What a powerful opening line:
“The older I get the more I have come to appreciate that the act of humility is not a concession I make to the Creator but the simple recognition of where I stand in the order of things.”
As the years pass, I have filtered out of my consciousness many of the values that we lived by.
The flesh is weak.
But the one truth that is so rooted in my being that I will never forget it is this:
We live our lives out of humility, gratitude, and compassion.
I do not mean that I live my life in harmony with these values. I mean that when I fail to live my life in humility, gratitude, and compassion – which is often – my ego is given a sharp slap in the face.
In the words of the great Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich, I feel estranged
- from myself,
- from my neighbor, and
- from the ground of my being.
I shared this story with my local congregation a while ago. I described a personal encounter with grace – when in our deepest moments of separation we are knocked off our high horse and our illusions about our self and others are shattered.
It happened this way:
I was driving into town and approached the exit off Interstate 95. At the end of the exit ramp I saw a young man with a sign, asking for money. He was shabbily dressed.
- I looked at him with scorn.
- I laughed to myself.
What a fool.
Who is going to give him money sitting there like that on the highway?
Just then, a big tractor trailer truck drove down the exit. It stopped. The driver lowered the window, reached out, leaned over, and handed the young man some money.
I was shocked.
- Shocked not that the truck driver would give a hippie some money, no – shocked that I had set myself up as a judge of that young man.
- Shocked that the truck driver knew what I did not know – that nothing separated that young man from me in the eyes of God.
- Shocked that it took a truck driver, someone whom I probably would have also scorned, to teach me a lesson that I would never forget: that the truck driver, the beggar, and I were all connected.
And in a moment, I was reconnected with myself, with my neighbor, and with the God.
Reconnected with the mystery, depth, and greatness of existence.
“We cannot transform our lives,” says Tillich, “unless we allow them to be transformed by that stroke of grace.”
Just a thought…
Joe