HUMBLE AND HAPPY

Many scriptures record the Lord’s opinion concerning the proud and the humble. James the apostle gives one example, “God is opposed to the proud and gives grace to the humble.” Part of the resistance to humility is that it has so often been associated as weak, mousy, down-in-the-mouth, or subdued. That is not humility. Humility means to not be proud, haughty or pretentious, but it also means to be happy and full of joy.

Edward Abbey (1927-1989) wrote, “Frogs are dirge-like rather than jubilant. It may nevertheless be the case that these small beings are singing not only to claim their stake in the pond, not only to attract a mate, but also out of spontaneous love and joy, a contrapuntal choral celebration of the coolness and wetness after weeks of desert fire, for love of their own existence, however brief it may be, and for joy in the common life. Has joy any survival value in the operation of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless. Therefore the frogs, the toads, keep on singing even though we know, if they do, that the sound of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail cats and kit foxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene of their happiness. What then? A few of the little amphibians will continue their metamorphosis by way of the nerves and tissues of one of the higher animals, in which process the joy of one becomes the contentment of the second. Nothing is lost, except an individual consciousness here and there, a trivial perhaps even illusory phenomenon. The rest survive, mate, multiply, burrow, aestivate, dream, and rise again. The rains will come, the potholes shall be filled. Again. And again. And again.”

Humble and Happy, what a way to live, what a way to go!

“Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Jesus