December 23, 2013
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The Pride of Universal Guilt
The World on Her Shoulders
A person with the “Pride of Universal Guilt” carries “a form of vanity and egomania. She holds herself responsible for things that could not possibly be her fault. As if she controlled everything, as if other people’s suffering came about as punishment for her sins…. She blames herself.” (1)The idea of being out of control, of having no control or part in a situation or the world around, is terrifying. People long for control, from childhood we seek to understand our world and then to find some means or illusion of control within it to provide security and achieve what we want. As a parent of a little boy who was born with a speech delay and did not speak understandable sentences until after he was six, I experienced saw directly how a parent would rather find some or many reasons they caused their own child to be disabled, rather than accept that they had absolutely no control. ”We should have had a c-section”, or “we should not have let him get immunizations”, or any number of things.
I find the term “pride of universal guilt” interesting, as it recognises the root of this is pride: that “I” am great enough that surely anything that happens is caused by my doing, is my fault. If I wanted someone to die, and they die: then “it is my fault”. Children often struggle with this concept of feeling everything that happens around them is in response to their thoughts, actions and desires- according to my father, child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. Clyde Flanagan. It is something we often carry with us into adulthood, not really aware of it until something happens that shows us how little control we have.It is at this point that we must accept our own powerlessness. For the person who believes in God, we can have faith that 1) God IS in control, and 2) God shows love for us and grace towards us (made manifest in the birth and death of a certain carpenter from Nazareth). When we accept forgiveness which comes at no cost to us and every cost to Him, and follow Him, this does not mean our life will be free of painful things that seem hard to understand. In some cases it may take gazing back at the wandering journey of our lives from future vantage point, to see just how blessed we were.Do we, in pride, create a world in which everything revolves around us and we are responsible for every wrong and negative? Or do we accept the reality of a world in which situations are out of our control, and the only true and non-illusory security we can receive is in God?(1) Orson Scott Card, Speaker of the Dead(2) Art created specifically for this post by Charlotte11Anotation: I find it continually fascinating how, as I read a book by a clearly brilliant author that clearly did not intend a specifically Christian meaning to his work, the Spirit continues to teach me as though that meaning were there. There are often seeds of truth buried in perspectives other than our own: do we, in fear, evade them or plug our ears like a child? Or do we listen, and trust the Spirit inside us to aide us in “separating the wheat from the chaff”?
