Crucible of Humiliation

"Accept whatever befalls you, in crushing misfortune be patient; for in fire gold is tested, and worthy men in the crucible of humiliation."

To avoid bristling at the 18^th word – men – Connie would simply speak, again and again in the deepest white-haired holiness of her prayer, just the last four words: “the crucible of humiliation.”  In our circle of chairs at these prayer meetings Kathy and I were young and untested, our lives darned near perfect, in our idealistic way. We had our little house two blocks from my job at the university, two beautiful, healthy little girls, and a VW bus that got us where we wanted to go in 29 cent-a gallon gasoline.  I didn’t know what the heck she meant, but the way she was transformed by the words, the way she climbed into them, stuck with me.

This morning, my heart is occupied by Connie’s words, and I Binged the phrase to find their source.  I thought they’d be in T.S. Eliot of C.S. Lewis.  They are from the Book of Sirach, Chapter 2.  The crucible is a melting pot for metals, a stone container t used to hold metals in a furnace hot enough to melt the metal so the impurities can be skimmed off.  In her aging, Connie had been released from her usefulness, her responsibility in working society.  The women’s college she had served for a lifetime now had someone else caring about the girls she had lived with and loved.  She was in that furnace of aging, and God was the stone bucket, impervious to the heat, that held her even as she melted.  Until this moment, I had thought of the crucible of humiliation as something negative…like the wall. You know, THAT wall: the one that you run into, made of brick; the one that your back is up against. 


In the last three weeks I’ve sat with three young men whose love has moved me with its purity, its certainty.  And all three, it strikes me, have their backs against that wall.  Would they have come to this degree of honesty if not for the heat of the fire?  One fights the fight to be dad his twin sons, the dad he did not have at 15.  Wounds he received in the military before they were born have him on pain medication and oxygen.  I hadn’t seen him since his student days, and my hope to meet him was dashed by his being sent by his good wife to bed, to recover from a too-generously spent Sunday with young men that he mentors.  The second looks at the life he’s lived, the foolishness that he fell prey to before he met his wife, and found a church, and can’t get over how far short he falls from where he ought to be, as loved as he is.  The third is facing the limits of love, unable to open his beloved to receive it. 

These three have their backs against the wall and face the fires of incapacity, unworthiness, and powerlessness.  And even as I delight in the bright glow of their goodness that is being refined, I fear for them, and feel my own helplessness.  I imagine Connie, 20 years gone from us, looking with love across that circle of chairs at my three young friends, worthy men in the crucible of humiliation.

What is your wall, your fire, the refinement that calls you to endure, and the crucible holding you?

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.