Marketing with Christian humility—or trying to

A Reflection for Saturday of the Twentieth Week in Ordinary Time

Find today’s readings here.

Those last two lines: Exalt and you will be humbled, humble and you will be exalted. 

In the fall of 2020, Orbis Books published my book, “O Death Where is Thy Sting?,” a moody, odd and profligate tome about suffering. To publicize it, I went on podcasts. I set up readings. I asked one of my co-workers to broadcast it on social media. I solicited blurbs for the book cover from other authors. I wrote not one but two articles for America excerpting the book. 

Soliciting blurbs, going on podcasts and inviting people to readings is essentially saying, “This book is that good; it is that special, that strong, that profound, that wonderfully profligate; it deserves your precious attention.” 

For instance, the blurbs: “What a relief, and strangely a comfort to be allowed inside a Jesuit brother’s own dark nights of questions and quandaries.” By Julia Alvarez! In the Time of Butterflies! Her! How great!

And Thomas Lynch, who wrote The Undertaking, a finalist for a National Book Award! “Joe Hoover has shaken the theodicean tree [I don’t know what theodicean means but it just sounds so great] and stands among the fallen apples, wormy and bruised, and laden with grace and gravity.” Cryptic and elliptical and profligate and basically: “This is a very cool book.”

With these quotes, was I exalting myself? Or, even more sneakily, was I enlisting these other people in exalting me so that I could garner the fruits of their exaltation without making it seem like I myself was exalting me? 

(And right here and now, this whole section of the article, would you say I am exalting myself by repeating for you, the reader, how these others have exalted me?)

In today’s Gospel, Jesus lays into the Pharisees. He critiques how they parade about to be seen and how they love places of honor. Do what they say but not what they do, he says. Jesus does this to get down to the nub, the core, the broth in the kettle reduced to this perfect inversion: “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” One of the greatest utilizations of the semicolon in all the Bible.

In marketing my book, it would certainly appear I was exalting myself, and so I will be humbled, cast out into the proverbial outer darkness with other failed writers where there will be grinding and gnashing of typewriters. 

Right?

Or. 

Or, is the problem at hand actually not that you exalt yourself, but how you exalt yourself? What if you are just telling the truth? “Hey folks, I wrote a book and I like it, and I think you might like it.” 

Maybe the concern is not about, in my case, marketing your wares; the concern rather is about an expectation of other people’s praise of what you are marketing. Boasting of your accomplishment and mentally insisting the world laud you for it—because how could it not—is a quiet arrogance, a base pride and certainty about your worth and standing in the community of artists and humans.

Maybe that is the real issue here. Not the exalting, but the way it is done.

Because the fact is, the midwestern introspective heavy-laden Capricornish self-disregard thing that some people are afflicted with could probably use tempering now and then. Some people are so afraid of seeming like they are exalting themselves, boasting or “being the show” that they resist even telling anyone about their accomplishments.

In other words, if one does not acknowledge that they have done something worthy, good and even fantastic, then can they even choose humility about the thing they have done? If one does not acknowledge to the world the truth-–“I made something that I really think is worth people’s time”—then how can they heed Jesus’ warning about being smug and arrogant in the way they proclaim that truth?

Maybe we can market a book, a magazine or any given enterprise with humility. With humility maybe we can do what may feel uncomfortably like self-exalting but is actually just telling the truth—without necessarily insisting that others see that truth the way you do. We might just say: “I like what I’ve done and hope you do too”—letting chips fall where they may.

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