Humility and A God Named Max

On Tuesday we got into an interesting discussion about humility in my Benedictine Spirituality class. The Rule of St. Benedict was written over 1,500 years ago and is the guiding document of ancient and modern members of Benedictine religious orders. Our class is dealing primarily with this text. One of the amazing things about reading the Rule is how much it makes sense. You think about Dante, or Shakespeare, people who lived five or six hundred years ago and had profound things to say, but even their work is not as quickly accessible as this pamphlet that was written only a few years after the Roman Empire fell.

The Rule is in sections, the seventh of which deals with humility. From the first four parts of this section, our professor, Sister Judith, distilled these core ideas for us:

The Rule’s Rules of Humility (Otherwise Known as the Facts of Life):

1. God’s God and you’re not.


2. You don’t always get your way.


3. Sometimes we have to do what other people tell us to…


4. …And sometimes it is going to be awful.

I just really like this because a.) It shows how down to earth the Rule really is, and b.) It’s the kind of practical advice it’s nice to hear over and over even though you feel like you shouldn’t need to. Who needs a better reminder that they’re not God than an Italian train station? But it’s still centering to hear.

Another topic that captivated me was our discussion of being watched by God. Some admitted to being a like creeped out by this, but Sister did a good job of framing it for us.

Our attitude towards God’s attention to our lives should be like a child playing on the playground while a loving parent watches. They are constantly imploring their parents to “Watch me! Look what I can do!” and even if the parent has no idea what they did or where even trying to do they coo gentle reassurances to the child that they are being watched. Children love to have the security of that loving eye on them at all times. Therefore, our attitude should be one of shame, or guilt because we’re worried about what God is going to “catch” us doing, but one of joy and excitement because there’s always someone to turn to and say, “Did you see what I just did?”

In an extension of the childlike theme that ran through my day on Tuesday, that evening a speaker came to talk to us. She is an American who has spent much of the last 15 years in Italy because she met her husband, an Italian man, while she was modeling in Italy in college (and yes, she was tall, and yes, even after 4 kids, she was stunning). Anyway, she came to talk to us about her life and conversion experience. I won’t rehash her whole story, except to say that she talked about a long period of her life—high school to college—where she no “faith” in God per se, but talked to “Max” every night before bed. “Max” was her way to feel connected to something, even though she thought she was making it up. Max may not be real, but the hunger that caused her to seek him out was very real. That hunger resulted in her conversion. The childish, almost imaginary friend-esque nature of Max really spoke to me about the child in all of us that wants to know that we are not the be all and end all of everything. Because that we can’t face. We’re not meant to. We yearn for God even when we don’t know what his name is, and at the end of the day, God is the only answer.

Peace.