Jonny Heart: Curse Our "Pride and Prejudice"

Saturday, October 6, 2007

Curse Our "Pride and Prejudice"

I can not believe what I am about to tell you, when you hear I’m sure you will no longer look at me the same and may never again view me as the dominating strong man that I know everyone sees when they look my direction. Through my youth my mother spooned fed us kids all sorts of novels. Novels that guys should not read. All I need to say is one name, Jane Austin. It gets worse, she also read books to us like The Secret Garden and Jane Eyre. While in youth Erin, Laura, and I sat on our parents King size bed and talk for hours and on several occasions Mom read to us from what ever book she had her nose in that time. She loves to read so it was no bother to her. Yet all of this may not shock you, but this will. I love Pride and Prejudice. The Proud Mr. Darcy, and the Prejudice Eliza Bennett beautifully carry out a battle of wits to prove to the other what they themselves subconsciously are. In the midst of the grave quarrel between the two destine lovers Mr. Darcy unveils his “folly” to the “pair of fine eyes” Elizabeth. He so boldly proclaims, “I find it hard to forgive the follies and vices of others or their offences against me. My good opinion once lost is lost forever.”

The sins pride and prejudice really go hand in hand. One cannot exist without the other. Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice displays this impulse perfectly through these two characters, not only does it take a strong hold on the perspective of life but it controls and twists lives. Not only those lives of the proud and of the prejudice, but everyone closely related to them. At some point a person’s iniquities spills over and impinges on those even most precious to them. Pride is a vast and complicated sin to defeat; no one can ever overcome its grasp, for me if I achieved flawless modesty I would discover myself boasting in my meekness. So to avoid the limitless complication in describing pride I want to focus on what Darcy said. “I find it hard to forgive the follies and vices of others or their offense against me. My good opinion once lost is lost forever.”

In the past two years I realized I share the same view as Darcy. I discovered after someone offended me I could not forgive them and held bitterness long after the offence took place. Once they (whoever that may be) did something to compromise my stature and ridicule me they no longer had any worth and disserved to get thrown out. This may seem worse; I sometimes looked for reasons to despise a person. I know this view leaves a distasteful reflection of my Christianity and for this reason I apologize to those I retaliated against with unrighteous anger and those who did not deserve it I beg for your mercy. This problem of mine derives from my pride that I need to swallow and look upon people with Love and not an arrogant demeanor. Even the great Mr. Darcy and the lovely Elizabeth Bennett could find a way to put their arrogant presuppositions aside and find an appeal in the other. Jesus said the greatest commandment is “Love your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength and the second is similar to the first. Love your Neighbor as yourself.” The later of these I am finding most difficult to accomplish. Curse our pride and prejudices.

Also, happy birthday Dad!

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Quotes from my Senior Patron

-Clive Staples Lewis-

"The Love of knowledge is a kind of madness."

The Problem of Pain

"We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which he will not be satisfied until it has a certain character."

Mere Christianity - (Pg. 31)

"This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies."

The Problem of Pain - C.S. Lewis (Pg. 31)

"What would really satisfy us would be a God who said anything we happened to like doing, what does it matter so long as they are contented? We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven - a senile benevolence who, as they say, liked to see young people enjoying themselves, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, a good time was had by all."

"If we wish to be rational, not now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the fit of faith, for the power to go on believing not in the teeth of reason but in the teeth of lust and terror and jealousy and boredom and indifference that which reason, authority, or experience, or all three, have once delivered to us for truth."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 139-140)

"It is not reason that takes away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other... Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your ganging moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know by experience..."

A Grief Observed - (P.g. 9-10)

"I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 7)

"It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 32)

"In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth-only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 56-57)

"Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something mush harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person-and he would not need it."