Saintly CEO: What is True Humility. Does it Involve Pursuing Glory?
Understanding the Virtue of Humility, and How it's a Call to...Glory?
I can’t promise you much, but I can promise you today’s newsletter will be better than Nolan’s Odyssey. Just kidding, I actually liked it. I can, however, promise you this is a lot shorter and won’t blow out your eardrums.
Welcome back to Saintly CEO: the Tuesday morning newsletter for business owners whose first objective is to become a saint.
IN TODAY’S ISSUE
Updates: My First big Speech
Feature Content: What Humility Really Means
Heavenly Hustlers: Spotify for Patents?
Highlights: What CF and Sam Adams have in Common
[read time: ~8.5 min | word count 1,898]
News / Updates / Events:
Nashville Catholic Founders, we have a meetup tonight. 🤝 If you’re coming and haven’t signed up yet, register here.
If you’re interested, here is the recording of the talk I gave at Catholic University of America last month. I had to tell a room full of Catholic biz school professors what they need to teach the leaders of tomorrow.
Learn how entrepreneurship in mission territories helps Catholics fight poverty and elevate communities toward holiness and prayer through our latest podcast episode with Eamonn Clark. 🎧
Catholic Founders in NYC had an amazing celebration last weekend. 🎉
Check out all of our in-person events on our Luma page. Or start your own meetup; we’ll be happy to coordinate with you. Email us at admin@catholicfounders.com.
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Pursue Glory. Humility Requires it of You. Let me Explain.
Humility is the basis of all virtues. A priest once illustrated this to me using the Crucifix. He said (I’m paraphrasing) the heart of Jesus — the center of the crucifix — is Charity. But holding all that up, is the cross itself — firmly planted in the ground. Without that firm root, the cross can never stand, and charity cannot be displayed.
This is an important reminder for us as Catholic builders.
We are, in many ways, living in the heart of the world. It’s the domain where we must allow our charity to shine to all those we encounter. However, as stated previously, we cannot do this if we are not firmly rooted in humility.
Now, there is something interesting about humility. I recently read 1 Peter 5:5-6, and one line really stood out to me. Here’s the passage.
“In the same way, you who are younger must accept the authority of the elders. And all of you must clothe yourselves with humility in your dealings with one another, for
‘God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’ [quoting from proverbs]
Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time.”
Perhaps this is an indictment of where the attention of my heart lies, but that last phrase stood out.
“So that he may exalt you in due time”.
It just seems interesting to me that Peter tells us to humble ourselves, so that God may exalt us in due time.
Does that mean we are actually in fact meant to be exalted… eventually?
While I do not feel that I have in any way ‘figured out’ this passage, I have been thinking about it for a couple days, and here is what I think it means (I remain highly open to suggestions though).
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We know that God desires our exaltation in heaven. This is not really glorification of us as much as it is a glorification of God through his perfected creation. But beyond heaven, I take this to mean something similar.
In this life, we can become exalted… in order to give glory to God. We can attract the praise and glory of men, but then choose to redirect that energy towards its rightful end: God.
And I believe that God is pleased by this.
His creation, using the talents and skills he has bestowed on us to do good, to imitate his goodness on earth, and ultimately to send the praise for those works up to him. Hopefully drawing more people in towards him, so that they may know his heart.
Consider the story of a musician. He’s given a talent. He decides to practice and lean into that talent. He knows it comes from God, so as he grows in popularity, he always directs that praise he’s receiving up towards God. He can only do this authentically if he actually believes that the gift is from God. When others see this authentic praise of God, they are drawn to consider it more deeply, hopefully one day, coming to know God.
The key part of this is that there is an active participation. We do put in the work. This ‘work’ is really just cooperation with the things he’s given us. The raw talent is shaped by his graces. But it requires us pursuing him.
Going back to the musician. He had the interest, the basic skill, and the resources to know about his love of music. But he had to cultivate it into a real skill. To the point where he could even be capable of receiving praise from men. If he hadn’t cultivated the gift, there would be no attention for him to redirect towards God.
We started this conversation around humility, and this is where I’m trying to get. If we are humble, we can truly recognize the gifts God has given us. Once we have done that, we must also recognize that it would be wrong, lacking gratitude, and plain sad for us not to put those gifts to the best possible use.
For goodness sake. He created us, gave us gifts, and how often do we just bury those in the sand? What if the musician just let his gift fall to ruin, or worse, what if he never cultivated it at all?
Doing this, putting these gifts to work, honing them, perfecting them, and using them to serve those around us, will undoubtedly lead to us getting attention. In a way, you could say it would lead to our ‘exaltation,’ at least in the world’s eyes.
Does this mean we should not do these things? No. Obviously not based on the reasoning we’ve followed so far.
It doesn’t mean we should not do these things; it just means that we should direct all that praise to God, where it belongs.
Again, we cannot set out in pursuit of exaltation, for to do so would be a failure to recognize the gifts are from God.
We should, however, set out to exalt God. To glorify him for the gifts he’s given us, and the things he’s done for us.
Exaltation is going to be the outcome as a byproduct… but not exaltation of ourselves. Exaltation of the Most High, King and Lord of All — God; the Creator.
So, I’m asking you, in humility, to recognize where your gifts come from, and pursue glory — glory for God. He desires that you put those gifts to work. It pleases him.
“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time.”
God Bless & Happy Building
~Silas Mähner
Heavenly Hustlers
These are other Catholic business owners. Nominate one (including yourself).
🚰 Kory Koralewski is the founder of Denver-based Optimum Field Service Solutions, a company providing specialized management software for the irrigation industry that integrates scheduling, inventory, and CRM tools for dealerships.
💰 Chris Da Silva is based in Armadale, Australia, and is building ‘Financial Discipleship,’ a project offering digital resources and coaching to integrate faith with personal finance. The project aims to provide financial education to institutions, including schools and their staff.
🪪 Art Nutter, based in Colorado Springs, leads Patent Books, a platform that helps independent inventors secure licensing compensation from major tech companies through centralized industry patent pools.
🚜 Michael Thomas of the Catholic Land Movement, based in Cooperstown, New York, leads an international mission to resettle Catholics onto productive, agrarian property. They promote distributist economic principles and foster community-led sustainable agricultural enterprises for Catholic families.
📈 Christian Esqueda operates Krux Marketing and Philanthropy based in Texas, an agency that assists Catholic organizations with advancement and fundraising. He is also piloting a SaaS product called Micro Give to help streamline donations for Catholic nonprofits.
🙏 Carlos Espinoza Banegas is the Founder of the PleasePray App. Through this, his goal is to create innovative faith-based solutions to connect communities.
🧮 Tim Thackston leads and operated a family owned accounting firm serving small businesses. He is based in Westminster, Maryland.
🙋♂️ Nominate a Heavenly Hustler (including yourself) - It takes 1 min.
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Highlights: A Key Part of Sam Adams’ Success in the Revolution
A group I’m part of recently read about Samuel Adams and how he is arguably the most critical man in creating the circumstances for the American Revolution.
Without getting super far into it, there is one thing that stood out to me. And that is the network that he built called the Committees of Correspondence. The name sounds innocuous, but in reality it was a form of shadow government before the union was finalized.
Hearing about this got me thinking a lot about what we are doing with Catholic Founders. The local meetups, discussing the ideas of Catholic entrepreneurship. Our WhatsApp chat, stitching these local communities together. And a shared goal: to Make Our Country Catholic.
We all need to do our part in growing these networks and fostering true community among ourselves.
Here is a huge list of various resources that we have compiled over time: The Ultimate Catholic Founders Resource Guide.
Feel free to bookmark it as we’ll continue to update it. And if you have suggestions on what to add, ping us (even if you want to promote your own stuff).
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Great newsletter this week! Love this community