One of the occupational hazards of people who study religion and theology is to equate ideas with the force behind them. It’s true that lofty ideas can have a way of motivating and inspiring. But when set against the power they exhibit when felt in the attractiveness of a person who actually lives them, the abstractions pale by comparison.
And isn’t that the case when speaking about the virtues, one of which shows up not only in Louise and Vincent, but also all through the gospels. I’m referring to humility – as in Jesus’ teaching: “whoever becomes humble like this little child is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.”
I can try to define it and distinguish it from other virtues. But the true value of it comes through much more pointedly when I experience (feel) it in the life and actions of someone who’s living it. To feel its real effects and experience its power, I need to encounter someone who has translated its meaning into the flesh of everyday life.
And that’s where those whom we call “life-models” come in. I’d ask you to pause for a moment and try to bring up someone in your past – and especially someone lodged in your imagination – who lived humility. Someone who wove this gospel quality into the rhythm of his or her daily and weekly and yearly life.
I don’t doubt that each of us has someone in mind, someone who, as Jesus describes, was childlike (in the right sense). Someone who didn’t just speak about humility, but who acted humbly, who really knew her place in life, who recognized herself for the gifted and flawed person she really was, and then acted from that stance. Such a person moves the virtue from the limbo of theory into the fleshy visibility of the everyday.
Vincent himself found a humility-model in one of his heroes, St. Francis de Sales. In a 1655 letter, Vincent writes:
The late Bishop of Geneva understood this well. The first time he preached in Paris, on the last journey he made here, people flocked to his sermon from all parts of the city; the Court was there and everything had been done that could make the audience worthy of such a celebrated preacher. Everyone was expecting a sermon corresponding to the vitality of his genius, with which he was accustomed to delight everybody. But what did that great man of God do? He simply recounted the life of Saint Martin, with the intention of humbling himself before all those illustrious persons, which might have swelled the pride of someone else. By this heroic act of Humility he himself was the first to profit by his preaching.
(Volume: 5 | Page#: 478) To Jean Martin, 26 November, 1655 added on 6/28/2011
