"What has become of King Don Juan?
And the Princes of Aragon,
What has become of any of them?
What remains of our handsome nobility?
And of the many fads and fashions
They brought with them?
What remains of their jousts and tournaments,
Gilded ornamentations, fancy embroideries
And feathered tops?
Was all this insignificant waste?
Was it anything but a season's fleeting touch of green on the fields?"
Jorge Manrique
"To some who were confident of their own righteousness and achievements, and also looked down upon and despised others who were less accomplished, Jesus told this parable: ‘Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ''God, I thank you that I am not like other people – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.''
‘But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
‘I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’"
Luke 18:9-14
Pride, intended as a recognition of our achievements and superiority, ironically diminishes our fullness as human beings, and often quite dramatically. It can make people act in ways that from a distance seem very pompous and silly. And among these proud ones there are often those who not only go beyond a simple agnosticism and indifference, but actively refuse to acknowledge anything greater than themselves with a kind of fervor, aggressively despising any forms of observances among others as a weakness of mind and character.
They proudly build their castles made of money and honors and power on the weak sands of their own ego and worldly achievements. But that form of pride is so much easier for us to understand. We see it clearly in the self-proclaimed elite of our time. The balance of things may only be restored for them by the four last things, which are irresistible even to the mighty.
But less obvious perhaps is a spiritual form of pride, that reduces us into a kind of distortion of things that would be equally silly if it were not so insidious. It blinds us to our own faults, of course, but even worse than that, it leads us to magnify the faults of others. In doing so we can justify our own imagined achievements, and at the same time dismiss own bad moral treatment of them. There is no person who is spiritually proud whose heart will serve as a home for the Holy Spirit, the spirit of humility, and mercy, and of love. They are too full of the law, and of judgement, and of the trappings of righteousness
Pride makes us think of ourselves as a superior example of all creation, a model for others if they were only able to rise above their own weakness. Even if we acknowledge a greater God intellectually, or so we think that we do, in fact we are doing so on our own terms, terms that we ourselves have set, and often in a very legalistic manner. God becomes the perfection of our own goodness, and not the other way around. This is the leaven of the Pharisee, the great experts of the law, as noted so often in the gospels, and in the parable above.
Spiritual pride leads to a lingering spiritual death. It turns the living being into a whited sepulcher, all bright and polished on the outside, proudly decked out with ornamentation, scrupulous attention to detail, and adherence to the letter of the law, but inside full of corruption and foulness and 'dead men's bones.'
It is all too common among those who love the rituals and the forms of religion, but want nothing to do with the human realities of it. It is a sickening romance with the self, unto death.
But Jesse, isn't this just what it means to be human? If Mother Teresa had decided to heck with the poor and the dying, and run off to join a reality cooking show in Hollywood to make her fortune, wouldn't that only be
human?
No. There is a difference is between the things that people may do that are beneath their calling to be fully human, and what they do that strives to achieve the fullness of their humanity. It is this general lack of moral aspiration and the glorification of that perversion of individuality which is selfishness that marks our time, as it has done so many times in the past..
Gold tried to break out above 1300 on Friday and was turned back toward support.
Stocks had a 'dead cat bounce' on the Friday option expiry after the big decline of the day before.
See you next week.
