Lessons in humility

This past Saturday Archbishop Burke was speaking about some of the tricky (difficult) questions in the Marian Catechist tests and he mentioned that some of them were intentional. Fr. John Hardon had used them as a means to teach humility to some of his Jesuit brothers who had become prideful of their knowledge. This is a good lesson for all of us. We all need to practice humility regardless of the extent of our knowledge.

He also mentioned something else which I understood as a problem about which I have been struggling for some time - that of being overly critical of many bishops and others for failing to act decisively as I believe I would if I were in their positions. Because of the Archbishop’s admonition and advice, I am making the effort to be more charitable in presenting facts and commentary. And hopefully, I will do this in a more prayerful manner.

And this brings up another instance which taught me another lesson in humility. A sentence in the paragraph above contains a subjunctive mood clause which my son ‘proved’ was a proper and correct usage, despite my many arguments against his.

One reason for this is my pride of thinking that my knowledge of English grammar was somewhat remarkable. It began over 40 years ago in 4th grade as I was taught English by a wonderful teacher, Sister Mary Selsus, a religious sister of Loretto. She taught us proper grammar by instilling in us the ability to truly understand the language and its rules. We began diagramming sentences in 4th grade, we learned the parts of speech, and we were ‘encouraged’ to memorize various rules, and other aspects of English. Because of her ability to impart knowledge of English, I was able to grasp other languages in my subsequent years much more easily.

Some forty plus years later, I know of two people who can recite an alphabetical list of 32 prepositions in under 10 seconds. I encountered the other person who remembered these things working at a local Catholic bookstore. We both reminisced about those ‘good old days’ while others around us must have thought we were somewhat ‘touched’ as we rattled off those prepositions and discussed the things we had learned at that time.

Another thing which is firmly engrained in my mind, are the rules for verbs (which is leading to the other point I want to make). For all verbs, we were to know the following: Principal Parts, Form, Use, Voice, Mode, Tense, Person, Number and the Rule: “A verb must agree with its subject in person and number”! These nine items, I still recall and use to this day and I am so grateful that I was fortunate enough to have had such good sisters teaching me and others in Catholic grade school.

Anyway, while I remembered the ‘Rule” above, my son showed me the exception to the rule this past weekend. “If I were so and so, I would do such and such.” ('I' is singular and 'were' is plural-therefore, it must be wrong) However, this is the only use of the subjunctive tense in the English language and it uses the first person singular while using a plural verb. I was certain that the proper way to write or express the phrase would be, “If I WAS so and so,…” I reluctantly admitted that I was wrong – thinking that the “Rule” was absolute without exception.

So I was blessed to have had a couple of lessons in humility over the weekend. I hope and pray that any future criticisms I have will be more charitable and intellectual rather than emotional.

Father Hardon was right. There is a certain joy in humiliation especially when one learns something from it. And it is from humiliation that one learns humility,