Faith Venture

The teacher on the podcast I listened to this morning on my walk around the ponds mentioned that problem—when I comes before we.

Evagrius Ponticus, a 4th Century Christian monk and teacher, early in his Praktikos writes about the eight kinds of evil thoughts. The last he addresses is pride.

The demon of pride is the cause of the most damaging fall for the soul. For it causes the monk to deny that God is his helper and to consider that he himself is the cause of virtuous actions. Further, he gets a big head in regard to the brethren, considering them stupid because they do not all have this same opinion of him.

Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos

I have seen this affect others in a negative way destroying relationships and respect. But that is hardly the key. Most important it is our ability to see this within ourselves and to “nip it in the bud” as the saying goes.

Anger follows this, according to Evagrius. If we pay too much attention to media, we may think of anger as the description of our culture. Anger from pride or anger from fear.

As we nestle with God in prayer and contemplation, seek release from pride and then from anger. Ourselves and everyone around us will be the better for it.

This entry was posted on July 12, 2021 at 8:00 am and is filed under Awareness, Disciplines, pride. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.