HUMILITY AS TRUTH: THE FOUNDATION OF AUTHENTIC PRAYER

V/​ I will turn to you O God, 

R/​ to God who gives joy to my youth

V/​ Give me the Wisdom that sits by your throne; 

R/ that I may be counted among your children

Lord, in your all-providential plan, you have led me to this moment to rediscover me in your Word and Wisdom. Aid me to make this time of meditation and prayer enriching, transforming, and liberating for my well-being and others. Amen!

HUMILITY AS TRUTH: THE FOUNDATION OF AUTHENTIC PRAYER

By Vivien Foster

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Sirach 35:15-17, 20-22; Psalm 34(33): 2-3, 17-19, 23; 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18; Luke 18:9-14

15th October 2025

We are all familiar with the importance of prayer. But today’s readings suggest that how we pray is as important as that we pray. If we approach prayer with the wrong mindset or attitude, our prayer may be fruitless, perhaps even unheard. So, what is the right way to pray? From our Gospel parable today, we learn that God looks at the disposition of the heart.

A heart that is full of pride – self-righteous and supercilious like the Pharisee – is repellent to God. The Pharisee’s prayer, it turns out, is no more than a self-deception. In reality, he is speaking to himself rather than to God. He is enclosed in his own echo chamber; so much so that he does not need God, rather, he thinks that God needs him. Instead, God looks kindly on the humble, those who – like the Publican – are painfully aware of their own shortcomings. As the Psalmist says, “a broken and contrite heart, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:17).

In the Carmelite tradition, St Teresa of Avila places great emphasis on humility as the foundational virtue of the spiritual life and a prerequisite for authentic prayer. She famously states that, “God is supreme Truth; and to be humble is to walk in truth, for it is a very deep truth that of ourselves we have nothing good, but misery and nothingness” (Interior Castle, VI.10.7).

Indeed, “if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). Jesus is truth itself (John 14:6) and “came into the world to bear witness to the truth” (John 18:37). Therefore, we cannot stand before him authentically in prayer, except in the truth of who we are – warts and all.

Teresa identifies self-knowledge as the “royal road” to discovering this truth about ourselves; a truth that is inevitably humbling (Interior Castle, I.2.8). She insists that knowledge of self and knowledge of God are mutually reinforcing, like the photographic contrast between light and darkness, which work together to convey an image of reality.

In her magnum opus, The Interior Castle, she explains: “In my opinion, we shall never completely know ourselves if we don’t strive to know God. By gazing at his grandeur, we get in touch with our own lowliness; by looking at his purity, we shall see our own filth” (Interior Castle, I.2.9).

Yet there is more. Our humility is not merely about the honest recognition of our fallen nature. It goes much deeper, springing from a desire to imitate the Divine nature from a recognition of the breathtaking humility of God. As Teresa puts it, “by pondering his humility, we shall see how far we are from being humble” (Interior Castle, I.2.9).

Perhaps the most powerful declaration of the humility of God is to be found in St Paul’s letter to the Philippians: “Being in very nature God, [Jesus] did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:6-8).

From this perspective, we begin to understand how absurd – and indeed grotesque – it would be for us to stand proudly in prayer before a God of such unimaginable humility! We can see why God would find that abhorrent or offensive. As the Psalmist confirms, “though the Lord is high, he regards the lowly, but the haughty he knows from afar” (Psalm 138:6).

In sum, the attitude that we bring to prayer determines its ultimate efficacy. God, who is truth, delights in hearts that are grounded in truth (Psalm 51:6), desiring to be worshipped “in spirit and truth” (John 4:24). That means equally the truth of who we are and the truth of who he is. Both truths lead us inexorably towards humility. Lofty as he is, God is drawn irresistibly towards the lowly, as if by some spiritual equivalent of the law of gravity. And thus, paradoxically, the less holy we realise ourselves to be, the more holy we ultimately become.