Lent, Days 7 & 8: Pride
It all started with a Lenten devotional (thank you, Biola University Lent Project) on loving your enemies—one thing led to another and then I was holding a stone marked “Pride.” It was soon joined by a few other stones that, like new shoots at the base of a tree, are quick to spring up and grow green in my heart when pride is present: “self-righteousness” and “false humility.” I had set out on a journey to discover how to love my enemies, but soon realized that pride was sitting in the middle of that road. It was something that I would need to dig out (in religious terms: repent of) before I could move ahead.
I recognize that repentance is a loaded word. It is blasted from billboards along the highway, painted hastily across wooden slabs and stuck in the ground at the corner of neighborhood streets. It is pounded into our hearts by fists on pulpits, and in other egregious and harmful ways. It’s a concept frequently used to bring people low. So low that they can no longer feel the sunlight, or remember how precious they are to the Maker of the sun.
With that history buzzing in the background, I wanted to be clearly intentioned in my own heart about what this practice of repentance meant to me, and for me, before beginning. I wondered to myself—was it a return to old, unhealthy practices of self-flagellation that only served to convince me more and more that I was unlovable and unloved by God? Was it a return to the practice of self-shaming that once caused me to bury my precious self deep in order to hide away from God and my fellow man? It was good to check in, but it was quickly clear to me that this moment was about self-protection rather than self-hatred.
(Shout-out to my Enneagram folk out there:) I’m a cut-and-dried poster child for Enneagram-2s. The “deadly sin” that 2s seem to most struggle with is pride, and I find that to be painfully true for me. Categorized as a “secondary human emotion,” pride is particularly insidious in my life because it tends to latch on to innocent and acceptable emotions or experiences so that it can settle deeply into my psyche before unveiling its identity. Operating as such, it sometimes takes me a long while to root it out and separate it from things that are otherwise perfectly reasonable and right. And all the time that it’s lurking in me, it’s slowly releasing its poison into my system.
That is the self-protection I was hoping repentance might bring about. Pride is a poison that infects everything. It’s like getting an infestation in your home, and nothing but structural fumigation will do to rid you of it. For too many years of my life, I have watched from a front-row seat as pride has utterly dismantled beautiful possibilities, ideas, communities, and people from the inside-out. I have been the collateral damage more than once in spaces where humility is sorely lacking, and it has been a kind of foundational damage that’s virtually impossible to rebuild without bringing the whole house down. I carry a deep hatred for pride, but regardless of my experiences, and increased awareness of it, I’ve never been able to totally protect myself from its infiltration: It still slips into my soul with persistent regularity.
Now was as good a time as any to do a pride check. I don’t want there to be termites eating away at my floorboards and think that everything is peachy keen until an ordinary step sends my foot through the floor. I don’t want that poison in my soul. What does this look like? Well, to continue the metaphor, I think it requires setting everything out in the light. Turning it over, searching inch by inch. Following trails of refuse–ungracious thoughts, uncareful actions, hurtful words, the lingering heaviness in my chest and the hurt it causes when I lash out–to the source. It means getting really close to be able to see, then picking off the parasites one by one and disposing of them properly (which is to say, setting them ablaze). Then, when all is investigated and dealt with, putting everything I’m keeping carefully back in place.
It’s a very long, slow process (and even then, I sometimes miss something and then–oh boy, and then…). I don’t expect to finish it all in one day, or even two. But this is the labor I’m focused on right now, and I’m hoping to come up for air soon and carry on towards my original intent.
I’m not done with this work–I’m pretty certain I never will be–but today, I carry these stones to the back of our property and symbolically leave them among the trees. They are stacked in my hand, one atop the other, and it reminds me to root pride out at its source, or else it will gain height, grow wider and stronger, and take me with it: bearing me aloft so that I can only see the top of people’s heads below, and they can’t hardly see me at all.
Today, I commit to the work of digging out the pride that has taken hold of my heart. As I climb up to tuck these stones in the crook of a tree, I confess that I know pride will never be far from me, but I repent of the pride I’ve been holding close and ask that it be taken out of my reach. With this act, I “place” them in the hands of the One on High who is worthy to be so, for “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).
