Kirkepiscatoid

From all blindness of heart; from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice; and from all want of charity,
Good Lord, deliver us.

Oh, sigh. Pride. On that list, that is the #1 of them that trips me up. I'm too self-critical to get too far with vainglory, hypocrisy is too nauseating to me to do more than the occasional foray, envy, hatred and malice don't stick on me for too long (but I do admit to these three when I have the occasional volcanic eruption), and want of charity is, for me, at best, sporadic. Blindness of heart? Ehhhh...that would be #2 on my list. More there in a minute.

But back to pride. The problem with pride is that there is a thin line between "the good kind of pride" and the "bad kind of pride." There's actually some use for the good kind of pride. The pride I have in my job makes me do my best work. The pride I have in my friends, especially ones who have weathered storms in their lives, makes me love them even more. But cross the line, and my pride turns into irrational stubbornness. It comes into the "I'd die before I'd (fill in the blank) realm. In my connections with God, it plays into the times I hide in his presence, or can't sit still with him to be loved. It is the debris in my infected, open, wounded soul. It is what causes the "acute" part of the pain when I struggle in my life, and in my time with God.

Although I ranked "blindness of heart" as #2, sometimes it goes hand in hand with pride, because I become more oblivious, more unwilling to be aware. But I can also do "blindness of heart" simply because I have a tendency that when a task is in front of me, I strap on blinders and push forward, not looking left or right, but only at my "goal", no matter how inconsequential my goal is. Again, this creates a lack of awareness in me, an obliviousness...and if called out for it, my reaction is often, "Whud'IDo?"

One of the things, I think, that makes dealing with one's faults, with one's sins, so difficult is they are shadows of the same things that are the things that contribute to our goodness. So, like a wad of cancer cells that have failed to be detected by our own immune system, we recognize the cancers of our faults as "self" and allow them to grow. We exist in the illusion that it's all okay. We delude ourselves.

I would argue, though, that the "cure" lies within the disease. Avoiding these sins involves awareness of their antitheses in our own hearts. We need to be open to our own heart. We need true humility, the kind with awe mixed in it, to see them, and move forward with a cleaner heart. We need to accept God's "charity" in the form of grace--sometimes very unpalatable in the face of pride and obliviousness!