IT WAS CLEAR TO ME FROM DAY ONE in the little Pentecostal church of my youth that pride goeth before a fall and getteth you in trouble with the Sunday school teacher, the pastor and the board of deacons. That’s the way they taught Proverbs 16:8 back then. I grew up thinking I had avoided pride. But then I hadn’t reckoned with how insidious it is.
Novelist Ben Fountain holds the mirror up to the phenomenon. In “Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk,” he shows the way this country tends to watch war from a distance. Billy Lynn is home on leave from Iraq. He and the other surviving members of his squad have become 15-minute-of-fame celebrities. Fountain describes the frantic hand pumping as crowds press the soldiers. “They want autographs,” he says. “They say thank you over and over again with a growing fervor. They know they are being good when they thank the troops and their eyes shimmer with love for themselves and this tangible proof of their goodness.”
Pride is not something one rescues herself from. We tend not to even see it. According to Proverbs, it is God who “weighs the spirit” (16:2) and “directs our steps” (16:9). According to John’s Gospel, that same God’s self-giving love makes ours possible.
When it comes to overcoming pride, a great example is worth a thousand self-flagellating words. Here is one of my favorites.
Until Nicholas Kristof told her story in a recent book, Mildred Grady was just another unsung teacher — one who was trying to help a truant, shoplifting student named Olly. Kristof describes Mrs. Grady as “an earnest, dedicated African-American woman who had seen Olly as a smart kid with potential and so she tried to reform him. He responded by mocking her and reducing her to tears.”
It was 1957, the fall of Olly’s senior year, when he wandered into Mrs. Grady’s library and his eye was caught by the slightly risqué cover of “The Treasure of Pleasant Valley.” Because he didn’t want to be thought of as someone who would ever check a book out of a library, he put it in his jacket pocket and strolled out. As he read it under the covers that night, he loved it. A new world opened. Later, when he sneaked it back onto the shelf of the library, he discovered there was another book by the same author that he had not noticed before. So he pocketed that one. The pattern continued with Olly taking, reading, returning, discovering, taking, reading, returning, discovering, through four cycles — enough, of course, to effect a conversion. A reader was born.
Only years later did Olly Neal, the first African-American to be appointed district prosecuting attorney in Arkansas, then judge, then appellate court judge, find out the truth. Mrs. Grady had seen him take that first book. The next Saturday she had driven 70 miles to Memphis, Tennessee, to see if she could find another book by that same author. No expense account. Living on the meager salary of a teacher in a segregated black school. It took her three tries to find a store with the book she was looking for and two more Saturday road trips to fill out the shelf.
At the class reunion where Olly and Mrs. Grady finally compared notes, she told him how excited she had been to see him take that second book.
He mocked her and reduced her to tears. And so she pulled rank? No.
He mocked her and reduced her to tears. And so she got even? No.
He mocked her and reduced her to tears. And so she set aside her power and her pride … and stepped out into the new creation.
JANA CHILDERS is dean of the seminary and professor of homiletics and speech communication at San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo, California
