Everything depends upon me.
I must bring healing to that grieving family.
If I don’t show up to lead, the work will never be done.
Maybe…
The work to be done is important. We should be serious about it.
Perhaps not so serious about ourselves. Such focus leads to pride. Which leads to a fall.
Relax. Let the spirit flow through you to do the work. Chuckle at your shortcomings. Try easy.
I’ve used meditation for most of my life for both spiritual and physical benefits. I’ve had God experiences. The practice has been calming when I needed it. It’s even impacted my overall personality.
Meditation, called mindfulness, has become all the rage over the past several years as therapists have discovered its benefits for their clients.
Meditation is also one of the spiritual disciplines. People who intentionally pursue practices such as prayer, study, fasting, worship and the like can find a deeper God relationship.
There is a trap into which one is easily snagged—pride.
John Wesley discusses spiritual practices that he calls means of grace. He warns, “After you have used any of these, take care how you value yourself thereon: How you congratulate yourself as having done some great thing. This is turning all into poison.”
The tradition I grew up in discouraged broadcasting the practice. Pride is a horrible thing.
I have been reading some ancient insights into pride and humility. As I was making some notes in the margins of the book, this thought came naturally. It derived from personal experience and from observation.
How often does our pride interfere with learning when we read the Bible?
Since we already know it all, do we read simply to reinforce our opinions?
Can we read with a mind open for God to speak new insights directly to us (think of yesterday’s post about praying with open hands)?
Can we read, and, instead of assuming we know what every word means, be puzzled over the meaning of a word? And take time to look it up? Discerning the nuances of translating from the Greek or Hebrew?
I often read with my smart phone handy stopping to look up a word. Often surprised at the word’s various meanings and derivatives. It’s easier than the old days of reading with a dictionary at hand.
Putting pride behind us with a dose of humility is a great warm up before study.
When I’m serious about studying Christian thought, I love to go to the writers of the first two to three generations of the church. These people were trying to figure out what this new movement meant, what it meant to live with a risen Jesus.
Especially the Desert Fathers were concerned with pride. They knew the power of pride to bring people down.
I’ve been rereading some of the theologians of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. What amazes me is that these very smart and educated men all latched onto certain verses from the Bible and then built a system of theology on them. One source noted that Calvinism is “proved” by these six verses. Meanwhile Arminianism by a different set of six verses.
A few hundred years later a preacher in a small village near my home town was studying scripture and “discovered” a Bible verse. He built a “Biblical Research Institute” and started a movement called The Way International.
What I do find amazing is the hubris of people who read a translation of a translation and then proceed to tell people they know exactly what God thinks.
There is a phrase from French psychologist Émile Coué repeated by Chief Inspector Dreyfus in the Pink Panther movie series—“Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.” (Oh, that was said to help many people, but it didn’t work for Chief Inspector Dreyfus.)
The first step to knowledge is to recognize our lack. Then, dispelling hubris, we learn a little bit more each day. I think we could read Matthew chapters 5-7 everyday for the remainder of our lives and everyday realize something new to apply to our lives.
[Check the beginning of Proverbs Chapter 2.]
If you’ve followed me long, you realize I’m an eclectic reader. I’m like a sponge plus a filter when it comes to absorbing information and wisdom wherever I can. Steven Pressfield writes fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays. His The War of Art (a cute play on words from the classic Sun Tzu, The Art of War) talks about The Resistance that interferes with your creative process.
He writes a weekly newsletter. This morning he wrote about the memorial service for his old friend and mentor Norm Stahl. Norm’s son told the story of Norm and his cousin. The cousin called once and asked for $25,000 for an emergency (most likely a gambling debt). This was many years ago when that was really a lot of money. Norm had it, and he loaned it. The cousin never paid it back.
The entire family knew the situation. It was a constant source of tension at family gatherings. At one family holiday gathering the tension visited again. Norm got up and walked toward his cousin. He hugged him. It broke the tension. Everyone was released.
Pressfield writes, The change in Norm was he shifted from the ego to the soul. This is monumental. It’s the equivalent, if you ask me, of what the Buddha would call Enlightenment.
The ego holds grudges. The ego sees only its own self-interest. The ego hoards slights and grievances. The ego hates.
But the higher self sees soul-to-soul. It pierces the Little Picture and perceives what’s really important. It loves. It forgives.
Pressfield is spot on. That is why Jesus and the early Christian Desert Fathers (see John Climacus, for example) spent so much time on ego, pride, humility.
I sense that we (all of us) need to meditate and pray deeply about our own journey from ego to soul. Someone need a hug today?
It’s 3 in the afternoon (15:00). I finished my workout and breakfast and sat down to write at 9. But since it is soccer season and I never know what emergency I may face, I scanned email. Oh, joy! There was a long email sent to the state sports administration. That created all manner of interpersonal conflicts that required a quick response. Then a second one. This soccer season (in its second week) is shaping up as one of conflicts.
The problem? It really boils down to a simple initial personality conflict that expanded to a full-page memo to the state. It needn’t have gotten that far.
How often we offer a quip in a moment that we think is cute or funny. And, how often that quip is received in a manner different from what was intended. And feelings are hurt. And things grow. And now people are not speaking to each other. And now they talk about the other person to third parties. And it grows and grows like mold on your onions in the pantry.
It could have been stopped. I can still see Don Knotts as Deputy Barney Fife in the old Andy Griffith show on one episode where he said, “Nip it in the bud, Andy. That’s it. You gotta nip it in the bud. Nip it in the bud.”
Yes. A lesson for us all. Nip it in the bud. Don’t let it sit and mold and spread disease everywhere. Fix it now.
Every time there is an incident it happens. For every politician or executive in the news, there it goes again. For when the crazy neighbor complains again on the community Facebook page. For all of these, we (and the crazy media) love to speculate about the psychology, the inner thoughts and fears, the soul (or lack of) within that person.
I picked up this thought from the writer Virginia Woolf, “We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others.”
Yes, hubris pops up everywhere. Hubris, that feeling that we know everything about everything. We can psychoanalyze anyone from a distance. We can know the state of someone’s soul by reading about them on social media.
We assume we’re OK. We assume we’re not OK. Either way we are wrong. And right.
Our actions reflect the state of our heart. If we were to step back from ourselves and look at our actions as though we are outside our bodies, what would we see? Would we look like someone who possesses the heart of Jesus? Would we look deranged? Do we really know enough about ourselves to pass judgement on another?
Probably not. There is where our work lies.
More people recognize the dangers and evils that lie in divisiveness. They talk about it more often in public. That in itself is a triumph. Trolls are everywhere to swamp your comments with, well, divisiveness.
Why I wonder do we devote so much effort emphasizing how we are different from one another. And why those on the other side of the dividing line are evil, bad, very unlikable versions of humans.
Our wish to feel superior to others forms the substructure of this attitude.
Christians specialize in dividing themselves from those who are not. But also so do those of other faiths–Islam, Hindu, Buddhist, nothings, and on and on.
Even within Christianity love divisiveness, there are liberals, mainstream, evangelical, reformed, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Pentecostal (if you haven’t spoken in tongues, are you even saved?)–I think I could probably go on.
Christians who worship in all manner of forms and who hold some tenets stronger or weaker all have one thing in common–Jesus. Thinkers have devoted way too much time figuring out just who or what Jesus was. But at least all agree he existed. That’s a start.
Thomas Merton (one of my spiritual heroes) found common ground of contemplative Christianity and Buddhism. And, after a lifetime of experience, I agree with his path. He was on to something.
I bet that if we tried that we could find more common ground. But we would have to lay aside our pride, and our fears, and open our eyes and hearts. That’s not impossible. But it’s hard.
Sometimes we change–and we don’t change. Or, we change one vice for another.
Perhaps we are a judgmental, abrasive type of person. We “become a Christian.” And we become a judgmental, abrasive Christian. Know any of those? What would Jesus think?
Perhaps we gain the virtue of humbleness. But then we become proud of our humility.
Self-awareness becomes the key to change. When we gain the ability to see ourselves, only then can we become the change we seek.
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.
Faith Venture 