Humility is a noun
Micah 6:8 is one of my favourite Bible verses.
I always appreciate a simple to do list – even if they are very hard to do! I find that they link to the Quaker Testimonies to Equality, Simplicity, Truth and Peace strongly for me.
Equality is a foundational belief for me – that we are all created of equal worth by G-d. We therefore must practice humility to keep that in mind and not lean too easily on our own privilege.
I mentioned that humility is a noun, and it describes a quality of a person – so a humble person could be described as acting with humility.
Humility is not thinking that you are necessarily a bad person (as someone once told me) but instead that you have flaws, faults and make mistakes.
Which links to another favourite quote – the last line of Advices & Queries 17, ‘Think it possible that you may be mistaken.’
Good advice always!
But God's already made it plain how to live, what to do, what God is looking for in men and women. It’s quite simple: Do what is fair and just to your neighbor, be compassionate and loyal in your love, And don’t take yourself too seriously— take God seriously.
Quakers got their name from the way they ‘quaked’ before the lord, but refused to show that honour or other social humbling to others.
Quaker Business Method
One way that Quakers live with humility is the handing on of power to others. So someone who is holding a role today, can be released and any power or authority or responsibility is also handed on. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who have been recognised to have different abilities. But Quakers are careful about assigning power or expectations to others. In the UK we no longer have ‘recorded ministers’, people recognised as having a gift for spoken ministry, although there are other places in the world that still record names.
We do have people who travel in ministry, or with a travelling minute – both of which give anyone meeting them reassurance that someone has been vouched for by those who know them well.
If you’re wondering about how you might explore this topic in more depth, Woodbrooke offered a course on this – and the blog post giving suggested readings is still available.
Click here to read the blog post.
In addition – I wrote about Humble back in 2019’s AdventWord.
“In reality, there is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, and it’s still alive and every now and then will peep out and show itself. Even if I could conceive that I could completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.”
Wendrie Heywood
MBS Founder
