Posted on August 3, 2016
Posted on August 3, 2016
No one likes to be wrong, and often admitting we were wrong seems like adding insult to an injury, yet it is an absolutely crucial ability for humans to foster. When we consistently refuse to cultivate humility we instead cultivate an inner person of pride.
When we observe pride within ourselves and often more easily in a family member that cannot easily hear truth about themselves, we play it down. We say, ‘well so and so is just like that’. They then give non-verbal cues and passive aggressive attacks towards those in social situations who conversationally risk moving towards those areas in their life, character and relationships. Our pridefulness must increasingly hold a mask of our own faultlessness up until we have tricked ourselves with our image consciousness and cannot discern the real from the imagined.
When our pride is in a room everyone becomes aware that conversation must stay in the shallow end of the pool of life. Anyone who attempts to venture into the deeper end of things will be met by the abandonment of silence or a short harsh yank back to the shallow end again. While we make excuses and explanations around nature and nurture for the way pridefulness acts, it destroys a sense of connectedness in a room, and more painfully in our families and friendships. It creates disconnection and isolation that leads people to talk about us being there but not actually ‘present’.
I’m wanting to break the mirage of harmlessness that we pick up about pride, it is not harmless it is endangering our very souls and shared abundant life. I believe the outbreaks of fear, anxiety, depression and suicide in our societies trace themselves to the relational disconnections and aloneness that result. Pride is not harmless.
Interpersonal pride is one thing, but we increasingly live in a world where there is an epidmeic of pride that characterises the very institutions that govern our societies. As fear dominates the international politcal landscape we see leaders engage in brinkmanship and insist on their often self-deluded image of themselves and their nation. Their pride and the corresponding lack of ability to admit any wrongness is literally leading people to their deaths in wars, coups and riots.
Now, as you consider the ones you love, not least yourself in this diagnosis of pride I do want to keep something before us. The person of pride is not a bad person, they are a pained person. This person will not be served by purely rebuking them in some fire and brimstone fashion. People retreat into pride as a mechanism of self-protection, what these people need is to be loved. But loved enough not to swerve the invisible road blocks that are put into place but to be engaged.
Again, I want to excercise caution in how you engage the person of pride. Very often we have built up a great deal of resentment to the unspoken tension the person of pride creates and engaging them can very quickly become letting them have it and that will causes even deeper levels of retreat.
If you are going to confront someone in a moment where you observe pride rearing it’s ugly head, you have to be motivated for the person, their transformation, and for the liberation of their relationships that are in bondage to this pattern of control.
A person with pride is not a bad person, but instead someone who’s pain has overcome their ability to do the necessary work on the inside. So what does it look like to overcome the person of pride in ourselves? That’s the good news and what I’m writing about next week!
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