Dear friends— Here’s the short version: Essay 7 is about pride, but not the kind most of us were warned about. It asks whether pride might be a gift—not the hubristic drive to stand above others, but the courage to contribute from what we’ve received. What I learned in writing this is unsettling: my formation misunderstood both shame and pride in ways that still shape me. This essay goes back to Augustine, the Cappadocians, Aquinas, Luther, and the hidden curriculum of my own life to see what the tradition actually taught—and what we turned it into. If you’ve ever felt torn between the desire to offer something meaningful and the fear of being seen, this may help name that tension. The fuller exploration begins below. A Phone Call Home I called my mother from Duke to confess unfaithfulness. Not the kind she might have expected. I had fallen in love with Augustine of Hippo—a Catholic saint. In my tribal imagination, this bordered on betrayal. The boundaries had been clear since childhood: Marianne from St. Joseph’s Academy was gorgeous, could waterski like a dream, but Mom forbade dating her. “She’s Catholic,” she said, as if that settled everything. It did. Like St. Joseph’s, “St. Augustine” meant one of theirs, not one of ours. If this resonates: biweekly Friday essays developing incarnational alternatives to dominative Christianity—integrating embodied psychology, constructive theology, and jazz. Presence, not opposition. Yet here I was, a grown man at divinity school, calling to confess that a fourth-century North African bishop had rocked my world. That I had found in his Confessions what I couldn’t find in the Christianity of my youth: permission to be restless. Permission to not have it all figured out. Permission to approach God with something other than achievement. I knew there was no going back. Mom laughed. She always did have more grace than her tribal language suggested. But the phone call marked something real: I was beginning to discover that the Christianity I’d inherited might not be the Christianity. That what I’d been taught about pride and shame and how to become a worthy self might represent a mutation rather than the tradition itself. The Question The previous essay left me with a problem. If shame operates as biological firmware—an ancient alarm system that can’t be quieted through achievement—then what do I do with the Christianity that formed me? The one that taught me to “be the gift” through heroic service? The one that measured spiritual maturity by how much I could contribute, how little I needed to receive, how completely I could transcend dependence on others? But as I sat with that question, another one emerged underneath it. What if the problem wasn’t pride itself but what we’d done with it? In the fourth essay, I argued that shame is a gift—biological firmware designed to call us back to communion when we drift. What if pride is also a gift? Not the hubristic kind that needs to dominate, but something else entirely—the courage to contribute, the capacity to recognize that what we’ve received is worth offering back? If that’s true, then my formation didn’t just misunderstand shame. It also distorted pride—turned a gift into a grasping, made contribution into competition, replaced the courage to offer with the compulsion to prove. Was my faith itself at odds with what I was learning about shame and pride? Or had I inherited something else entirely—a mutation that wore Christian clothes but operated by different logic? I needed to go back to the sources. To find out whether the tradition itself understood what my formation had missed. Augustine: The Restlessness That Won’t Quit I expected Augustine to pile on the guilt. He has that reputation—the architect of original sin, the man who supposedly invented Western sexual shame. I braced myself for more of what I’d grown up with: the problem is you, try harder, do better. Instead, I found the most famous line in Christian autobiography: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” Not: “Our hearts are wicked until we fix them.” Not: “Our hearts are deficient until we achieve enough.” Restless. A word that describes a condition, not a crime. Something in me recognized it immediately—that constant hum beneath all my accomplishments, the nagging sense that more was never enough. Augustine knew that restlessness couldn’t be quieted by achievement. He had tried. Professor of rhetoric in Milan, climbing the imperial ladder, succeeding by every measure that mattered—and the restlessness only intensified. He was experiencing what I would later recognize as the firmware problem: disordered shame operating below the level where accomplishment could reach it. What struck me most was his distinction between two kinds of self-love. There’s amor sui—the curved-inward love that makes the self its own ultimate reference point. And there’s caritas sui—proper self-care that flows from first being loved by God. The first generates what we’d now call hubristic pride: defensive, comparative, needing to outperform others to feel secure. The second generates authentic pride: grounded in reception, capable of genuine contribution precisely because it isn’t scrambling for worth. But here’s what haunted me: Augustine saw something that my formation had missed entirely. He noticed that consciousness of your own moral effort could itself become a subtle form of that curved-inward love. You could be so focused on your own spiritual achievement that even your humility became a source of pride. Even your service became about you—about what you were accomplishing, what you were contributing, who you were becoming. Augustine’s diagnostic marker was gratitude—or rather, its absence. Amor sui can’t really receive because receiving threatens its self-sufficiency. It can take, acquire, even accept—but it can’t receive in the way that acknowledges dependence. I saw this at my parish every Maundy Thursday after I implemented the foot-washing rite. Each person would arrive at the basin, wash the feet of the one seated, then sit to have their own feet washed. Many enjoyed washing their friends’ feet—generous, serving, in control. But when they sat and someone knelt before them, I watched them grow agitated. They could give but not receive. The Eucharist that followed asked the same thing of them: come with empty hands, receive bread and wine, be fed before you serve. Some found it easier to wash feet than to be fed. Peter’s protest to Jesus—You shall never wash my feet!—wasn’t humility. It was pride dressed as deference, the self-sufficient self, so threatened by grace that it would refuse communion rather than receive it. Self-sufficiency all the way down. I recognized myself in that description. All those years of heroic service, and I was terrible at receiving help. Terrible at being served. Terrible at the genuine gratitude that acknowledges: I needed that, and I couldn’t have provided it for myself. Augustine showed me the curvature. The Cappadocians showed me what we were curving away from. The Cappadocians: From Dependence to Coinherence Nobody taught me about the Cappadocians in Sunday school. Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus—fourth-century bishops who hammered out what Christians actually mean when they say “Trinity.” I discovered them at divinity school and they began to upend everything I thought I knew about dependence and identity. My formation had taught me that dependence was weakness. The goal was to need less—less from others, less from circumstances, less from God except in appropriately spiritual ways. Maturity meant self-sufficiency. The “gift” I was supposed to become was defined precisely by its independence: not needing, only giving. The truly strong person stood alone. Gregory of Nyssa shattered this with a single metaphor. To explain how Father, Word, and Spirit relate, he made an analogy to human thought and speech. The mind frames its thoughts in words; the content is identical, but thought and word are different realities. And a thought, even when formed into words, remains unexpressed until spoken—until breath transforms the inner word into the reality of sound. Gregory played creatively with the Greek pneuma, which means breath, wind, prophecy, and Spirit all at once. The Spirit is the breath that transforms God’s Word into the concrete reality of creation. Sitting in the Duke Divinity library, I felt something crack open. Here was a framework where the persons of the Trinity were distinguished not by competitive self-sufficiency but by their relationships to one another. Thought needs word needs breath. Each one is what it is only in relation to the others. This wasn’t the self-sufficient isolation I’d been trained toward. It was a vision where identity came through relationship, where “dependence” on another wasn’t weakness but the very structure of divine life. Sam Wells helped me see how far this goes. The tradition calls it “coinherence”: each person of the Trinity constituted by relationship to the others. Not a chain of command. Not one person existing first and then producing the others. Each one wholly containing and being contained by the others while remaining distinct. Think of it this way: the Father is not the Father before or apart from having the Son. The Son is not the Son apart from the Father. There’s no protected core of autonomous selfhood hiding behind the communion—no private self that exists first and then chooses to relate. Barth said it plainest: God is “never-to-be-except-to-be-with-us.” The relating is the being. Relationship all the way down. The Cappadocians weren’t naive about disordered dependence—the kind that manipulates, that refuses to grow, that burdens others unfairly, that makes another person res
