Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Confession: Pride

So I've been reading more of Mere Christianity, and I just read the chapter on Pride. Here's the gist of it: "Pleasure in being praised is not Pride...The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, 'I have pleased [someone]; all is well,' to thinking, 'What a fine person I must be to have done it.'" (C. S. Lewis 1952)

There's much more, if you disagree the quotation you should really read the whole chapter, it's as well written as the rest of the book (Liepa explained to me that link I gave two weeks ago ins't the whole book, incidentally). Anyway, I figured I'm probably GUILTY of this baby, BIG TIME, as you may have guesed from the title of this blog. So I figured I'd keep count. I estimated a count of 20 Pride sins per day, but it's 4:30, I've been up since 5:50 a.m., and it's only been 4:
  1. an sms from my special lady about what a great dream she had about me made me think "what a fine person I must be for that to have happened!"
  2. an email from a colleague made me think "what a fine person I must be for him to be so excited to have a meeting with me!"
  3. my students told me a grammatical explaination I gave was the same as in text books, and I thought "what a brilliant professor I am to make up off the top of my head the same things experts come up with for books!"
  4. and I'm not sure if this counts, but the repair guy called up to tell me my lap top was fixed, and I thought, "that's the most exciting thing that's ever happened to anybody, because my excitement matters more than anybody elses!"

So is that alot? I feel like that's not that much, at least it's less than I expected. And this experament comes at a funny moment, cause on Easter my special lady asked me at church if I was going to confession, and I told her I can't imagine what I'd say, besides regularly forgetting to go to church.

4 comments:

Liepa said...

do you remember what happened to the proud character in SE7EN? i wanna see that movie again

Jim Gust said...

experiment.

man, were those John Lyman teachers incompetent.

i've never seen se7en, and i guess i never will.

Aras said...

those teachers may be incompetent, but that probably makes it easier for them to not be proud in the sinful way.

mrdarius said...

i'll have to try that experiment myself, but i would've guessed around 20/day as well.

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