Occupied with Pride
Adopting a heart posture of humility is my greatest work in this life
Dominant overculture asserts that we ought to place ourselves at the center of the Universe.
It’s a narrative of seemingly never ending exhortations of “me, myself, and I.” A wanton tsunami of hyphenated self-isms: self-help, self-love, self-care, self-actualization, self-made. A shameless exaltation of the proud.
We’ve, in turn, become a populace that is excessively preoccupied with ourselves.
As someone who’s spent years studying psychology, trauma, stress, and the nervous system—this excessive focus on and overvaluation of the self… well, to be frank, is actually quite natural and consistent with our body’s drive for self-preservation.
When the body perceives danger, the instinctive fleshly response is to put ourselves, our needs, and our survival first.
A simple sensory cue and our physiology cascades into a stress response pattern primed for fear, defense, and self-centeredness.
And this anatomical deluge doesn’t just stay at the level of our body; No, the state of our physiology inevitably affects and informs the psychological story that occupies our hearts and minds, the mythopoetic narrative that we live into in our relationships, families, and communities.
It is evidence of our primal, animalistic impulses brazenly asserting their position in the pecking order of our internal systems.
And it actually makes total sense that our body, decidedly deficient of a perspective of the eternal, would cling to a vestige of self in this temporary vessel of life. Indeed it’s really no wonder, as humans socialized within a culture dissociated from God, that we’re so primed and ready to yield to our body’s assumption that this moment and our current perception is all there is.
Our body’s urges are strong. So strong, in fact, that most of us fail to recognize the particular ways that the prideful posture of our heart has its roots woven into this physiological fear response. A posture that has us trudging on in a state of perpetual amnesia of our True, created purpose.
I say this, not as someone who’s somehow conquered her ability to ever be affected by her body’s carnal urges, but as someone who struggles greatly, as someone with great empathy for those of us living within the confines of this tunnel vision, so caught up in the rat race of survival, so undoubting of our skewed perceptions, so convinced that this life is truly all that there is.
(May I never, in challenging another’s pride, believe myself somehow immune.)
Yes, pride can skew our perceptions of reality; We are apt to gorge on a sickly sweet delusion of lies rather than stomach the bitter fruit of Truth.
As a mother, I naturally see the parental dynamic embedded in this unfolding drama. As an adult woman, I recognize that my age, education, and lived experience give me an advantage to recognize that I have more wisdom than my young children. I can see that allowing them to indulge in certain natural tendencies is, in fact, not good for them. That is why, as their mother, I am tasked with setting clear boundaries and de-facto laws in our home—to guide my children’s choices and behavior in a direction that has their best interest in mind.
No, you may not eat chocolate candies for breakfast.
No, you may not fling your little brother across the trampoline.
No, you may not watch hours upon hours of cartoons.
No, you may not stick a fork in the electrical socket.
Knowing children, they will inevitably push back against any number of these rules I’ve established. They might even throw a tantrum or complain I am somehow unjust.
Not because they’re innately contrarian, but because they lack the wisdom to recognize how these limitations maintain a kind of order that allows everyone to thrive.
God created a similar set of laws for his children, albeit with a bit more depth and breadth than the rather simplistic rules I’ve established in my own home.
But laws they are still the same. Laws that maintain a kind of order that allows us to thrive as human beings.
How often do we, in our pride, push back against these natural laws, believing them unjust and irrelevant? How pervasive is the tendency to believe ourselves as somehow wiser and more intelligent than our Holy Father?
Pride has become the bedrock of the World we now live within.
It’s become so ubiquitous that many of us struggle to recognize its prevalence.
And pride is so stealth, so sly, that we often fail to see how its talons have our hearts gripped in a hardened vice.
Examining our motivations can prove valuable in determining our level of pride—but how skilled are we in concealing our true motivations, even to ourselves?
Consider that pride is not just a fixation on our favored parts, but on our unfavorable as well.
As long as the spotlight is on ME, it doesn’t really matter where your gaze is set. All press is good press, dontchaknow?!
Yes, we’ve become hyper-focused not only on our lofty achievements, next-level abilities, absolute importance, and social status—but also on the evidence of our inadequacies, our blatant failures, our foibles & faults.
While we often think of a selfish, prideful person as an individual who positions themselves above all others, we rarely consider the one who habitually asserts their unworthiness as conceited.
But being fixated on our shortcomings is a strange and twisted form of self-exaltation.
It’s pride wrapped up in penitence.
It is written that pride was the first sin ever committed, when the angel Lucifer, created absolutely perfect, chose to violate God’s natural order by believing itself as equal to or greater than its Creator.
Pride makes us believe we can get by without God… That, in fact, we ARE God.
Walking in pride, we see ourselves as somehow equal to the One who created us.
Our skills and abilities become self-sourced, to be used according to our will, to glorify ourselves, rather than as gifts imparted to us from God, to be used humbly in service of others as an instrument of His beauty and goodness, bringing praise and glory to Him.
Walking in pride, we become wholly ignorant of Truth, falsely equating what feels real right now in this moment with what is unequivocally True.
Walking in pride, we live perpetually dissatisfied and discontent, what God has provided is never enough, and we are left always wanting bigger, better, faster, stronger.
We are like little toddlers, screaming uncontrollably, flinging ourselves to the floor in haste when we notice that Daddy has just spread peanut butter onto the wrong side of our toast… HOW COULD YOU?!
Pride puts us in an adversarial posture against our Heavenly Father, in flagrant rebellion to God’s purposes for us in this life.
These limitations you’ve established for us, God, are clearly backwards, oppressive, and arbitrary! We surely know what’s best for ourselves. And, in fact, we know it much better than you, for that matter!
Jesus once told a parable of a Pharisee and a tax collector: The Pharisee, a devout religious leader, was known for exalting himself as “holier-than-thou” above all others for dutifully following Jewish law, while the tax-collector, considered in Jesus’ time as occupying one of the lowest rungs of the social ladder, boldly recognized his penchant for sin and humbled himself in repentance.
Who do you think Christ asserted as the one truly walking with God?
If pride had a polar opposite, it would be humility.
Humility asks us to remove ourselves from center stage, repositioning God in His rightful place, reassuming our place as His children, wholly and fully dependent upon His mercy and grace for every good and beautiful thing we’ve been granted in this life.
"Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less." - Rick Warren in 'The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?'
I can remember hearing one of my former mentors Victoria once give voice to a prayer that floored me.
She said, “May there be none of me, and all of you, God.”
My initial gut response was, “What?! Why would she ever pray for something so silly?” In my pride, I failed to recognize the value of her appeal for humility.
Over time, I began to notice how very often I found myself prideful, in both blatantly overt and sneakingly subtle ways.
In my marriage. While parenting. With my own parents. On social media. In the line at the grocery store. In the confines of my own head.
I began to realize how chained I am to my natural tendency to place myself at the center.
But it’s said that an addict cannot hope to recover until they have humbly admitted their dependence upon their drug of choice. That’s the first of twelve steps, right?
I now see that willfully admitting my proclivity for pride is the first step in coming back into right relationship with God, the first step in adopting a humble posture as a child of the Most High.
I think one of the things that attracted me most to following Christ was the central practice of humility through a flagrant admission of sinfulness.
Of course Christians are not somehow exempt from the sin of pride. Indeed, like the Pharisee of Jesus’ age, many modern Christians have come to believe themselves as somehow better than others for their faithfulness in their eternal salvation.
Just as our self-hatred can be a camouflaged form of egotism, our faith can easily become weaponized by the adversary as a tool for sin.
I believe this is why humility is so powerful: Because our natural inclinations are towards indulgent self-centeredness, the path of selflessness and sacrifice, when practiced willingly and intentionally, exists as a kind of supra-human divine love made incarnate.
We are called to develop mastery over our instincts, so that our crude corporeal urges towards self-preservation are tempered and deliberately submitted to our created purpose of self-sacrificing service to others.
Sacrifice is to make sacred. It’s etymology combines the Old French sacer, meaning "sacred” and facere, "to make, to do.”
To adopt a heart posture of humility is to sacrifice our selfish pride on the altar of Truth, recognizing that we are not our own, but that we belong to God, created in His perfect image to serve His goodwill.