Entire arsenal of spiritual life is needed to overcome pride's destructive force

Book 2, Chapter 2

-Part 3 continued more-

When we fail to perceive the merit or meaning that is ours at the hand of God, we will devise our own. This is a very troublesome aspect of those of us who seek to follow Christ. We can be ill-at-ease with our own status within the household of God. Probably, we are not aware enough of the gracious work of Jesus by which we have been elevated from “enemy of God,” to “child of God.”

Selfishness never looks good on a person, but, among spiritual people, self-centeredness is just plain weird. Augustine said “Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues.” If that is so, then pride must certainly be the mortar and pestle by which all other virtues are ground to powder.

The best disguise for spiritual pride is zeal. In the very name of seeking God with all our hearts we can jeopardize our true calling by making one up out of our own idea about what we think our service unto God should look like. It is perilously easy to become jealous of another person’s ministry. If he builds a vast network of buildings and people and equipment (and cash) in his work for the kingdom of God, then why shouldn’t I try to get a piece of that?

When I was 9 years old I sat by myself with the small congregation, while my mother sat with the choir, and I was perturbed at the minister, sitting in what appeared to be a throne padded in burgundy velvet, and him doing all the talking. It was a 9-year-old’s version of pride making itself known by spawning the spiteful question, “Who does he think he is?”

It doesn’t have to be strictly ministry that makes us envy others. It could just be their state of life, to use Caussade’s words. I notice, for example, that money comes very easily to some people. They are in situations where their earnings are very good. Myself, I have never been a grand earner of money. I have known men and women who could turn an idea into cash in ways that simply mystify me. My mother is a natural bookkeeper, but I neither inherited nor absorbed any of her monetary acumen. Possibly I am no more financially refined than I was when I was sitting in that church on that Sunday at age 9.

In some spiritual ways I am also no more refined than I was back in 1966, sitting in that red-brick small-town church with the floor tilted toward the front, and the windows stained with greens and blues.

At the root of many of our spiritual immaturities is the lifelong struggle with humility.

Science is prone to tell us, for example, that our bodies are always coming down with pneumonia. In healthy people, the body is strong enough and equipped enough to ward off the pending ailment. A weaker, less-equipped body might put up less of a fight, and pneumonia gets the best of it.

I was a fairly strong young man when I had a bout with walking pneumonia. Other than general exhaustion and my lungs feeling like they were filled with sand, the worst symptom was that of pleurisy. The lung lining is inflamed and hurts. Coughing or sneezing felt like someone was spearing me in the back with a rusty blade, then twisting. I remember running to walls and door jams to press my back against some external support so I could sneeze with less pain. I also remember wishing that something could be removed from my body to make walking pneumonia go away. Alas, there is no such procedure.

It is the same with pride. It cannot be removed. It has to be overcome. With what? In the same way that the overall health of the body wards off pneumonia, the life that God gives us and renews us to includes the gifts, the fruit and the character of spiritual life that will hold pride at bay.

In order to answer the problem of pride we have to engage the entire arsenal of our spiritual life.

It is possible that over the course of time we have fallen prey to the idea that we have to balance a certain amount of pride with anything spiritual in our lives. Purity of heart will not allow a percentage of pollution. Pride killed us in the garden, while humility made resurrection possible through the work of Christ on the cross. We cannot see the cross clearly and conclude that a little bit of pride will give us the balance that we suppose we need.

Having become Christians, we are not now immune to pride, but are rather more vulnerable to it in its most horrific form: Spiritual pride.

The presence of pride and the absence of humility are two sides of the same coin, but we must realize that the presence of pride undoes far more than humility. It contaminates every other aspect of the spiritual life. I can trace everything I have ever done wrong, and every right thing that I have avoided to a proud “me-first” spirit.

Pride won’t stop any of us from reading about self-abandonment to God’s providence, but it will most certainly stop us from actually abandoning ourselves to God’s providence.