The sin of pride is especially insidious and perhaps ineradicable, and an absolute barrier to salvation: because it is the ultimate complacency that "I am good enough as I am".
Salvation is resurrection, and resurrection is a remaking such that we become wholly good, wholly motivated by love...
This includes our recognition that we need remaking, that we need to reject and leave-behind that of us which is dissonant with the euphony of divine creation.
But if we are spiritually-proud, we see no reason why we need to be remade to be fitted for Heaven.
The proud Man wants, instead, that Heaven be fitted around himself as-is.
Such pride seems very common and normal, and is found among the despised, weak, poor and sick - as also (more obviously) among the strong, arrogant and famous.
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Note: Of course, pride is not the only blockage to salvation. Self hatred is another, because it is our-self who is resurrected. If we hate our self, we will not desire to be resurrected.
2 comments:
A helpful post. The notion of not wanting to be remade for Heaven but having the world (or Heaven) remade around oneself is very memorable.
It strikes me that the former implies a positive transformation of the self, whereas the latter insists upon the world being remade to fit some obviously negative and false self. The latter also inevitably ends in failure (due to entropy, suffering, death, etc., of not just the self, but the remade world).
It also raises the point of which choice is more *realistic* (just to counter the materialists out there).
@Frank - I was thinking, partly, about how entitlement and resentment have become core to so much of present ideology - and how they can become a kind of central organizing principle for so many people, which seems immune to any argument or persuasion - indeed are stimulated by any semblance of disagreement.
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