Humility’s Burden

The City of Spirituality

She was a young woman dressed in dirty men’s clothing from a dumpster and burdened by a large heavy suitcase she was dragging down a dark alley in the City of Spirituality. I should tell you how she got there, or you might mistake her for a homeless person, which wouldn’t be accurate. A few moments earlier she was wearing a black skirt and a white silk blouse. However, those feminine clothes were stripped from her by the Shame Enforcement Officers. They threw her into a dumpster to teach her a lesson about her true spiritual role in society.

When crawling out of that nasty garbage (which is where she acquired and clothed herself with dirty men’s clothing), she had to pull, twist, and jerk the large and heavy suitcase out of the dumpster, and then she hit the ground hard. Her clothes itched and smelled of shame, and her suitcase was full of heavy burdensome shame. But why did she have it? That is a good question. Why did she drag that suitcase full of burdensome shame out of the dumpster?

When she got out of the dumpster, the Shame Enforcement Officers were no longer present, for they never lingered longer than what was needed to shame someone. It’s a busy job enforcing the laws of social status in the City of Spirituality, and especially when the city legislation keeps writing more laws each week. You can always count on the Shame Enforcement Officers to do their job as quick, efficient, and frequent as you might see a postman delivering the mail.

They treated this woman with no less haste and efficiency. Her name is Humility; a light skinned girl with dark hair. Her walk down that dark alley in the City of Spirituality (with her burdensome suitcase of shame), was the most miserable experience of her life. In the past, she had often worried about the day she might meet the dreaded Shame Enforcement Officers, but she never imagined it would be for this reason. Have you guessed why she was shamed? Let me give you a hint. In the City of Spirituality, it is against the laws of social status for a woman to speak or instruct on her own authority about matters of spiritual reality.

Humility never saw herself as spiritually authoritative. She had grown up in the City of Spirituality, where great and renowned spiritual men were the leaders, and women extended their authority no further than the reach of those men. Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of women who would lead, speak, and teach with spiritual authority, but if one of them ever did it in a way that made them appear greater, wiser, or more authoritative than a male spiritual leader, it would be a serious violation of the laws of social status.

Humility wasn’t even a spiritual leader when she broke the law. Her parents had taught her the basics, but she learned most of what she knew by living in a city full to the brim with spirituality. Every coffee shop, book store, grocery mart, café, bar, business, and street corner expressed and influenced the diverse mystical reality of the City of Spirituality. But Humility was not that serious about it, and she wasn’t even sure what she believed. She didn’t belong to a particular group or church or religion or organization. Her belief was open, and she described herself as spiritual, but not religious.

So what happened? You must be wondering. How did this spiritually diverse average girl in her early twenties become a law breaker of social status? How did she extend her spiritual authority beyond the reach of the leading spiritual men in the city? When did she become so interested and concerned with spirituality that she would say something authoritative about it? She was, up to that point, an absorber of spiritual information only. She never answered questions from her own opinion. If someone asked her about something spiritual, she always referred to what someone else had told her, never as if it was her own idea.

But something changed, didn’t it? It always does. People say they never see the change coming, but that’s what makes life so exciting. The greatest legends are the ones where the hero seems to come out of nowhere. It catches everyone by surprise; the unlikely hero who seemed to have no real value or purpose in the big picture of things. Humility was just that type of person in the City of Spirituality. She was a little fish in a vast ocean, but even the smallest events can change the course of history.