The way of the anawim

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

Today’s gospel (Luke 17: 7-10) comes among a series of admonitions from the Lord. Seen in the context of the preceding admonition concerning the necessity of faith, today’s passage may simply be advice not to become too prideful if our faith is such that even the elements obey our very word. We are servants, and even when we return from our hard labours in the fields, what should we expect but to be treated as servants are, with this final lesson:

We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.

Every vocation, every invitation to holiness, is only a call to reflect in some way the beauty of God, and to reflect in a particular, concrete way the beauty of the Lord Jesus, the Word of God made flesh who lived among us. Today’s admonition of the Lord is then just such another dimension of that call which, for all of us, is to live according to the mystery of the Lord’s self-emptying. In the Lord’s case, all honour was due to Him since He was God eternal, born of the Father before all ages. In the incarnation, He chose this self-emptying in order to walk among us, to embrace our every condition even the lowliest, and so to make real before our eyes that the delight of God is to be with the children of men; and more than that, to show His readiness to take on the burden of the world’s sin. How much more then should we be ready to follow the Lord into this mystery of His self-emptying, his kenosis as the theologians call it? For in our case the honour on which our hearts feed, on which our inner-self sometimes gorges, is not the honour due to us but the honour we seek for ourselves. What can this mean?

In the first place, what it cannot mean is to turn from self-aggrandizement to a condition known as abasement. Abasement is a dissonant need, a search within us for diminishment, a readiness to blame ourselves or to dwell upon our inferiority or unworthiness. Abasement is not humility; in fact, like so many bad tendencies, it is merely an ape or imitation of the good, like the devil is the ape of God. Abasement brings satisfaction, just as physical self-harm can bring satisfaction, i.e. in a way that reveals already the deeper disorders in our self-love. For self-harm or abasement are only the flipside of an inordinate self-love, and these extremes live in weird proximity to each other. To quote lines this blog returns to from time to time from the novel of Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest: It is easier than we think to hate ourselves. Grace means forgetting ourselves. A third element in this toxic mix is that abasement may only be a reaction to the disappointments of another dissonant need: that of succorance, the need to be needed by others, with all its attendant processes where the heart expects payment for due deference or affection. Succorance is the vice of the looking glass where we imagine we are only what we believe others think we are, where we make ourselves indebted to their esteem.

It is a great paradox that the cure and remedy to both these dissonant needs lies in the self-emptying that Jesus recommends to us today in the gospel. After all our labours, He tells us, we must still regard ourselves only as unprofitable servants. But why? Because our ennoblement must come to us as through the gift of grace, for we are the sinners that He came to save. It is much as St Augustine of Hippo said:

If we examine the evil we have wrought, what we suffer is little, what we deserve is great.

What we have committed is very grievous, what we have suffered is very slight.

We feel the punishment of sin, yet withdraw not from the obstinacy of sinning.

So then, when we have done our duty, we can hardly boast about it.

Freedom here lies in neither conducting an inner trade with our self-esteem - demanding recognition for our works as if our slate had always been clean – nor in believing ourselves intrinsically incapable of any good. These extreme valuations or devaluations, we must pour out of our soul for them to be replaced by the example of the Lord who is meek and humble and peaceful of heart.

But if we cannot abandon the wage demands that we make to the Father, let our first demand be a living and unending union with Divine Love.

You have written well of my Sacrament, Jesus said to St Thomas Aquinas in a vision. What would you ask of me?

Nothing but yourself, Lord, was the reply of the Dumb Ox.

For the self-emptying of the Son in our service is only a function of the greater cycle of Divine Love that passes between the persons of the Blessed Trinity and in which God Himself has called us to share if only we will follow the Son back to His heavenly Kingdom, the Divine Pied Piper. Our hearts still tremble for the foothills of human esteem, recognition, and affection, and may all these things be added unto us, but first we are called to seek the Kingdom of God and His love and His goodness, to receive His invitation to this adventure as our most precious possession, and as our greatest honour. It is this dignity, which comes to us by His gift, that raises us up from being merely unworthy servants, turns us into adopted children who receive a ring of honour, and sits us among His chosen ones at the Banquet of the Sacrificed Lamb.

Like our Mother Mary, we are the anawim, the little ones of the Lord. We do not recognise our unworthiness in order to sink into the mire. Rather, we recognise it so we can better appreciate the gift He makes us of His enduring and ever-faithful love. We do not recognise our unworthiness to persecute ourselves. We recognise it so as to be free of the shackles of our inner trade, grappling with all the imaginings of human self-promotion, so as to be free to rise and dance before our Father’s joy with a freedom wherewith His Son has made us free.