Ah, humility.  It's worth a lifetime of study.  As the world continues to recoil from the seemingly unceasing paths of violence too many of our fellow human beings are taking to resolve their cultural frustrations, I share words of Edward John Carnell, the second president of Fuller Theological Seminary in California, on humility.  So he observes, "Even as we never allow either ourselves or others to approach the heart from a humble, loving acceptance of the mystery of the heart, so we must approach others with an equal sense of mystery and with equal humility and love."
     Well put, Dr. Carnell.  Even though we too often fail to appreciate the mystery of the human heart, we must nonetheless strive to approach the hearts of our fellow creatures in full view of the mystery embodied in them.  We'll never find humility until we recognize the complexity and presence of mystery, the mystery of life, the mystery of living, the mystery of the heart.  We will never succeed in being humble if we fail to acknowledge that there will always be dimensions to us--all of us--that defy ready explanation.  Humility is accepting that yes, we are material, but that we are transcendent, too.  We are creatures of immense mystery, mystery which several lifetimes of study will never unravel fully.  We must confront the fact of our mystery, our curious capacity to hold immanency and transcendence simultaneously in our person, before we can truly love and understand our fellow human being.
     God did not make us mechanical and material beings only, but creatures with profound depth and point.  We're present, yet we're mystery; here, but everywhere else, too. Humility is acknowledging that we will never know it all, that we are finite, that we have boundaries.  Humility is recognizing that we are woefully contingent and dependent beings: we live in visible form, yet speculate and ponder its limits in the face of overwhelming mystery.