Humility

By Alex P. Vidal 

“Only a person who has passed through the gate of humility can ascend to the heights of the spirit.”  — Rudolf Steiner

ONE of the chief reasons why many famous characters—including public officials—fall in disgrace too soon is because they lack humility.

When we don’t have humility, we tend to be haughty, egoistic, arrogant, and even dominant. We don’t have respect for others, first and foremost.

The primary hallmark of being “too big for our breaches” is pride—excessive lordliness and irrational sense of entitlement and superiority: we don’t listen; we have this myopic thinking we are bigger than life and we are better and mightier than most people.

Because we stand ten feet taller, we have this uncanny and putrid belief we are beyond snooping and scrutiny.

We hate criticism; we loathe dissection and inquiry. Accountability and transparency have no place in our glossary of terms.

In our thoughts, we operate as a one-man army; we know everything—deeper and more detailed than what Google and AI combined can dish out.

Egos over bloated, we become vexatious to others; and the saddest apart is we think our truculence and sullenness don’t harm others and our being superior and scrappy are something ordained by the ghosts in heaven.

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Abraham Cho reminds us that by all accounts, humility ranks as one of the most important virtues of the Christian life. In his classic book Humility: The Beauty of Holiness, Andrew Murray famously referred to it as “the first duty and the highest virtue of the creature, and the root of every virtue.”

As scholar F. S. Fitzsimmonds put it, “The importance of this virtue springs from the fact that it is found as a part of the character of God.” Stunningly, humility is an attribute of the biblical God himself. C.S. Lewis’: “True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.” Tim Keller built on this idea when he wrote, “True gospel-humility means I stop connecting every experience, every conversation, with myself. In fact, I stop thinking about myself. The freedom of self-forgetfulness.”

And more recently, David Brooks’ book How to Know a Person quotes a biographer of E.M. Forster who wrote that “to speak with him (Forster) was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.”

“Inverse charisma” seems like a great description of what humility feels like when we encounter it in someone else. But do these definitions, wonderful as they are, capture the full essence of humility as we see it in the Bible?

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In about four weeks, the filing of certificates of candidacy (CoC) by candidates in the 2025 Philippine midterm elections will bump off the major issues that have been dominating the headlines these past weeks.

Whether Apollo Quiboloy will be finally dug up from the bunker, Arnulfo Teves and Alice Guo will be extradited, Gerald Bantag will be arrested, among other developments in the various sensational crimes, media will be buzzing with stories about who’s who in local and national politics competing for elective positions in the local government units (LGUs) and Congress—both the Upper and Lower Houses.

Interesting rivalries for mayor, governor, congressman and woman involving former allies, friends and relatives will occupy the front seats in the media coverage.

Some of the hotly contested areas in the Philippines are expected to grab the bulk of publicity both in the mainstream and the social media especially in Metro Manila, Iloilo, Cebu, and many parts in Mindanao now divided between the warring bandwagons of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. and Vice President “Inday Sara” Duterte-Carpio.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two daily newspapers in Iloilo.—Ed)