Tag Archives: humility

09.16.25
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Who Can Give Us Meaning?

Dear Reader: My apologies for postponing “Way Out West, Part V” for the second week in a row. It’s just that something came up. Next week, back to what passes for normal around here.

Charlie Kirk and former President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with attendees at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. 15 July 2023. Photo by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.

I came home from an appointment Wednesday afternoon, and my wife asked from the kitchen if I’d heard somebody had been shot—I didn’t quite catch the name.

“Who?”

“Charlie Kirk,” she said. “It’s been on TV.”

“Oh. Charlie Kirk was shot. I’m very sorry to hear that. Who is Charlie Kirk?”

She pointed toward the livingroom, where the television spewed forth the stew of messy details and somber speculation that it always serves up at times like these. It announced in due course that Mr. Kirk had died from the single bullet he received in his throat. 

It turns out Charlie Kirk was a conservative political activist, a debater in the political arena, a Trump acolyte, the organizer and head of a huge student movement called Turning Point USA—in all, a Very Big Deal. 

I suppose that’s why people, adrift in the rip currents of our era, have been treating his death as a Very Big Deal. The airwaves abound with post-mortem speculations and virtue-freighted  posturings. The social media, too. 

Charlie Kirk’s fans certainly knew who he was. His critics likewise were very much aware of him. Perhaps I was the only person in America to whom he was not a household name, but then, I’m often accused of not paying attention. It’s really just that I pay attention to other things.

My wife pointed out to me that Kirk’s death cannot be dismissed as unremarkable, having played out amid a crowd of thousands. Kirk was killed at a political event while delivering a political message. The assassin meant the slaying as a political statement.

Before the echoes of the gunshot faded, all sorts of people, speaking or writing in public media, began testifying that the central meaning of this event is political.

Some say, “A man speaking his mind peacefully has been silenced. This is a threat to our First Amendment right of free speech.”

Some say, “His views were reprehensible. He deserved what he got.”

Some say, “When will we learn? We must re-establish civility in our public life.”

Some, like the governor of Utah, see this moment as a possible inflection point—an opportunity to change course as our nation struggles with divisive ideologies. 

All these diverse voices place the problem and the solution in the realm of politics.

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I think it goes deeper.

A man took a high-velocity bullet in his throat. His lifeblood poured out and his life was ended. His wife was widowed, his children left fatherless. The act was done by a man in the grip of powerful emotions he could not, or did not, control. His rage was murderous; he took it out in violence. 

The ancient human drama of killer and killed is the primary meaning of this event. The beliefs and polemical effectiveness of the victim, the beliefs and operational effectiveness of the assassin, are secondary. 

Our dogged insistence that the main meaning is political keeps us from seeing the real problem.

It leads our spokespeople to say fatuous things time and again, things that we know are not true, are meant only to assuage our sense of hopelessness. “We’ve got to understand the killer’s motive, so we can make sure nothing like this ever happens again.” 

Really? How has that been working out?

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We in our oh-so-enlightened society are loath to admit the flawed nature of human beings. It used to be called Original Sin, back when we believed in sin. But to believe in sin, you have to believe in God, for sin is a crime not only against one’s fellow man but against God. And we have no room for God.

Instead, we assume we are naturally good, or at least neutral, beings. We do evil only because we are influenced by a negative environment. If only We—that is, Society—learned how to take the right approach, We could eliminate crime and violence. We need to educate people better. 

  • If only Charlie Kirk had embraced a more enlightened political viewpoint, he would not have invited his own destruction.
  • If only the shooter had understood the First Amendment, he would not have sought to win his argument through violence.
  • If only we all took lessons in tact and diplomacy, this kind of existential conflict would be avoided.

What a mighty opinion we have of our human powers! 

If any of us are grown-ups, we should know by now that none of these things are true; that our powers and our understanding are limited; that even our internal will to do good is apt to falter in the face of felt needs and fears.

Think of all the people you know. Surely you know someone who embodies, in one person, both saint and sinner: the best kind of person and the worst kind of person, inseparable and unaware. 

Not many of us are prepared to take the thought further and examine ourselves for signs of this saint/sinner dichotomy. Maybe we’re afraid of what we’d find. 

My point is, we are mixed beings, both good and evil in one sweet package. Education will take us only so far. We need firm guidelines, if only to protect society. And because even those boundaries will never completely rein in our waywardness, we also need forgiveness.

There is a Stoic in me who says, “Do not expect much of people. We are weak reeds, unreliable stanchions. When people deliver goodness, be agreeably surprised. When they deliver badness, do not condemn but look to yourself and straighten out your own inner being.”

There is also a Christian in me who says, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. I am only human.”

What Society needs is not some miraculous, altogether unattainable, political accommodation. People have been wrangling over divergent interests since the dawn of history. We haven’t got it all worked out yet, and we never will. 

What Society needs is humility. We need, for starters, the simple recognition that Man is not perfectible. We need some firm guidelines enforced socially, and we need a spiritual basis for hope. 

For me, it’s enough to trust that God has the answers, which must remain to me mysterious. I can live with that, but then I’m old.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

02.06.24
by

Those Detestable Christians!

Or, SUMMA CONTRA BUMPTIOSI

Saint Michael and the Angels at War with the Devil, Painting, tempera on panel, by Domenico Ghirlandaio  (1448–1494). Public Domain.

AN OLD FRIEND—a man I have known casually for more than fifty years, one to whom I am kindly disposed because he once did me a great service—recently posted this verbal meme:

Thought for the Day: It kills me that Christians insist everyone else honor their religious sensitivities while they stomp all over others!

A thought leapt to my mind, a mirror of the meme itself: “Atheists demand we honor their religious sensitivities, which seem to require the indiscriminate slander of Christians!”

Striving to resist a knee-jerk reaction to my old friend’s provocation, I read on. Some of his Facebook followers had added comments, most of which echoed the anti-Christian meme. 

One commenter let loose a 12-gauge blast in five extended paragraphs. Pared down to its essentials: “. . . Lutheran, Baptist, ‘evangelical’, and ‘non-denominational’ were all about the same: hypocritical. . . . I believe people are intrinsically good and are sometimes made worse by religion. . . . As I saw once on a bumper sticker, ‘Religion is the Problem’.”

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Whew. 

Time to take a deep breath.

This blog generally avoids religion and politics, for good reasons. But Your New Favorite Writer is always concerned with the past and how it echoes in the present. My old friend’s bumptious meme fetches up undead beasts from the past that continue to haunt us today—to our great common detriment.

So, now: To the barricades!

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First, people have a right to cast aspersions on Christianity. That right I do not contest. It is guaranteed, in our land, by the First Amendment—whether such sentiments are spurred by generous or spiteful impulses.

So, the critics have the right to criticize.

But where do they get the moral standing, the breadth of outlook, and the depth of knowledge to swing their clubs with such casual malice?

These are questions of import, which I do not ask lightly. Thus, Kind Reader, I beg your indulgence as we explore the topic in some depth, at a leisurely pace.

We may as well begin with the grey squirrel, a shining emblem of moral deficiency.

Grey squirrel. Photo by Phil Sellens, licensed under CC-BY-2.0.

The Grey Squirrel


Like a small grey
coffee-pot,
sits the squirrel.
He is not

all he should be,
kills by dozens
trees, and eats
his red-brown cousins.

The keeper on the
other hand,
who shot him, is
a Christian, and

loves his enemies,
which shows
the squirrel was not
one of those.

-- Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940)
Humbert Wolfe. Drawing by William Rothenstein, 1931. Public Domain.

It is mistaken, of course, to state that grey squirrels eat red-brown squirrels; in fact they do not. But Humbert Wolfe, a Christian poet with Jewish roots, wants us to understand that the grey squirrel, in any case, cannot measure up to a Christian standard of morality. He also points out, with wit, that a Christian may not measure up to his own standard of morality. 

This goes to the question of moral hypocrisy implied by my old friend’s meme and posed explicitly by the agitated commenter.

But, wait. Why are we all today, Christians and anti-Christians alike, so obsessed with morality? 

Jesus, depicted by an unknown artist on the wall of the 4th-century catacomb of Commodilla in Rome. Public Domain.

It seems to me we did not talk so urgently about morality before this fellow Jesus of Nazareth came along and made such a point of it in his teachings.

But I am digressing, I fear, into religious talk.

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Far be it from me, Dear Reader, to dwell on the theological basis of all those moral laws we have come to consider purely secular because they seem so dazzlingly self-evident. I merely mention this in passing, in case it is of any interest; for many things that are self-evident now only became so after long firing in the crucible of humanity’s tortured experience.

Rather than dwell on that, let us examine our propensity to evade morality whenever convenient.

Let me ask my old friend and his Facebook choristers: Do you suppose that in the whole sad parade of human inadequacy, it is Christians alone who have cornered the market on hypocrisy? 

Must we assume that pagans, animists, Zoroastrians, Mithraists, Jews, Hindus, Confucians, Taoists, Buddhists, Shintoists, Stoics, Epicureans, pragmatists, utilitarians, agnostics, or atheists always live up to their stated ideals? 

Of course not. 

Hypocrisy is a human failing, not a Christian one.

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What can we take from this? That high ideals are pointless?

That’s absurd. Without moral aspirations, what will become of us?

Fair Reader, what we are left with is the fallible human animal: Someone who needs to hope to be good, yet who always falls short.

So when you fall short, do you give up? 

Winston Churchill—a man well-acquainted with failure, with repeated and spectacular failure—once advised young boys as follows:

“. . .  never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.”  

Churchill at Harrow, 1941

Most of us, however, lack Churchill’s iron resolve. 

Where shall we find the sheer chutzpah to keep going in the face of our own shortcomings?

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We need to draw from internal wells of humility. 

In pursuit of that thought, I must beg to differ with the commenter who said, “people are intrinsically good and are sometimes made worse by religion.” 

People may be worsened by religion, indeed. But then, we are not intrinsically good to start with. 

Richard Mansfield starred in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in both New York and London. Double exposure photo by Henry Van der Weyde, 1895.

Life is not that simple. People are not wholly good nor wholly bad. Abundant experience shows that we are both good and bad: At the same time. 

We are mixed beings, angels and devils at once. Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde.

Good and evil so commonly appear bound together in one person that it baffles me how anyone of mature years can have failed to notice that duality. 

We have various names for it. We call it inconsistency, perversity, or sheer cussedness. But by any name, its existence is undeniable.

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.

—James Truslow Adams

We desperately need to recognize this fact about our neighbors, and also about ourselves. It is not only the other guy who is a mixed being. As Pogo, Walt Kelly’s famous Okefenokee possum, said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

What has that to do with humility, and what has humility to do with anything?

One of the best and worst persons I ever knew was a colleague, back in the days when I exerted myself to make a living. Tim, raised a Catholic, had become a theoretical agnostic and a practical atheist. He projected the Self-Made Man, relying entirely on his own talents and exertions. This happened to be a good strategy for Tim, because he was intelligent, capable, and hard-working. 

He was also curious about many topics, including American history. But it shocked him to learn that U.S. presidents, including George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson, have called for national days of prayer and humiliation. 

“How,” Tim asked me, “how can any president call for national humiliation?”

To him, “humiliation” suggested ignominy, disgrace, and something akin to unworthiness. 

I’m afraid I let him down in this hour of crisis. 

Given enough time, I might have stumbled through an explanation that America has always been steeped in Reform Christianity—or, in one word, Puritanism. The Founding Fathers, even those who were not Puritans, grew up in a Christian world that assumed a universal need to repent of our transgressions; to recant any claims to pride; to be brought low by prayerful introspection. And this process of becoming appropriately humble—since we all have a bit of the Devil in us—was called “humiliation.” 

Given enough time, I might have explained all that. But Tim’s question was posed in passing, on a typically busy day. So he went to his grave without ever hearing my (possibly tedious and long-winded) explanation. In case you’re wondering, Dear Reader, the God I know would not hold this  human lack of information against him. 

And suddenly, with no warning, we have arrived at the central point.

If we think we understand everything, we are grossly mistaken. We need more humility than that. 

It’s true that Christians have often fallen short of our ideals. One of the ways we fall short of our ideals is by trying to force our views on others. 

It is wrong to suggest, as the meme does, that all Christians always do this. But some of us do, sometimes.

Some non-Christians, and some anti-Christians, also do this sometimes. 

Even when we are at our worst, Christians are no worse than other people when they are at their worst. 

A terrible frailty is part of the human condition. Puritans called it “original sin.”

If you think it does not apply to you—whatever you may like to call it—I invite you to think again.

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At the beginning of this essay I said the man who posted the bumptious anti-Christian meme on Facebook was an old friend. And so he is. 

How I can treasure my old friendship with one who blithely flaunts such a clouded and limited vision of the world? 

Let me tell you, Fair Reader: Many years ago, this same man taught me how to ward off airsickness—a terrible occupational hazard to a young airman. That teaching was the act of an angel. Without it, I would have been condemned to great misery in the course of military duty.

I also happen to be conscious that I have made my own share of foolish declarations.

We ought to try, as best we can, to show the world our clarity and our charity, not our presumptuous hobgoblins of prejudice. 

Yet we can’t always manage that. 

The Season of Lent approaches, and we require humiliation, in the old sense of the word.

Unless we cultivate enough humility to cut one another a bit of slack, how shall we ever find our way to the light?

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

11.29.19
by

Thanks for the humiliation

“The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth” (1914) By Jennie A. Brownscombe (1850-1936). Public Domain.

“[A]mongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others.”

—Edward Winslow, December 12, 1621

This well-known event was not “Thanksgiving,” even though we remember it that way. 

We know it was not Thanksgiving because if it had been a special time of Thanksgiving,  the Scrooby Separatists would have treated it like a designated time of Repentance: with fasting, prayer, and humiliation. Not with feasting, fun, and games.

Humiliation? What’s that got to do with thanksiving?

How Humiliating

John Adams, painting by Gilbert Stuart. Public Domain.

A friend of mine, who happened also to be my boss, boggled when he read a presidential proclamation by John Adams that called for fasting, humiliation, and prayer. 

“Humiliation? Why would the president of the United States call for our country to be humiliated?” 

My friend/boss was a soldier and a patriot, proud of our nation’s achievements. He was also a classic narcissist, the star of his own show—a show in which all the rest of us were bit players. Humiliation was a concept that did not appeal to him. 

His question was not rhetorical. He was sincere; he wanted an answer. Sadly, other matters more pressing at the time pre-empted the long talk it would have taken to justify the role of humiliation in the psyche of our infant nation.

Of all the presidents who have called us to prayer and thanksgiving, only one embraced the “h” word—John Adams, a staunch old Puritan. His proclamations of 1798 and 1799 urged national, as well as individual, humiliation. That need was seen by the Calvinistic Adams, and perhaps by most New Englanders of that era, as an absolute prerequisite if there was to be any hope for a people mired in original sin.

My boss scorned old John’s advice, I surmise, because he equated humiliation with defeat. After all, the Packers routinely humiliated the Bears. Victorious allies humiliated Germany at Versailles. Saddam Hussein suffered abject humiliation by Norman Schwarzkopf.

Victorious allies David Lloyd George, Vittorio Orlando, Georges Clemenceau, and Woodrow Wilson prepare to humiliate Germany, Paris 1919. U.S. Army photo. Public Domain.

The Upside of Humiliation

“Humiliation” also signifies a path to remembering our creaturehood. Humans are inclined to hubris, yet our proper attitude—the realistic attitude in the full context of God’s world—is humility. That does not come easily to us; thus we require humiliation. Such humiliation could be seen as a victory, not a defeat. I think that is what John Adams meant.

If we ourselves are the center of the universe, we thereby occupy the whole. Where is there space for gratitude? What is there to be thankful for? Who is there to thank?

It has been a very long time since anyone of Great Importance in our general life ventured the faintest suggestion that humility might be a good thing; or, even better, modeled humility as a public virtue. 

Rather, those who dominate our headlines and our consciousness reliably turn out to be monsters of pride and arrogance. Their toxic self-absorption trickles down to the public at large. Or, could it be that it seeps upward to them, from us?

Authentic Gratitude

On the day we call Thanksgiving, we gather around the groaning board. We honor a tradition begun in 1621 with a feast and various entertainments, including football (our most military game). 

“Happy ThanksGiving 2010” by BenSpark is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 

Because the name of the day is Thanksgiving, we try to remember, amidst all revelries, to give thanks. Our thanksgiving may take the simple form of each person around the table, in turn, stating what he or she is thankful for. That’s not a bad thing to do. 

Humility, if nothing else, might suggest it is also important to mention Whom we are thankful to.

A little humiliation could be a good thing. Happy Thanksgiving.

Blessings, 

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author 

 

07.02.19
by

Cross and Flag

My irascible sometime friend and former work supervisor, Tim, once went ballistic in my presence over the historic fact that U.S. presidents including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and in the twentieth century Woodrow Wilson on various occasions had issued public calls for “fasting, humiliation, and prayer.” 

Our flag. “US Flag” by jnn1776 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 

Tim—alas, now deceased—was a military man. He was quite intelligent, tolerably well-educated, and always in the grip of a steamy anger that was never far from the surface. He had been raised in a Catholic family but in adulthood described himself as “agnostic.” 

He made no quarrel with presidential calls for fasting and prayer. He understood that even in a nation that prohibits “an establishment of Religion,” a leader may give voice to the general religious impulses of the people. But he did not think a chief executive should call for the country to be humiliated.

“Cross” by dino_b is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 

Tim was a notable narcissist, full of pride in himself and esteeming pride as a general virtue in all cases. He considered humiliation as the one thing to be avoided above all. Therefore, to call for humiliation of the whole nation was tantamount to treason. After all—the British, the Germans, and the Japanese had tried to humiliate us and we had not let them get away with it. Why, then, do it to ourselves?

With more time and more patience, had I been wiser and deeper, I might have helped Tim understand the concept of national humiliation in a larger context. But I did not.

In his sensitivity to that issue, Tim inadvertently put his finger on a key dimension of America’s church-state relationship. If we understand our nation’s affairs to fall within the Providence of a Power who calls each of us to approach life with Christ-like humility, then it seems  proper for all of us, as a body politic, periodically to be humbled. To be reminded, that is, of our proper place in the world under the overarching care of God.

“Humiliation” in this sense may be what Lincoln had in mind when he said, in his Second Inaugural Address,

Abraham Lincoln. “twlncn63” by gvgoebel is licensed under CC PDM 1.0 

“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?” 

That kind of thinking, I believe, is what Washington, Lincoln, and others meant when they called for national “humiliation.”

Past generations have mostly understood and assumed a close kinship between our lives as Christians and our lives as citizens. Alhough the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment has always forbidden the government to prescribe forms of prayer and worship, nobody construed it to prevent Americans from expressing our religious affiliations and sentiments in our public lives.

Under such a general understanding, it seemed perfectly natural to Americans of the mid-twentieth century to salute our national sovereignty by displaying flags in our houses of worship and recognizing national holidays during regular worship services. But expectations and understandings are much different today.

Our pastor—no bomb-throwing activist, she—called our attention to three articles in the current online Alban Weekly dealing with churches’ sometimes uneasy relationship with Independence Day celebrations. She wanted to know what we thought about them. The leading piece, a nine-year-old reflection from Duke University’s Faith & Leadership website, titled “What to do about the 4th,” written by a retired Methodist minister named Ed Moore, mentioned some “local traditions” that he called “affronting.” These were: “an American flag draped over the Lord’s Table, the Pledge of Allegiance included in the liturgy, or the choir expecting to deliver a patriotic anthem.”

I suppose these “local traditions” must exist somewhere in Christendom, or Rev. Moore would not have called them out. But they must be exceeding rare. In all my years I have never seen any of these “affronting” cases included in the worship of any churches I have attended. Using the U.S. flag as a communion cloth or a chancel parament? Such a practice must be abhorrent both to Christians and to patriots (bearing in mind that many of us aspire to be both).

Some patriotic expression in worship space, however, has been a commonplace in most churches since the dim past. It might take the form of red/white/blue floral decorations on July Fourth (a practice Rev. Moore okays, faintly); or the display of the flag somewhere in the worship space; or the singing of a patriotic song such as “America the Beautiful” by the congregation on the Fourth, in place of a regular hymn.

The reason such practices come under the microscope of critical examination now is not that we somehow are better educated than our grandparents about the implications of the Establishment Clause. Rather, it’s because we now live in a society that is markedly less religious than theirs was. I believe we are the poorer for that. But it does not follow that those who still keep the faith must embrace a sharp divorce between that faith and our inner sense of national identity. There can be room for both.

The Christian flag.

In the church where I have been a member for the past forty years, we have never practiced extreme liturgical patriotism. Sometimes we sing a patriotic song or two on national holidays. We used to display a U.S. flag and a “Christian flag” in our sanctuary. We retired those flags a while back; I am not aware of any complaints about that. 

But should we, at some future time, choose to restore flags to our worship space, that would not show that we had sold out our Christian faith to some crypto-fascist conspiracy. It would only signal that fashions, or group preferences, had shifted slightly.

Some wise person once decreed that sleeping dogs ought to be permitted their slumber. Despite any number of learned articles that may be written, already or in the future, I doubt that most American church people feel any great tension between their devotion to Christ and their loyalty to our country.

I’ll bet my combustible friend Tim, if he were here today, would at least agree with that.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer