I was wondering what was going to be my subject of my Sunday Sermon and then over the last few days it grew kind of organically (I asked the universe and it answered me).
My subject today is the dark side of pride, which is excessive pride.
I came upon this subject by watching a movie with my mother a few days ago based on an Edith Wharton novel called "The House of Mirth". In it a woman at the turn of last century who is beautiful, smart and from an affluent family tries to control the destiny of her life with her valuable assets, however it is her very assets that go against her and through a series of unfortunate decisions she ends up destitute and dies from poverty as her excessive pride forbids her from reaching out to the people who care about her for help.
We then saw another movie early this morning from the 30's called "The Women" (which had an awful remake last year) in which an all female cast goes through marital issues in which in the end they blame themselves for having too much pride to fight for their marriages. This one I can take or leave but it's true, sometime we let our pride and egos make decisions for us and we let relationships die. Jane Austen's novel, Pride and Prejudice is a perfect example of this sort of excessive pride.
When we speak of pride it is mostly a positive quality. Pride connotes love of country, of self, of our culture and nationalities. Pride is our love and acknowledgement of our accomplishments, our family, our sport teams, our offspring, etc. Pride is generally a good thing but as I mentioned beforehand pride can have it's dark slide when it gets in the way of our survival and the ability to accept help from others in our time of need.
In this economy my mom and me have been seeing all around us lost of jobs from our friends. My mom has been trying to get another job in her field but because it is such a niche field but she has not had much success, so we just concentrate more on our jewelry line as that is our passion. So when we saw the movie, "The House of Mirth" we thought, "Yikes!" no time for the luxury of excessive pride, if we need help we are going to let our friends help us and hopefully we can we can then help our friends in turn.
I am a Maltese, a proud purebred dog with an aristocratic history. I was bred to be on the laps of "ladies who lunch". Obviously that is not the case for of my mommy so I have to just learn to be grateful for our situation and forget my aristocratic pride and accept the help of those more fortunate to help us to get us through this hard time with the minimal of suffering and hardship.
My mommy and I think excessive pride is a result of the super ego and therefore not really the "self" so if we just work on separating the ego and the self we can learn to use pride for good and not have it be self-destructive to us and those we love. There have been too many stories of people committing suicide or killing their entire families due to lost of their fortunes or jobs from this terrible economic environment. The individuals who have extracted these atrocities had excessive pride and egos. They cannot see the forest through the trees in that they cannot image how they will adapt to their temporary fall of economic good times. Social workers are afraid that there will be more incidences of people committing suicide or killing their families due to their pride in not seeking help.
So my mommy and I are going to learn a lesson from all this. It's not easy as we are both proud beings but we want to adapt and be happy and we do know that life is all about patterns and what goes up most come down and vice versa so we and our friends will get through these hard times as this isn't the first time we went through hard times and we have since survived and thrived.
On a completely different subject we want to give our condolences to Martha Stewart today as her adorable Chow puppy Little Genghis Khan perished in a fire along with 15 other dogs at his border's home. That is so sad and breaks our heart as we here at the PPP believe puppies weren't made to go to heaven so early in their lives. In honor of Little Genghis Khan, Martha made a Chinese lunch for her guests that day (true story).
I hope you had a nice weekend. My mommy and me had a hard week last week but it's another week and we survived so we are crossing our fingers for a better week. We give thanks for our family and friends as they have helped us greatly in this time of hardship by giving us solutions on how to go about our dreams. For that we are forever grateful and thankful! Chow for now!
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