When a preacher takes on topics like humility and pride, it is important to do so with a good deal of care.
I think back to a time circa 1978 when I was a sophomore or junior in high school. It was the custom back then that the youth from the four Lutheran churches in the area where I grew up in Wisconsin to come together for a joint Easter sunrise service. I either volunteered or was volunteered to give a homily that morning—I can’t remember which—and I chose to base the homily on a passage from the Gospel of Matthew:
[1]3 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
I should say first of all that I’m really glad that homily happened before the days when it was easy to record such things with a phone and post them online. I’m really glad that there was no chance of my words going further than that little Lutheran church early that Easter morning.
I can imagine that if there was a video of that event it would show this young person pretty full of righteousness, pretty full of myself actually. In those coming of age years for me I did see a lot of hypocrisy in those around me and my memory is that I chose to address those concerns, as we might say, “head on.” My memory of that time is that I was rather proud of myself for my words, but I can expect that for many out there that day the joke was on me. That I was the one who had missed the whole point of that scripture passage.
It is one of those memories, that, I expect, if I were able to see it I would probably say, first of all, ouch. It was one of those messages that needed to come with a good deal of humility.
So that scripture about pride going before the fall is echoing in the back ground somewhere for me this morning. And all that said, pride and humility are things that I find myself thinking about a fair amount these days.
Pride in the form of hubris and arrogance seem to be all around us. The theologian C. S. Lewis called pride the essential sin. He called it the utmost evil. Yes, it is all around us. The problem is knowing how to respond. It can be easy to want to respond to that hubris and arrogance with more of the same. But that doesn’t seem to work all that well. And what about the humility part? Aren’t we also called to see that hubris and arrogance and to name it for what it is?
We live in complicated times.
Part of the spiritual life is asking us to look at ourselves—and our lives—in perspective. To see ourselves in those places where we shine but also in those places where, well, we still have growing that we need to do.
These days in my prayer life I find myself asking for guidance in how to live in these times. I believe we are asked to be present in the world and to bear witness to the world for all it is and to use our gifts and our power well. But that being present asks us to be mindful of not only all we see and all we know but also to be present with all we don’t know, all we have yet to learn.
Here’s what Wikipedia says about pride:
Pride is an inwardly directed emotion that carries two antithetical meanings. With a negative connotation pride refers to a foolishly[1] and irrationally corrupt sense of one’s personal value, status or accomplishments, used synonymously with hubris. With a positive connotation, pride refers to a humble and content sense of attachment toward one’s own or another’s choices and actions, or toward a whole group of people, and is a product of praise, independent self-reflection, and a fulfilled feeling of belonging.
In a few months we’ll send a large contingent to the pride parade here in Portland. That kind of pride, that celebrates the diversity among us, that calls out and the qualities take make each of us unique, well, I’m all for that kind of pride. There is a place for recognizing our gifts and using our gifts. Particularly when those gifts have not been celebrated and affirmed.
But the shadow side of pride is a when to goes in the direction or hubris and arrogance. It is a kind of making ourselves the center of things without much regard for others. Everything becomes about us and we really don’t care much about how others fit into the picture. And I don’t know about you, but it feels like there are some examples of that around us these days.
Now humility, in contrast, is usually seen as a virtue.
Humility is defined as being “unselved”, a liberation from consciousness of self, a form of temperance that is neither having pride (or haughtiness) nor indulging in self-deprecation.[4]Humility, in various interpretations, is widely seen as a virtue which centers on low self-preoccupation, or unwillingness to put oneself forward, so it is in many religious and philosophical traditions, it contrasts with narcissism, hubris and other forms of pride.
But humility, particularly a kind of faux humility, can also have its shadow side. It can have that sense of self deprecation, of almost putting yourself down, and perhaps in turn to be a way to not claim our power in the world but to instead of put it off on others.
Now I expect that most of us, if we were to honestly reflect on who we are, would see ourselves somewhere on an imaginary continuum between humility and pride. One of those poles likely comes more naturally than the other, I expect. And of course we all have those inherent qualities that were celebrated and affirmed or not… and also too is in the mix. Sometimes that pride can be hard won and needs to first of all be something that comes from within. Finding our way to self acceptance and pride can sometimes be a lot of work. And sometimes the lessons of life can bring humility, whether we are ready for it or not.
And it might be that we can learn a thing or two from our religious ancestors in this regards as well.
When we look at our own Unitarian Universalist family tree, a tradition of pride particularly stands out. It was the minister Thomas Starr King who famously compared the Unitarians and the Universalists this way: “The Universalists,” he said, ”believe that God is too good to damn them. The Unitarians believe they are too good for God to damn.”
There’s some truth in the old joke that has survived for a long time. Truth our Unitarian ancestors had a pretty high opinion of themselves and thought themselves superior to just about everyone else. Within that elevated sense of self could be all kinds of racism and sexism that left a lot of people out.
Hubris is certainly not too strong a word. And that hubris kept them from seeing the arrogance inherent in that and didn’t recognize the privilege they carry.
But we can still fall into some of those vices these days. We can so easily lose sense of the privilege we have. We can forget the sacrifices others have made that have made it possible to be where we are. There are so many things that it is easy to forget. When we talk about white supremacy culture I think that’s an example of what we’re talking about. The spiritual task starts with just being aware of all that our privilege has brought so many of us.
Hopefully our modern day Unitarian Universalism calls out a degree of both pride and humility for us. One way that I like to think of it is in the context of our 7 principles, particularly the first principle and the last one.
When we look at our inherent worth and dignity of every person, that is a good place to start. But there is also an extreme of that, a shadow side, which would go something like, I am the center of the universe.
It is always important to ground that recognition of the individual’s worth with the recognition of our interdependence. After all if you want to honor everyone’s—and everything’s inherent worth, well that’s where that interconnected web comes into play.
Truth is we all need to be in the world with pride in the gifts with have and with an awareness of what those gifts are. But we also need to be grounded with a degree of humility about ourselves in the scheme of things. Truth is we are all in this together.
The spiritual life asks us to balance these, to be asking ourselves how it is we are to live.
Bill Sinkford, as he has talked about evil the past couple weeks has come down to the point about the choices we make, how it is we are to live. How it is we lean towards the good, how it is we lean towards evil, that which cuts us off from the fullness of life.
And our awareness of pride and humility, that too, is something we need to keep paying attention to. What choices do we make? How do we see our lives in context? How do we see our privilege and our power? How do we see our interdependence and how we fit into the whole scheme of things?
We live in times when anger and hubris and righteousness seem to be all around us and I think it can be easy to feel our own share of righteousness and anger is response. But if all we do is respond to hubris and arrogance and righteousness with more of the same then maybe the worst of those things is what gets called out in us. That might be where the humility part is so very important.
This week we observed the death of Stephen Hawking, considered by some to be the most famous scientist since Einstein. Hawking with a theoretical physicist and cosmologist and his book “A Brief History of Time” was a bestseller in the 1970s and made science accessible to many, many people. He lived with ALS for decades and even though it was very difficult for him to communicate he did just that and shared his knowledge in remarkable ways.
In reading tributes to him, one of the things that struck me most was a piece on how Hawking, as a scientist, liked to make bets with other scientists. And the important part of the story was that he was fine with losing the bet because that meant that science, in the end, might be advanced. In fact he reveled in losing bets because for him it meant that when scientists could be right as well as wrong, that ultimately the importance of questioning and learning and discovering were increased.
In 1974, Hawking bet Kip Thorne, a CalTech physicist, that Cygnus X-1, a bright object in the constellation Cygnus, wasn’t a black hole. In 1990, he announced that the accumulated evidence meant he’d lost the bet. The subsequent publicity raised the profile of black holes for years.
In 1997, Hawking and Thorne bet another CalTech physicist, John Preskill, that information swallowed by a black hole could never be retrieved. If Hawking and Thorne were right, the finding would undermine the basic tenets of physics. Hawking worked on the problem until 2004, when he used the occasion of a major physics conference to announce he’d devised a calculation that proved he was wrong. The bet was covered globally, as was the scientific question at the heart of it — and Hawking’s embrace of his own error.[2]
Embracing our own errors. Being willing to be wrong. Taking pride in our own accomplishments and our learning and our growth—it is all part of this being human. How we are to live is one of the basic questions for us. How are we to be in relationship with all of life? How we are to be as individuals together on this good green earth.
But this being human doesn’t always come easily. The school of offers us lessons day in and day out. The spiritual task, I think, is first of all to pay attention, to notice. It asks us to the places where we are accountable—to those around us, to our community, our God or higher power, however we might name that. It asks us to live with courage that we will come round right.
Our Unitarian ancestor Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “A great(person) is always willing to be little.” Now by little, Emerson didn’t mean small. Rather, he spoke of the humble person as one who knows their place in the world, as one who has confidence, as one who is not afraid of being perceived as little but grounded in the world and who they are.
The spiritual task is to day by day by day see ourselves in relation to this vast and mysterious universe. It is to look in wonder and in awe that we are here and that we are living and growing beings in relation with all that lives. And that we are to live and move with pride and humility about what we know and all that we don’t know. And to see ourselves finally, as connected to it all. Amen.
Prayer. Spirit of life and of love. God of many names and of no name be with us. Be with us in our learning, be with us in our failing, be with us in our succeeding. When we falter, help us to have good folks around us to help us find our way. And when we would know that success, may we have others to celebrate with us. In this complex and broken and wonderful world, help us to find our way. Amen.
Benediction
As you go from this place, may your journey be grounded in not only pride but also humility. And through it all may you use your gifts to bless the world.
[1] Matthew 7:3-5 New International Version (NIV)
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-14/physicist-stephen-hawking-was-smartest-when-he-was-wrong
Topics: Evil