Henri Nouwen, one of my favorite writers, and theologians, said this: There is a nagging sense that there are always unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, unrealized proposals. There is always something else that we should have remembered, done or said. There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit. Thus, although we are very busy, we also have a lingering feeling of never really fulfilling our obligations. A gnawing sense of being unfulfilled underlies our filled lives. When we are in touch with ourselves, we can relate to these words, these expressions of inadequacy. At the end of the day, we cannot measure up and cannot not disappoint others and ourselves. Generally the fault is not that we are not sincere or that we do not put out the effort. The fault is that we are human. We have limited resources, we get tired, we experience feelings we cannot control, have only 24 hours in our day, have too many demands on us, have wounds and weaknesses that shackle us, and thus we know exactly what St. Paul meant when he said: woe, to me, wretch that I am, the good I want to do, I cannot do; and the evil I want to avoid, I end up doing! That may sound negative, neurotic, and stoic, and it can be those things, yet, appropriated properly, it can generate hope and renewed energy in our lives. To be human is to be inadequate, by definition. Only God is adequate and the rest of us can safely say to ourselves: fear not you are inadequate! But a God who made us this way surely gives us the slack, the forgiveness, and the grace we need to work with such a state. When I was growing up I participated in a TEC Retreat…..Teens Encounter Christ, and one of the talks by one young guy I heard him say…..”I believe that God don’t make junk.” And I can remember, even at 17 thinking…..Wow!!!! Wow!!! Thank you! I had struggled for years with feeling less than adequate for anything, especially holiness! All of a sudden, with those words, a new world opened up…and I began to see myself not as less than, but as enough. But the old tapes of “junkiness” often would replay themselves and I would struggle to want to believe the words that I heard….God Don’t Make Junk…I desperately wanted to believe that. Luckily….the older I get, the more I do believe….God Don’t Make Junk…. You see I reasoned that if God was perfect, and God created each and everyone of us, then we were perfect…. yet so often I would run into things in my life that I thought were far from less than perfect, and then I would end struggling to believe that “God Don’t Make Junk”. That has led me on this journey into humility and trying to figure out what humility means and what it would mean to really believe that God Don’t Make Junk….. I went back to love…. You see I do firmly, without question believe that God loves each and every piece of God’s creation….human, and non-human…if God created it, then God loves it. So from there I began to learn that humility, true humility, is not self abasement, or self loathing, or false meekness. I learned that the basis of true humility is acceptance! And with that, the eureka moment happened again! Maybe God created us perfectly imperfect! And I read St. Therese Lisieux and she wrote….”Our faults cannot hurt God. Nor will our failures interfere with our own holiness for genuine holiness is precisely a matter of enduring our own imperfections patiently.” When I was in prison, I asked one of the inmates whom I truly think is one of the holiest people I have ever met, a man who at 17 murdered his mother, father, two sisters and one brother, and who has really struggled with the realities of that horror and has come out on the other side….I said… Tom…what do you think it means to be humble…. He thought for a moment and he said…..Chap, I think what humility is, is the willingness to accept that we are absolutely perfectly imperfect and will spend our lives working at correcting our imperfections as best as we can, realizing that only God is perfect. He confirmed what I had come to believe….we all are perfectly imperfect, and accepting that, is the basis of true humility. Then I sought out some of the most humble people I know….and I watched and observed them. And I found the key… a key which the Godon Hinckley, the president of the Church of the Later Day Saints for over a century had discovered and written…when he said… “Being humble means recognizing that we are not on earth to see how important we can become, but to see how much difference we can make in the lives of others.” What I have noticed is that when I am in the presence of humble people, I somehow leave that experience feeling better about myself as a person. Not because they put themselves down or demeaned themselves or anyone else, but rather…because I became more because of my experience with them. That is my friends what I think the Eucharist does….it sends us forth to transform the world, not by grandiosity or power, but by humility. By making others know deep in their hearts that they are loved, accepted, and protected by a God who created them perfectly imperfect. In the Big Book of AA it puts this whole concept like this: Acceptance is the answer to ALL my problems…