Pride and its sister

The plants have taken a beating. Any pride they had in their splendour has surely been tempered. Pride, my father used to say was his greatest sin. But not the flowers, they are innocents. Just there to help us see the beauty that is. We on the other hand are always thinking, planning, loving, managing. We are not innocent because we have the power to think and do. 

This week I have been thinking about my father and what he said about pride and wondered what he meant. So often I did not go to the underneath with him. So often I just accepted what he said without asking what was behind it. So often he said the same things again and again as I do to my own children, that I just let the words fill the air in the room. Sometimes I barely listened.

The few times I did question it I never got much. He just gave me a quick story that had no real story in it. I do this myself sometimes when I don't want to tell the understory, or perhaps when I don't even know the understory myself. When I look back it seems I barely knew my parents. They had lived so much before me. They had raised six children, lived through the blackouts of the war next to an American base on the easterly most point of North America. There was so much about them I never knew. So his concern about his pride still captures my interest because I relate to it. I understand the notion of pride, but I hate to think of it as a sin or in today's words perhaps a fault. What was the story that lead him to say this time and time again? And why was it his fault? 

I see pride differently. Probably because as a young woman I was indoctrinated in the importance of self esteem and assertiveness. But for me it has a very different meaning than it did for my father. I believe we must recognize what is good in us and at the same time we must believe in our humanity and our fallibility. Pride can live in us as long as we have humility as its sister.

If pride is by definition taking pleasure in your accomplishments as well as being conscious of your own dignity, then it is important for us to know what we have done or are working towards. It is also important, of course, to know that we never do it alone. There are the others that help us. And depending on our spiritual life, there may be God, or the universe, or however you speak about what is greater than you. For I am sure of one thing, there are indeed forces greater than me. And this brings me back to my own father who felt this also. And now years after he has left the room I still wonder what he wondered. I still would like to know the rest of the story. Parents and children remain with each other all of their lives. We are tied together with gossamer threads that are unseen when we are young.

And so if he were here I would listen intently. This is what I tell myself. And I think it might be true for I am older now and my desire to know what he felt and thought is deeper and more sincere. I too think of pride and how careful one must be with it. How we must know our own goodness and also know that we are small under a big sky. And I would be happy to sit and listen because I have the gift of seeing the gossamer threads now. How their thin filaments hold us together across the seasons of life and beyond. How each of us lives for the next generation. And how our individual stories can sometimes carry each other across those generations.

I would like to know my father's stories about pride and how they shaped him. For pride is an emotion like any other. It rises and falls. It is tempered with time and heat just as the hardest of metals can be tempered with the same. And it is just a word in a story that was never truly told and so remains a mystery.