"He that is proud eats up himself..." ~Shakespeare

Yesterday I began reading, in honor of the feast of Saint Thomas Becket, the epic verse drama by T.S. Eliot known as Murder in the Cathedral.  As I read, reflecting upon how deeply Eliot captured the struggle of the human heart, one question struck me in particular:

THOMAS

Is there no way in my soul's sickness,

Does not lead to damnation in pride?

Is not that the question of our lives?  Pride—that first sin, that greatest sin, that sin that makes good evil—plagues our pilgrim paths.  At the very moment when we think to achieve victory for God, we find ourselves working for our own glory and not His, surrendered to ourselves and not after all to Him.

I have heard that once one manages to conquer all the sins in the flesh—gluttony, anger, envy, lust, sloth, covetousness, and even pride—that one must then face these on a spiritual level.  The deeper one goes into God, the more the devil tries to bring him down.

What greater tool of destruction could there be than pride?  For if holiness is the presence of God within and union with Him, then the sin that chooses to exalt self on the altar of one's heart must of necessity shrivel holiness.  Yet how subtly it works!  It sneaks in so silently that we do not realize how much we have begun to rely upon ourselves, to glorify our own work rather than the will of God.

Especially when one like Saint Thomas Becket must choose to serve God rather than men, the temptation of pride comes.  The devil likes to turn back upon us all the good that we would do.  He wants us to act for God only out of our need to be great and at the same time to believe that we only act from our own pride and therefore are worth nothing before God.  What contradiction there!  Yet how many times have you found yourself caught up in similarly contradictory thoughts prompted by the evil one?

Sometimes it seems that wherever we turn, we see pride rear its ugly head.  It seems folly to resist and therefore can even bring us to the edge of the chasm of despair.

One time in prayer as I wrestled with that despair of freeing myself from pride, my Lord brought to my heart a beautiful and humbling thought: rather than fight pride by trying to destroy it, I must instead turn to Him, for pride will always be there.  In fighting it, we make it grow stronger.  Yet if we choose the good—and choose to turn to God—we will find that the dragon of pride begins to lose its power because we let God fight the battle and He always wins the victory.