Interlude 2: On Humility
The challenge of flourishing in just enough soil.
Hi! It’s been a busy two week! Between multiple writing projects, preparing for this year’s Colloquium on Violence & Religion in Mexico City1 with
, and preparing notes for a reading group I’m leading which starts almost as soon as I’m back from Mexico (sign up by June 30 if you’re interested!), my headspace at the moment is about 80% very thorough notes and about 20% coherent thought.I am still keeping pace with my re-read of James Alison’s The Joy of Being Wrong, with an eye to continuing my ranging thoughts on the theology of the Cross, the role of human violence in Christianity, and why I think these things are good, good news at the heart of the Gospel. Hopefully, after next week at COV&R, I’ll be able to enrich those connections with thoughts from James himself!
This week, though, I want to reflect on something James said at last year’s Colloquium—something that’s stuck with me, and that in many ways formed the seed of what I think a “religion for losers” looks like. He wasn’t speaking directly to the American political situation, but there was a clear application as he discussed the Christian idea of humility.
First, James felt compelled to say what humility is not.
Humility does not mean “accepting the way things are.” It is not passively letting the boot sit on our necks while resenting it, complaining about our own powerlessness.
Likewise, humility does not look like making oneself a martyr for the sake of making a point about said boot, achieving power by playing the victim. Friedrich Nietzsche accused Christians of ressentiment for a reason, noting how many believers—even in 1883 Germany—seemed to say, “Yeah, get your kicks in now, Jesus will prove us right when he comes back in glory to take vengeance on you!”
We may cast ourselves as the “losers” in such stories, but we’re still heroes in our own minds, vindicated by a God eager to do violence on our behalf. And this blasphemously misrepresents the God who defines “humility” through his own action.
True humility, James said, is “a proud person's descent into the shame of knowing themselves to be manipulative.” This may be a little hard to get our heads around, but my friend Lance Thomas, a scholar and activist in South Africa, has another helpful way of putting it:
Humility has its roots—literally—in humus, or soil. Think of the Ash Wednesday mantra, “Remember that you are dust.” But it’s more than that. Humility means taking up as much soil as you need to flourish, and no more.
Humility, then, begins with the humiliation of recognizing we’ve taken up more than our fair share of the soil. In our pursuit of a solid sense of self, we’ve crowded the Other out.
If humiliation is the exposure of our pride and rapacious desire, our automatic tendency to “crowd the other out,” then this exposure also belies our sense of who we are. We each have cultivated a sense of self by taking up too much soil, thinking we can only thrive at others’ expense. When confronted with this lie, our big, frilly, weedy identity is lost in the process. It’s right and just to see and experience this “descent” into shame as a kind of death.
But this is where the real work starts. Because we have not yet arrived at humility. Humility, remember, is different from resentment. Resentment is a kind of undeath, a shambling zombie fugue state we persist in after experiencing the shame of seeing ourselves accurately, authentically, as full of pride and desire for our own being. Resentment doubles down on its own rapaciousness, on its belief that we can only be if the other is not.
Humility is true resurrection. It is the mystical transmutation of humiliation into grace.
When we experience this transformation, the shame which brought us to the threshold doesn’t hold the same power over us anymore. Just as Christ tells us not to fear death, Christ also tells us not to fear the undeath of living resentfully, with shame as our “ultimate horror.”
The Christian who “dies to themselves” and is “raised with Christ” becomes capable of something other humans are not: living with shame. Living with humiliation. And not in a bearing-with-it kind of way; the Christian becomes so inoculated against shame’s threat to their identity that it’s hard for them to even recognize it anymore. Shame that would destroy another’s sense of self does not phase the Christian; they go on flourishing, taking up as much soil as they need and no more.
Humility is both creative and reactive, a power that manifests even under the most abject of circumstances. James sums it up beautifully:
Humility, as modeled by Christ, is the power to “lose gracefully.”
Humility changes the meaning of “winning” forever.
I do believe that to read Scripture authentically, one must conclude that the God of the Bible is a God of “losers”: of those who have been cast off or rejected by systems of power.2 God pursues those who have no seat at any table, in order to invite them to feast. Christ dies the death of a criminal to show he has no interest in self-confident systems of human justice; he identifies with those who have been condemned and sacrificed by such systems. As Alison writes, God is “on the side of victims.”
But God does not choose the poor and powerless over and against those who have power and privilege. Rather, Christ sweeps away that power’s legitimacy; his death and resurrection leave power destitute. His universal proclamation to the victims of power, to those displaced from their soil, is “I see you! I am for you, I belong to you!” And his universal proclamation to the powerful who are overrunning the garden is, “You have no power. You are withering from your overreach. You also have no table at which you might sit… Which means I come for you, too.”
In this well-attested sense, Christianity is a “religion for losers,” for it makes losers of us all. Christ comes to “tear our cities down,” to overthrow the selves we’ve built at others’ expense—and he helps us understand what good news that is when, over the rubble of our walls, we are able to find and receive one another anew in love.
But Christianity is a “religion for losers” in another sense, too. One that’s maybe a bit closer to home right now, and imminently more political. Closer to what Alison means when he talks about the mystical importance of “losing gracefully.”
We presently face the looming possibility that the violent understanding of Christianity represented by Christian nationalism will win out and be legitimated in US politics over the coming years. The city we want to see torn down may expand. Those of us who seek to guard the dignity and pride of our religion from its abuses already find ourselves on the backfoot. It may well get worse.
There’s this terrible paradox here, which
puts so brilliantly: “The fact that it isn’t our job as Christians to win” has been one of the things that’s motivated our fight against Christian nationalism.And yet, those of us trying to preach a “loser’s” Gospel have fallen into their own temptation to be on the “winning” side: “We all think our cause is righteous,” Du Mez continues: “And when you refuse to allow for the possibility of losing, it changes what you’re fighting for. It changes how you fight. And it changes who you are.”
I take this to mean that, even if the cause is righteous, one cannot put all their effort into winning without inevitably taking up too much soil. The lesson of Exodus 14 pertains: “The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.” If we cannot be still, we will become the very things we fear.3
Christ promises his followers that “in this world [they] will have trouble.” And even though he has overcome the world he asks us to “take up our crosses” and follow him. To follow not, necessarily, unto violent death, but most certainly into a “long defeat”, fraught with grief, embarrassment, scapegoating and expulsion. We are to be “pilloried” before all the world, as Hans Urs von Balthasar puts it: “If world history is in the deepest sense judgment being passed upon the world, then what is revealed of it is not judgment upon those who are alien and ignorant, but the judgment of [Christ] upon his [Church]” (A Theology of History, 151).
To be more than a little cheeky about it, the world is meant to look upon the witness of the church and say, “Truly, if the Lord of the Universe can go out of his way to save even this den of iniquity, there must yet be hope for the rest of us!”
This beautiful, miraculous—dare I say funny—vision of the end of history can only be manifested by people who have learned to sustain themselves in a vocation of losing gracefully. To flourish in their place, in a way that sustains others.
And it’s to those ends that, this September, Joel and I are putting together a space where Christian leaders can share the wisdom and renew the courage not necessarily to battle the encroachments of violent theology (though this is needed, too), but to sustain themselves as graceful losers into the future. To be voices for the voiceless and to uphold Christianity’s “decisive turnabout” in our way of seeing God:
God is not, in the first place, ‘absolute power’, but ‘absolute love’, and his sovereignty manifests itself not in holding on to what is its own but in its abandonment—all this in such a way that this sovereignty displays itself in transcending the opposition, known to us from the world, between power and impotence. (Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, 28)
If anything about such a space interests you, or sounds good and life-giving for someone you know, please don’t hesitate to reach out! We look forward to dripping more details after we get back from Mexico.
I’m grateful to do this work under the banner of unRival Network, a non-profit organization that accompanies peacebuilders to nurture hope, inspire collaboration, and overcome destructive rivalries in a nonviolent struggle for justpeace. This newsletter is part of unRival’s mission to expand its community of regular people seeking ever-better ways of being together:
This Fall, Joel D. Aguilar Ramírez and I will be working with unRival to refresh the hearts of US-based Christian leaders buffeted by polarization but motivated by nonviolent theology and discipleship. We’re designing a safe space for doubt, wrestling, and healing together. A community for developing spiritual habits that protect us from isolation and burnout. If you value this work and want to support it or be part of it, please get in touch, and consider making a small donation to unRival:
The paper I’m delivering is on a stray connection I made to the thought of Friedrich Schiller, a Romantic poet and playwright who made much of the ethical dimensions of beauty. It got me thinking anew about how, exactly, we believe that “beauty will save the world,” and how much more probably depends on our response to beauty’s arising than on just filling the world with lovelier things. I think this topic is really important to the “sustainable spirituality” I want to keep exploring here at Religion for Losers, so if you’d like me to share my notes on this project, please let me know.
I do believe this is the right way to understand Christianity, over and against the triumphalism and resentment we see in American politics and the currents of Christian nationalism. But sometimes my own resentment creeps in, and it becomes a more “heroic” endeavor than it ought to be. I hope it’s instructive when it happens! “Losing gracefully” is a jerky, messy process, and it can be edifying to see it happening to someone in real-time.
I don’t think “giving up,” “losing gracefully,” or “being still” means abandoning the fight altogether. I do think it means, most imminently, that certain voices need to take a rest. That there needs to be a humble “changing of the guard,” in which new voices come to the forefront. My dear friend
talks often about this, and I powerfully recommend you read his recent piece for Juneteenth:
Another great piece. Looking forward to learning more about your plans for September; happy to be a part of it in whatever way may be helpful!
These kinds of themes have been running through my head recently. I wonder, in this world where we never seem to "win," if it ought not to start with our own understandings of what it means to be leaders or not--if the invitation to "follow me," is not a counter-intuitive invitation to "lose with me".