humility grows people who can kneel to serve without first agreeing to vanish.

Why was Moses called meek?

Moses was called meek because he was gentle, not because he was silent. The Lesson says God sanctified him in his faith, and meekness, and the Latin is lenitas, which Lewis and Short give as gentleness and mildness. The Book of Numbers goes further: Moses was a man exceeding meek above all men that dwelt upon earth (Numbers 12:3).

Now read the rest of what the Lesson says about that meek man. With his words he made prodigies to cease. He received a law of life and instruction to hand on to a whole people. The meekest man in Scripture spent his life speaking.

So meekness, in the Bible’s own picture, is gentle strength, not an absence of voice. Whoever tells you that the pattern of true humility requires you to stop speaking has a quarrel with Moses before they have one with you.

This matters for anyone who has been called arrogant for speaking up. The Lesson does not praise Moses for keeping quiet. It praises him for faith and gentleness, and then for words that changed things. The pattern of true humility, in Scripture, has a voice.

The seamstress who was not tired

On 1 December 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus. She worked as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair department store. The story that grew up afterwards made her what the Smithsonian calls the quiet seamstress of history books: an ordinary woman whose feet were tired.

Parks corrected that story herself. In her 1992 autobiography she wrote: People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically… No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

Consider what the myth did. It took a deliberate act and turned it into a small, meek accident that asked nothing of anyone. It took a woman who knew exactly what she was doing and rewrote her as too tired to stand.

There is a lesson in who told the myth. The tired-feet version was easier on everyone else, because it required no one to change. False humility is often a story told about someone by the people it comforts. True humility sounds like the account a person gives of themselves when they are telling the truth.

Parks refused, and she told the truth about why. That is far closer to the pattern of true humility than the myth ever was. Humility, measured against Christ, is not the person who gives way. It is the person who stays grounded and says so.

What did Francis Borgia give up?

He gave up honour, not himself. The Collect says Francis became a glorious imitator of Christ in terreni honoris contemptu, in his contempt of earthly honour. Terrenus, earthly, comes from terra, the earth, just as humilis comes from humus, the ground. The prayer sets two kinds of earth side by side: the ground you stand on and the rank you are handed.

Francis held real rank. He was a viceroy and a duke, and in 1550 he left his estates for good. Yet the Jesuits elected him their general in 1565, and he led them until his death. The pattern of true humility did not ask him to stop leading. It asked him to stop confusing a title with a self.

The Catholic Encyclopedia says the Empress’s death taught him the vanity of life and of its grandeurs. Grandeurs, not life itself. He did not decide that he was nothing. He decided that a dukedom was not the measure of him, and he went after the pattern of true humility instead.

That is the arrangement the Collect asks for us too. Let go of the honours that were never you. Keep the truth about who you are. Kneel to serve the person beside you, and trust that the pattern of true humility is also its reward.

If you are carrying a title, a reputation or a role that has started to feel like the whole of you, this feast is for you as well. Set the coronet down. You will still be there when you do.

If none of the theology is yours, the plain half still stands. Humility is knowing the ground you stand on. It is not pretending to be less than you are, and anyone who asks you to pretend is not asking for humility.

↑ The order resumes below.