Children sigh with resignation and parents with relief: It’s back-to-school season. For the presider, it’s back to work as vacationers return to the pews. Daily readings switch to Luke’s gospel, every day until Advent.

How do I maintain a sense of healthy humility? Who helps me keep my head on straight? What do I do to avoid the twin pitfalls of self-aggrandizement or self-deprecation? Can I accept that I am a “good-enough” human being?

I know people sometimes think that I make this stuff up. But life is so full of potential parables, as Jesus himself observed, that I don’t have to. Once I arrived at a meeting at which lots of important church people were expected. Some of the attendees were well known in the diocese and a few around the country. Being the neurotic type, I arrived first and wandered the room in search of a good seat.

One time when Jesus went for a Sabbath meal with one of the top leaders of the Pharisees, all the guests had their eyes on him, watching his every move.

It was planned to be a party for a child turning 5 and all her kindergarten friends to remember forever. The theme was “The Circus.” During a school day lunch period a clown arrived with invitations that looked like the program of a circus.

A friend of mine was secretly hurt when the provisions of his mother’s will were announced. He’d always assumed that his mother would bequeath her wedding ring to his daughter.

A grey-haired woman, neatly dressed and well into her upper decades, wasn’t exactly what the partners had in mind for their receptionist, but, “We’re desperate,” they reasoned. “She needs the work. Let’s take her on for a few months.”

A number of years ago my cousin got married. The wedding reception was held at a very sophisticated French restaurant. The timing between the ceremony and the reception was not well thought out, however, so people went right from the ceremony at church to the reception at the restaurant with more than two hours for cocktails before dinner would be served.

In a spirit of humility, we stand in the presence of God, confident of God's forgiveness.

Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. The goods we possess are not ours, but theirs.