With this utilitarian convenience we easily forget that the meal is also the social expression our relationships. What do I mean by this? It is true that eating together can build relationships but more importantly, our social bonds must express themselves through meals together. A good example is the Lunar New Year Reunion Dinner amongst the Chinese. And this has implications for what we do here. In fact, more than just being practical, the sharing of a meal itself can pave the path for objectives to be achieved. It does not have to be as business-like as in reducing the meal to its existential function—eat to survive.
What a meal does is to give us a perspective on how to behave socially. In other words, what needs to be completed does not need to be “planned”. Not that planning or organising is bad but we innately or instinctively know what has to be done. That is the social strength of sharing a table. A good example of knowing what to do even if unplanned would be the Apostle Judas. Of course, it is not the most positive example and yet it illustrates the point that during the meal what had to be accomplished became clearer to Judas. In any case, the sharing of food can facilitate a clearer picture of the tasks ahead that require our attention.
But more than work, the meal is also a place to know who we are. It is a perfect setting for excellence. How so? Have you ever eaten at a gathering where Darwin’s evolutionary theory is played out? By that I mean the survival of the fittest. You observe the person in front of you in the queue scooping up the choicest parts of the dish but not only that, the person takes more than his share. A person of excellence is one who knows that there are people behind and he takes what he needs or even less than he needs because the small serving has to be shared fairly amongst those who are still behind in the long queue.
The excellent person is a model of the virtue described in the Gospel. It makes sense that the virtue of humility is set within the context of a meal. This is a joke from a friend who takes great pleasure in highlighting the obvious egoism of the Jesuits. As you may know, the Jesuits are supposedly noted for their “excellence”, after all their motto scream “ad maiorem Dei gloriam”. According to him, St Ignatius conceded that the Franciscans should be recognised for their poverty. Whereas the Dominicans should celebrate their erudite prowess. But hear this: let the Jesuits boast of their humility.
It is getting harder to conceive of this virtue given that we live a go-getter world. It strikes one as a feeble invitation to be trampled underfoot. What is humility if one were not to be crushed? The humility of the Gospel is to see ourselves as God sees us. It is not a form of self-hatred. Instead it is an attitude captured by a quotation apparently attributed to C.S. Lewis, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less”.[1] It sounds like a loser’s mantra but it is not. Humility recognises that my space, physical, psychological or spiritual, is not filled with me alone. Humility makes space for others and most especially for God. Therefore it is free from narcissism.
However, it would be next to impossible to live humility if God were not present. Why, you may ask. Only when there is a God will we be assured that death is not the final stamp in life. Without that guarantee, it follows quite logically that we would be considered losers if we have not achieved anything or that nobody knows or recognises our contributions to society. The present compulsion to “virtue-signal” is symptomatic of this loss of faith in the afterlife.[2]
With regard to cultivating the virtue of humility, what complicates is that both our political and economic spheres are knowledge-based. On the one hand, a good development from Wikipedia is the democratisation of knowledge. Everyone has finger-tip access to information. On the other hand, the shadow of this ease of access to information is an arrogance—a forgetfulness of who we truly are. Is it not true that now we have the facility to fact-check almost everything, provided that Big Tech or Google has not already censored what we should or should not know. The point is, in simple conversations, even as someone is speaking, the listener can fact-check without realising that the very act of verification is based on the humility of Truth and not on the might of “being right”, as in, “I am right because I possess MORE information”. As mentioned earlier, our challenge is that without God, we will always need to be ahead of everyone because being behind is considered to be a loser. No one wants to lose. And it is not even “kiasu” to have this fear.
In terms of knowledge, humility makes us more a servant of Truth than its master, meaning that Truth is not a possession like information is. Au contraire, humility is to be possessed by Truth. The etymology of the word “enthusiasm” actually clarifies what it means to be possessed. Not by the Devil. To be “enthused” means to be taken up by God. When we are possessed by Truth, we will be humbled by the beauty of Truth. An oft-repeated remark can help us appreciate humility and how it serves the Truth. People say that with regard to paper qualification, it is not so much what you know as whom you know. Access to the corridor of power is granted by the knowledge of personage or patronage. Or better expressed, the access to greatness is through “whom” we know.
In a manner of speaking, we have come full circle to where we began. Whom do we know and encounter in the Eucharist? The lie in an age of arrogance is that our greatest encounter is the discovery of the self. The humility of truth states otherwise that the ultimate realisation of the self is found in God alone which makes the Eucharist the perfect cure to this lie. We know ourselves best only in God as expressed by St Augustine’s famous quip: “O God, my soul is restless until it rests in You”. The more we are at home with God, the more we are taken up by Him, the more will we recognise our truer self.
So each time when you attend Mass, you may think that you are here as an individual but in truth we are here to worship God together and to be known by Him. The beauty of the social setting of the Eucharistic sacrifice is that God accepts us not as condemned but redeemed sinners. That is who we truly are. It makes sense that at the beginning of Mass, we acknowledge this truth through the “Confiteor”. In this humility of our collective admission, we are kept both grounded and exalted. Grounded because we know who we are. Sinners albeit redeemed and loved. Exalted because humility lifts us up so that in our nothingness, God can fill us more with Himself. In conclusion, in the Eucharist, we have this profound opportunity to know ourselves better in the Lord and in the humility of self-awareness we are invited to be submissive servants of Truth. There is no greater discovery than to know oneself a sinner, yet saved by Jesus Christ, sanctified in His Truth and sent to serve in humility.
_______________________
[1] It is more a quote by Pastor Rick Warren from his book “The Purpose-Driven Life”, than by C.S. Lewis. The quotation by Lewis is much longer and does not sound as quoted by Pastor Rick. If interested, check out. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 8, “The Great Sin,” Kindle location 1665
[2] We are compelled to public broadcast our good works for fear that unannounced, there would be nobody to validate our goodness. Faith in God and in the afterlife is an antidote to this fear. Even if nobody knows, God knows. He alone can judge our goodness.
