Importance of Humilty in the Recovery Process

The topic of humility has been coming up in meetings recently and today I just heard a great chair by a guy who I've watched getting sober over the last couple of years. While he started off his chair (what some people refer to a lead...he told his story, whatever you call it) today, he said that he didn't feel like he had much to say because he had only a relatively short time continuously sober. He closed his chair by saying that he didn't really know what, if anything, he was doing differently this time in his sobriety, but whatever it was, it seemed to be working.

After the meeting, I went up and told him that I did notice something different in his demeanor today that I hadn't seen before. And that was a deep sense of humility.

A couple of years ago, I was reading a biography of Sr. Ignatia, who was a Catholic nun and early friend to Dr. Bob Smith and Bill Wilson. She was working in an Akron hospital, I think where Dr. Bob had some sort of privileges and where he and Bill started making early attempts to find other drunks to help. Sr. Ignatia, while not an alcoholic, saw something in what these two men were doing and it became her mission in life to help them out. She surrepticiously began redirecting incoming patients who displayed symptoms of alcoholism to special rooms in the hospital and then helped Dr. Bob and other early AAers approach these folks and attempt to help them if that was their wish.

Anyway, as to humility, Sr. Ignatia was transferred away from this hospital at some point (apparently, her religious superiors didn't like the idea of a nun hanging around a bunch of drunks, Doctors or not). Well, she ended up keeping contact with Dr. Bob and continued to help alcoholics connect up with other alcoholics.

Before his death, Dr. Bob gave Sr. Ignatia a little plaque which she kept on her desk for the remainder of her life. The plaque was entitled, "Humility" and Dr. Bob inscribed it something along the lines of "any alcoholic who acquired this sort of humility would do well in their sobriety."

Humility is perpetual quietness of heart.

It is to have no trouble.

It is never to be fretted or vexed, irritable or sure.
To wonder at nothing done to me;

to feel nothing done against me.

It is to be at rest when no one praises me.

And when I am blamed or despised,

it is to have a blessed home in myself

where I can go in a shut the door

and kneel to my father in secret

and be at peace.

As in a deep sea of calmness

where all around and about me

there is seeming trouble.

Dr. Earle once told me that in his mind, humility wasn't a thing to be possessed once and for all. It was more like a moment in time where we became willing to learn. I used to wonder what the difference was between "humility" and "humiliation" and in terms of what Earle said, I eventually came to believe that humiliation happened at those times in our life where we simply couldn't pretend anymore about who we were or what we had become and we fell flat on our face in the ground of our truth. They both have their root in the Greek (?) word "humus" the ground from which human beings were supposedly fashioned.

For many, humility comes about subsequent to humiliation. Whatever. Both can lead to a better understanding of ourselves and what we have become.

Humility is what I heard in Jeremy's story today. I heard a man who was willing to learn more about who he was, both as a alcoholic and as a man. I pray that he doesn't forget what he's been lucky to learn.

Mike L.