Lenten Programme II: Pride – “Blessed are the poor in spirit”
The Deadly Three: Lenten Meditations on Pride, Envy & Anger
Lenten Programme II: Pride – “Blessed are the poor in spirit”
Christ Church, Windsor, NS
Fr. David Curry 2025
“Be it unto me according to thy word,” Mary says. It is the perfect and, really, the only counter to pride; it is humility in all of its strength and beauty. It complements the Beatitudes especially the first: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.“ Pride goeth before a fall,” the old saying goes as taken from Proverbs 16.18. It reads in full: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” Only too true. “Ante ruinam exaltur,” Augustine says, “the heart is exalted before its destruction,” its ruin. But in a way, it is worse than that. Pride is the Fall in us. That is why pride is not only the first and the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins. It is what is deadly in all of them.
Thus Augustine called pride the foundation of sin. “Pride made the soul desert God to whom it should cling as the source of life, and to imagine itself as the source of its own life.” Pride always signals a kind of obsession with self, clinging to ourselves rather than to God the author of our very being.
Thomas Aquinas speaks about pride as “inordinate self-love [which] is the cause of every sin.” This is the point. Pride is in every sin.
Pride is in our envy, making us think that we deserve better than what we have or are and, consequently, to pull down and destroy anything that seems to stand above us and which others have. With pride there is no above, only below. There is only what stands below us and yet it consumes us in our revolt against the good or joy of others. It is the deadliest poison for our life together in the various forms of our communal and social life, our life in community, whether it is family, school, or church.
Pride is in our anger, making us adopt a position of superiority from which nothing can make us swerve. Even more, anger blinds us like smoke to the legitimate motives that move people. Anger is the smoke-screen that hides reality. Anger raises our fist to God because things are not as we think they should be for us. The all-consuming character of wrath or anger means that others sometimes see it better for what it is than we do. This is different from the category of righteous anger but even that runs the risk of overkill and overreach. Once again, our anger is about ourselves and often as not the penalty of anger is ourselves bringing harm upon ourselves in one way or another.
Pride is in our sloth, making us think that we may get by with a minimum of effort while obtaining the maximum result. Again, it signals a profound form of self-conceit and self-importance. It contributes to a kind of complacency and sense of entitlement based upon nothing more than our sense of ourselves and what is ‘owed’ to us without having to lift a finger.