Humility as earthiness may be less a distortion than humility as groveling or timidity, but each of these modern interpretations misses the essence of this ancient, classic virtue. For humility signifies, simply, the acceptance of being human, the acceptance of one’s human being. It is the embrace of the both-and-ness, both saint and sinner, both beast and angel, that constitutes our very be-ing as human. Beginning with the acceptance that being human—being mixed (and therefore sometimes mixed-up)—is good enough, humility involves learning how to live with and take joy in that reality.
As a spiritual experience, humility contains its own unique paradox: Those possessed by it do not realize that they do participate in it! And those who think they possess it most often have no idea what “it” is. As a Sufi saying suggests: “A saint is a saint unless he knows that he is one.”
Humility is, above all, honesty. True humility neither exaggerates nor minimizes but accepts. As Dag Hammarskjöld put it in Markings:
Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exultation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is—is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything.
To be humble is not to make comparisons” In response to modern narcissism’s extolling of “Me First” and “Number One,” humility does not necessarily suggest an attitude of “Me Last” (although that would provide a more appropriate starting-point for spirituality). What humility does counsel is that such comparisons are dangerous and foolish; the problem with both “first” and “last” as goals is that both are extremes. As A.A. co-founder Bill W. advised literally thousands of alcoholics: “Our problem is that we try, even demand, to be ‘all-or-nothing.’” Human be-ing—being in the middle—is to be neither all nor nothing.
Within Alcoholics Anonymous the term used to signify the opposite of humility is grandiosity, and A.A. meetings glitter with stories—humorous, perhaps, only to those who can identify with them—illustrating the pitfalls of high-flown pomposity.
There I was, the brilliant market analyst who was going to make a million bucks by the age of thirty, only I didn’t have the time to put my scheme into practice, because I was lying on the bathroom floor in my own drunken vomit. With my background, and schooling, and connections, not to mention my brilliant diplomatic skills, I knew that I was destined to be the greatest statesman of the twentieth century—but as time went on, all that I seemed capable of doing was sitting in my darkened living room and reaching out, time and time again, for the bottle. I knew, without any doubt whatsoever, that I was God’s greatest gift to women, this age’s greatest lover, if only I could remove my arms from their embrace around the toilet bowl.
So common is this acceptance of “grandiosity” as a chief failing of alcoholics that it led one of the authors, then a graduate student researching Alcoholics Anonymous, into a trap. Puzzled about the tendency for even intelligent alcoholics to get mired in the self-deceit of denial, he approached one of the field’s leading figures, Dr. Dan Anderson, then-president of the Hazelden Foundation.
“Why is it,” I asked, “that even intelligent alcoholics can get so trapped in denial of their alcoholism? Is it because of grandiosity—they think that they can do anything to their bodies and survive, they think that they are ‘too smart’ to be ‘alcoholic’? Or is it because of self-loathing—they despise themselves and feel they deserve to die, if they are alcoholics?” “Ernie, Ernie, Ernie,” Dan groaned with a patient smile. “The alcoholic’s problem is not that he thinks, ‘I am very special.’ Nor is the alcoholic’s problem that he thinks, “I am a worm.” The alcoholic’s problem is that he is convinced: “I am a very special worm.”
The problem with “very special worm,” of course, is comparison; such a vision is not the kind of mixed that underlies humility, which begins with the acceptance that we are neither uniquely “very special” nor absolutely “worm.” The humility of both/ and refuses precisely the kind of uniqueness, the claim to be exceptional, that “either-or” demands. Humility—the acceptance that being human is good enough—is the embrace of ordinariness. That is not to say that humility sees ordinariness as “good enough”; humility rather sees us as good enough, even in our ordinariness.
Humility, as A.A. co-founder Bill Wilson understood so well, begins with rejection of the demand to be “all-or-nothing” Human be-ing—existing and carrying out our lives in the middle—is to be neither all nor nothing. Humility involves learning how to live with (and even rejoice in) that reality, the reality of our mixed-up-ed-ness, our being both saint and sinner, both beast and angel. Live with and rejoice in—for humor, humorously denned as “the juxtaposition of incongruities,” is the placing together of two things that do not “belong” together. And what could be more incongruous than the strange mixture of beast and angel that we are, this spark of divinity encased in a hunk of nothingness? When we come face to face with the reality of our own imperfection, which is the reality of our very be-ing, we can either laugh or cry; comedy and tragedy, as the masks we see in theaters suggest, intertwine. At certain moments in our lives, in fact, it seems that the most fundamental choice each of us has is between fighting ourselves and laughing at ourselves.
An earlier chapter introduced Ernest Becker’s vivid formulation: “Man is a god who shits.” Faced with the incongruous image of a defecating divinity, we can either howl in outrage or laugh out loud. When confronting our own incongruities, humor is usually the healthier choice, as the wisdom of word-origins hints. For the words human, humor, and humility all have the same root—the ancient Indo-European ghôm, best translated by the English humus.
Humor, humility, humanity … we cannot work on one without working on the others. We cannot have one without having the others. To attend to any one of the three begins the process of bringing us home—home to ourselves, to the mixed-up-ed-ness of our human be-ing. Home is the place where we can be ourselves and accept ourselves as both good and bad, beast and angel, saint and sinner. Home is the place where we can laugh and cry, where we can find some peace within all the chaos and confusion, where we are accepted and, indeed, cherished by others precisely because of our very mixed-upedness. Home is that place where we belong, where we fit precisely because of our very unfittingness. Humility allows us to find the fittingness in our own imperfection.
Because the acceptance of both-and-ness implies the acceptance of our imperfection as imperfection rather than the claim to find in it some “very specialness,” humility is the foundation and keystone of any spirituality of imperfection. Such a spirituality is first and foremost free-ing, as a joyous Hasidic tale reminds us.
The king visited a prison and talked to the prisoners. Each asserted his innocence, except one who confessed to theft. “Throw this scoundrel out,” exclaimed the king. “He will corrupt the innocents.”
To any who know its fellowship, and especially its wariness of “grandiosity,” this is the same spirituality that infuses Alcoholics Anonymous.
A.A.’ s embrace of identity as alcoholic—it makes no difference whether we are “good” in any conventional sense. The key point is that, however “good” we may think we are (or are not), we cannot afford to take any kind of stand on our own “goodness.” It is equally dangerous to think of ourselves as having goodness as to think of ourselves as lacking goodness. Both are distortions, for it is precisely the weakness in whatever goodness we do have a share in that gives us our claim on reality and on the help of a Higher Power.
The message resounds, as always, in all traditions, loud and clear: Mistakes are part of being human. The real meaning of “sin” has to do not with committing evil deeds, not with willfully breaking laws, not even with the act of “falling short.” The term sin classically signifies not an action but the state of falling short, a situation of alienation from reality. One brilliance of Alcoholics Anonymous is that it never uses the term sin, a word hopelessly overloaded with convoluted meanings, but talks instead of the “defects of character” and the “shortcomings” of those who are “alcoholics.” For sin has become a word of religion, of absolutes; shortcomings is a word of humanity, a concept in tune with the understanding that we are imperfect.
And if we do “fall short”? That very awareness of “falling short” implies two related realities: First, we are trying, and second, we need to try again. There is no failure here, for spirituality, as the ancients reminded over and over again, involves a continual falling down and getting back up again. That is why humility—the knowledge of our own imperfections—is so important, and that is why spirituality goes on and on and on, a never-ending adventure of coming to know ourselves, seeing ourselves clearly, learning to be at home with ourselves. The great need is for balance—when we are down, we need to get up; and when we are up, we need to remember that we have been, and certainly will be again, “down.”