To humble someone is to bring low, abase. We love it when the proud and haughty have to eat humble pie and we can cut someone down to size. We've been taught in church school that the Christian must be humble, to think less of oneself, to continually debase, or self-abase. But I've come to learn that this isn't humility. A friend of mine is a Franciscan Friar who lives at the friary in Howard County and he showed me that humility is something other than trying to make yourself humble, as we've defined it.
Humility comes from the Latin word, humus , meaning soil, dirt.
Humility is a state of being down to earth, as it were. It means being honest. It means telling the truth. It means being truthful. This fourteenth century mystic spent many years in conversation with God, which she wrote down in her work entitled Dialog .