It hurts to be cut down to size!

Sometimes I outrun myself and forget who I came from and where I’m going. Before I know it, it’s all about me, and I have a hard time hearing otherwise. Trust? What’s that?

It’s hard to accept that something needs to change, because the values I’ve bought into tell me it’s going to be painful and shameful to humble myself. Yet that’s precisely what we are called to during Advent: remembering who we are and making the journey with Mary and Joseph back to our lowly “hometown.”

The good news is that rather than shame, God has a greater gift in store when we get there: God’s very self in the midst of a community “humble and lowly.”

Sometimes I think humility is a mental exercise. But during Advent, I remember that humility, for God, meant leaving a place of honor and going to be with the humble and lowly of our world.

Where might God be inviting me to “come home” this Advent season? Who are the people God is inviting me to be with?

— Ryen Dwyer, S.J., a Chicago-Detroit province Jesuit scholastic, is currently studying philosophy at Loyola University Chicago.