Pride

All the time, as a child, I heard my mother mention “the sin of pride,” though she wasn’t inclined to do so with anger, wasn’t inclined to point her finger, chastise me; rather, she would be the wry, ironic observer and teacher, ready to summon, say, Ecclesiastes (“vanity of vanities, all is vanity”) in order to give herself, never mind me, a bit of perspective on things. How well, for instance, I remember her response to an especially good report card I once brought home. I wasn’t such a good student at the time (fifth grade). I was, in fact, a noisy brat who hung out with two other boys just like me — a bothersome threesome to our teacher, who would call us “fresh,” tell us to mind our manners, threaten us with “demerits” and trips to the principal’s office, where we were roundly rebuked, sent back with warnings that our parents would be notified, that we would miss “athletics,” our favorite “subject,” and instead be asked to write 100 times avowals such as “I will obey the teacher from now on.” Still, in the clutch, I knew to shut up and try to behave myself, lest the teacher make good her promise to call my parents in for a “conference” — sometimes a child, thereafter, would be told to miss school for a few days. Now, for once, I’d parted company with all of that, turned into a momentary scholar of sorts, even secured a high grade in “conduct,” attesting to a spell of apparent obedience, respect for rules and regulation. Now I had evidence in hand, those letters “A” and “B” that had me, without reservation, on something called the “honor roll.” The teacher herself had sent a note home, meant to accompany the report card — an expression on her part of satisfaction, appreciation, even celebration. I had “quieted down,” my parents were told; I had taken a long first step on the way to being “good.”

To this day I recall my delight as I went home quickly with that report card and that letter — none of the usual dawdling, the diversionary tactics that could drive my mother (especially) and even my ever so reserved, even detached father to distraction: Where is he, and what is he doing now that will, soon enough, get him (and by extension, us) into some kind of trouble? I still remember, also, the satisfaction, the obvious pleasure my parents took in the card I handed them, and the teacher’s letter. My father allowed himself a thin smile, a wink: his wordless version of strong approval. My mother, far more talkative (a mixed blessing, I often felt) showered me with her appreciative gratitude. She “knew” I’d “pull through”! (Whence, I wondered, such knowledge on her part, when it certainly had eluded me?) She had “prayed” for this “turn.” (Is that what God has to hear, millions and millions of such entreaties — and how does He ever have the time to listen, never mind respond?) She had spoken to her sister about this matter of a son’s rebelliousness, and she, a schoolteacher herself, then living in Sioux City, Iowa, had counseled “patience,” had urged my folks to let me “grow up,” as assuredly I would. (But I had heard them criticize so-called grown-ups for the very qualities they found all too present in me — a naughty disobedience, a rebellious streak). Still, these perceived qualms or doubts on my part — a child questioning his parents, even as they worried long and hard about his inclination, at school, to question (to defy) adult authority — had at last given way to a swell of self-satisfaction, and, with it, good will, as my parents remarked upon (or in dad’s case, indicated) their relief, their approval.

Suddenly, though, a shift in the weather. Suddenly I feel chilly — if not totally taken by surprise. Now, I am hearing my beloved and warm-hearted and so often quite affectionate mom singing a different tune. Now, I hear this — and I swear, I know the message, word for word, from memory, not the workings (obviously!) of a tape recorder, though (Lord knows) the lack of mechanical validation presents a serious challenge to what can be accepted as “objective,” as opposed to “subjective.” (How about the “objectivity of subjectivity,” I once heard Erik H. Erikson muse, ask a few of us with some barely subdued annoyance as he contemplated something called “oral history,” with its glorification of a machine called the tape recorder — as if it doesn’t also shape what we say, engender self-consciousness, curb truths as well as enable their expression, all in the name of “progress” with respect to, and in contrast with, the tradition of the memoir, the essayist at work with his remembered past). Now, I am sitting at the table, and across from me my mother speaks, her voice noticeably lowered, her took grave: “Bobby, we must always worry about pride.” She is ready to go further, to explicate, but she knows she has sent forth a signal that will worry her husband, my dad — that will, actually, make him quite irritated. He registers that emotion, yet again, silently: He frowns at her, casts me a look of obvious sympathy, and then the sound: He has picked up the newspaper, as if thereby shielding himself from what he knows will come, a kind of “overwrought Bible-talk,” be once called it, when he had succumbed to (for him) a vast loquacity. Mother has given him his “say,” and now she has more of hers: “You see, we are tempted by pride at moments like this.” A pause, while I wonder at her choice of pronouns; I haven’t noticed any such inclination — though by then, I can anticipate what is to come, her insistence on precisely that point, and sure enough, I’m not disappointed: “That is how God works — He judges us not only by our accomplishments, but by how we bear them. And that is how the devil works — he tempts us with pride, and we become quite pleased with ourselves, too pleased with ourselves.”

She’s gone as far as she wants to go — too far for dad. He puts his paper down noisily, but won’t settle for that break with silence. He is simmering with a kind of down-to-earth, commonsense outrage that I had learned, already, to appreciate mightily — his scientist’s earthiness against mom’s religious flights of fancy (and righteous admonishment). Finally, his words, all the more precious for their relative scarcity: “For heaven’s sake [the irony!], why are we [we!] making so much of this!” My mom lowers her head — but not in fear or surrender, both dad and I know. She is praying for us! How to beat that, I would a few years down the line begin to wonder! Dad goes for the final plunge to victory: “You know, there must be a kind of pride in warning people — in warning yourself — of pride!”

That does it — the argument is fully engaged by both of them: Mom agrees with that last, psychologically astute comment, but reveals her own theological and psychological (and adversarial) skills, by remarking on the pride of the person who warns others of their obscure and not so obscure forms of pride. Dad counters that she and he can keep going back and forth in that way — to what effect, though? Mom tries to free both of them, all of us, from an overly focused subject-matter. “Phil, I’m just warning us about the danger of smugness.” He rejects the overture, however: “Sandy [her given name was Sandra], don’t you see that you are letting that Bible go to your head — it’s pushing us into this intense discussion, as if it’s a question of Life and Death, Heaven and Hell, all because Bobby came home pleased as punch with his good grades, and so are you and so am I, and I think that should be the end of it.” She says yes — but also no: “All right, I agree. I am pleased as punch! But I still think I should tell these children — I still think you and I should worry — that success can be a real challenge to us; that the greatest success is a humility that you have to fight for, every day, and especially on days like this, when the sun is shining brightly on you.” He retreats, in an instructive acknowledgment which I hope I’ll never forget: “Yes, things can go to our heads, I agree.”

In retrospect, I realize that my dad never did go for my mom’s biblically informed psychology; rather, he settled for a secular kind that did, however, meet hers part of the way. In retrospect, too, I thank the Almighty Lord for my mom’s provoking, at times unnerving, insistence upon “pride” as the great moral and psychological measuring rod. In New Orleans, when I visited the psychoanalyst I was seeing in his Prytania Street office, five days a week, that side of my mother often came up for examination. Indeed, the doctor who sat behind me on the occasion of the many years of a “training analysis” often wondered what the mere child I was could possibly make of the kind of discussion I’ve just set down. Wasn’t I “angry,” for instance, or at least “confused” that my mother implicitly would chastise me — when all I’d done was try to do a good job at school? Oh, yes, I assented; but then I’d hasten to point out plenty of smugness and self-importance in us, the big shot doctors who make up membership (or aspiring membership) in psychoanalytic institutes, not to mention medical schools or other graduate schools, or colleges, and on and on downwards, even to elementary schools, where (I’ve noticed since doing voluntary teaching in them) some boys and girls try to lord it over others, tease them, scorn them, call them “dumb,” define them as lower intellectually, among other ways — and so, I am left, late in life, with a grateful remembrance of my mom’s tough, demanding psychological awareness that never for a moment, it seemed, forsook its connection to the Hebrew Bible, to the Christian Bible, both.