Come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and humble in heart: and you shall find rest unto your souls.

For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Mt. 11: 28-30)

To become more humble, we have to be ready to accept the humiliation of finding victory elusive in our struggle to conquer our defects, and of being reminded of our weaknesses day by day. Often when we examine our conscience, especially on those occasions when we can do it more thoroughly, we can ask questions like these:

Have I managed to offer Our Lord in expiation the very sorrow I feel for having offended Him so many times? Have I offered Him the shame of all my inner embarrassment and humiliation at seeing how little progress I make along the path of virtue?

Then there are the humiliations inflicted on us by others – the ones we were not expecting or the ones that seem unfair or downright unjust. Do we bear these well I for Our Lord’s sake?

If we are very sincere with ourselves we shall ask Our Lord to stop us finding excuses to explain away our sins and failings, those things that humiliate us and for which we sometimes have to ask other people’s forgiveness. All of this is done with God’s help and with the help of spiritual direction, which is only another way of coming into contact with Him. Fixing our gaze on Christ, we can have enough humil­ity to admit our mistakes and set about putting them right.

We learn all about this virtue by studying the life of Our Lady. God has done great things for her –because He has looked gra­ciously upon the lowliness of His handmaid … I am more convinced every day that authentic humility is the super­natural basis for all virtues! Talk to Our Lady, so that she may train us to walk along that path.

Fr. Francis Fernandez