Spiritual Pride

 

The Way of Trust and Love

How do you try to make humility a practice?

 Humility in Lent - Ignatian Spirituality

Three kinds of humility

• To humble myself to total obedience to God.
• To be ready for honor or dishonor, poverty or wealth, or anything else for God.
• To desire poverty, dishonor, and even be a fool for God, since Christ was.

Pride is sneaky

At its root, self-objectification is a problem of pride. Pride is often thought of as a good thing in our modern society; we use it to denote admiration. I tell my kids I am proud of them, for example. Or I might say without embarrassment that I am proud of this book. But this connotation is relatively new. In almost all philosophical traditions, pride is a deadly vice that rots a person from the inside out. Buddhists use the word māna, which in Sanskrit refers to an inflated mind that disregards others in favor of the self and leads to one’s own suffering. Thomas Aquinas defined it as an excessive desire for one’s own excellence, leading to misery.[22] In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Satan is depicted as a victim of his terrible pride by being frozen from the waist down—fixed and in agony—in ice created by wind from the flapping of his grotesque, batlike wings. 

Pride is sneaky: it hides inside good things. Saint Augustine astutely observed that “every other kind of sin has to do with the commission of evil deeds, whereas pride lurks even in good works in order to destroy them.”[23] So true—work, which is a source of meaning and purpose, becomes workaholism, which hurts our relationships. Success, the fruit of excellence, becomes an addiction. All because of pride.

Brooks, Arthur C.. From Strength to Strength (pp. 56-57). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Humility is an elevation

 

Second Week of Lent

Matthew 23:1-12

Friends, today’s Gospel exposes the pride of the Pharisees and concludes with the prescription of humility. I want to reflect on this virtue. St. Augustine said that all of us, made from nothing, tend toward nothing. We can see this in our frailty and sin and mortality. St. Paul said, “What do you possess that you have not received? But if you have received it, why are you boasting as if you did not receive it?” To believe in God is to know these truths. To live them out is to live in the attitude of humility. Thomas Aquinas said humilitas veritas, meaning “humility is truth.” It is living out the deepest truth of things: God is God and we are not. Now, all of this sounds very clear when it’s stated in this abstract manner, but man is it hard to live out! In our fallen world, we forget so readily that we are creatures. We start to assume that we are gods, the center of the universe. The ego becomes a massive monkey on our backs, and it has to be fed and pampered constantly. What a liberation it is to let go of the ego! Do you see why humility is not a degradation but an elevation? DAILY GOSPEL REFLECTIONS FROM BISHOP ROBERT BARRON

His sublime self-denial

Through the pride that caused his disobedience, man severed his allegiance to God. The sovereign Lord, coequal with the Father, humbled Himself to the dust, becoming lovingly submissive "even to the death of the Cross."  Man willed to be absolutely self-sufficient, and God, to compensate for His creature's gross insubordination, nation, was "mocked and scourged and spat upon"; He "endured the Cross, despising its shame."

The necessary sequel of man's pride and disobedience was his self-indulgence. Man wills to make himself his only master; he wills to follow the tendencies of nature; he wills to extinguish the light of God in his soul. 

To satisfy for man's yielding to sinful pleasure, the divine Son became "a man of sorrows and acquainted with infirmity ... a leper, and as one struck by God and afflicted." He was "led as a sheep to the slaughter," was "dumb as a lamb before his shearer and ... cut off out of the land of the living. How criminal was man's craven carnality, how perfect Christ's atonement through His sublime self-denial!

John A. Kane. How to Make a Good Confession: A Pocket Guide to Reconciliation With God (Kindle Locations 405-411). Kindle Edition. 

Confession

The fruitful confusion associated with Confession, which often prevents recourse to it, is an inestimable benefit. It overthrows our pride, the cause of all our sins; it deepens our humility, the foundation of all virtue, by making us share in Christ's unspeakable humiliations; it confounds us before one instead of millions.

John A. Kane. How to Make a Good Confession: A Pocket Guide to Reconciliation With God (Kindle Locations 365-367). Kindle Edition.