Saturday, February 14, 2015

HUMILITY IN THE WORK PLACE

I WAS tasked in January to deliver a pep talk for our agency, as part of our Monday’s flag-raising ceremony. It was a few days before the pastoral visit of Pope Francis in the country. So I chose to discuss the virtue of which the People’s Pope is known. Humility.

Pope Francis is known to have plenty of humility. Humility to him means spending time with those people we find hard to live with, those we probably like the least. He denounced self-importance when he preferred a modest two-room residence to a grand papal apartment on Vatican’s Apostolic Palace, when he waited in line with the rest of employees at the Vatican’s canteen, and when he gave up his chauffeur and started taking the bus to work.

When we speak of humility according to Pope’s examples, we can’t help but sound religious, preaching about the teaching of the church. Why not, humility is the mother of all virtues, the most important lessons Jesus Christ imparted to his disciples and believers down to all of us present-day Christians. We’ve learned in the bible that God cannot work on us if we are proud.

Humility came from the Latin humus meaning “earth,” or literary “on the ground.” And to St. Thomas Aquinas, humility “consists in keeping oneself within one’s own bounds, not reaching out to things above one, but submitting to one’s superior.” This is consistent with the teaching of the Catholic Church that humility “in a higher and ethical sense is that by which a man has a modest estimate of his own worth, and submits himself to others.”