How did it happen that we came to confuse pride with arrogance … that somehow life taught us that pride isn’t virtuous … it the opposite of the virtue of humility … It’s to be avoided at all costs. My early learnings about pride came straight from the Bible … I remember learning the proverb, “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.” (Proverbs 16:18) It’s shorthand, better known version is simply: “pride cometh before a fall.”
But I realize now, it was arrogance not pride that I ought to have been warned off of … I have come to know that the opposite of pride is shame or self-rejection … and the antithesis of humility is arrogance, not pride. In fact, pride has more to do with a healthy sense of self-acceptance and self-worth than an over inflated view of ourselves … that’s its good to feel pride in one’s accomplishments … to take pride in one’s work … to be proud to be the unique humans that each of us are … that’s not to say that we’re proud of everything we do … but how could anyone every tell us not to proud to be who we are … whatever our strengths, capacities, identities …
A movement for the pride we celebrate in the month of June each year began as a protest … a protest against invisibility and inequity … against oppression and discrimination … an uprising for the freedom just to be oneself … to dress, walk, speak, gather freely, dance with whoever you wished, love whoever you love and be true to oneself …
Fifty-two years ago, in the early hours of the morning on June 28th, 1969, NY police raided the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar of the time. Raids like this were not at all uncommon but what was uncommon was … that on this occasion, the patrons pushed back … they pushed against the beatings, the arrests, the shaming and the outing … And the protests went on for several days … moving out from the bar and into the streets of the neighborhood. This courageous resistance became the catalyst for the pride movement … the quest for full human rights and dignity for all gender identities and sexual orientations.
Perhaps the freedom to be fully and wholly human is often born of protest. There is an ancient story told in three of the four gospels handed down to us in our tradition. It’s about a nameless woman in a faceless crowd who pushed back against her invisibility to insist on being seen. It is told as a miracle story. But I hear it as a parable.
24 So Jesus went with him. A large crowd followed and pressed around him. 25 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. 26 She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. 27 When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, 28 because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” 29 Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.
30 At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”
31 “You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ”
32 But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. 33 Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. 34 He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
There is something timeless tucked inside this time bound story. It is a kind of healing narrative originally intended for a 1st century community who had become the untouchables of their time. They were being pushed out of their synagogues … they were being told they didn’t belong anymore … they were no longer seen as children of Abraham … they didn’t fit because they were searching for the relationship between the law of Moses/their 1st century Judaism and the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and the orthodoxy of their day tells them there is no blending … is is either/or not both/and … so they have no place. They are shamed and excluded for seeking to reconcile their religious roots with their lived experience.
Into this hurting community comes this story about a woman who has been looking for healing and belonging for more than a dozen years. The story buries her in a crowd. At first, we don’t see her … she is invisible to us as she has been to her family, to the members of her synagogue, and to her neighbours and her community. She has been made invisible by cultural norms and religious rules. She has been isolated into invisibility by a condition her world classifies as unclean. She is an untouchable because she has been hemorrhaging in a society that has been taught to fear being contaminated by her.
To most of that first century crowd, she was just another bloody woman. She bled to bring others into the world. She bled in rhythm with the cycles of the earth. She was an old woman and she was still bleeding.
For a dozen years, the systems of healing had failed her. She tried everything and nothing worked. Not wanting to cause a scene, in her anonymity she comes through the crowd, she approaches Jesus from behind to touch him … to reach out to this teacher and reputed healer.
As we see her in the story making her way through this crowd, it isn’t enough for her just to see or hear. She needs to reach out and touch something that matters deeply to her. She had reached before. But this time, someone made space for her in that crowd and affirmed her. This time, someone turned to find her, to know her.
Though she only managed to touch his clothing, somehow Jesus felt the exchange of energy that happens when the space between two people is humanly warmed … wanting to turn and complete the healing they had shared, Jesus turned to see who had touched him … and she finds the courage to step out of her anonymity and become visible.
It was an act of protest to be in that crowd … to act out against the Levitical law that made her an untouchable … deemed her unclean … excluded her like a leper in her society … claiming she would contaminate anyone who came in contact with her.
She has had enough and she reaches through the crowd and breaks through the story that has rendered her a mere interruption in the narrative … Jesus was on his way to the home of an important man, a religious official, whose daughter was deathly ill. This anonymous woman gets the story tellers attention by barely touching his clothing.
The story stops Jesus in his tracks determined to see her … And she finds the courage to be seen … to speak out … to speak up for herself … to speak her truth … to refuse to stay hidden any longer …
Responding to the courage of her protest, he renders her visible … He calls her “daughter” … he calls her out of anonymity … reinstating her into the first relationship life gives each of us … to be a son or a daughter … acknowledging her as part of the family … affirming her place as a daughter of Abraham and Sarah … through the vehicle of the story, he affirms a sense of belonging among those first century Jews hearing this story some 40 years later who were feeling disenfranchised and disaffiliated from their tradition and from their contemporaries.
He gives this unnamed woman a name. It had been a long time since she had been someone’s daughter. And this one who calls her “daughter” is young enough to be her son. From privileged place of his gender, he names her as part of the family … part of the human family … part of the family of faith in the tradition of ancient Judaism which they shared … He names her with respect as one who belongs … one who matters … and one who has touched what matters.
He affirms the wisdom of the poet, John O’Donohue … “may you listen to your longing to be free” … May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within … may you never place walls between the light and yourself …
May we move from shame to pride … from anonymity to belonging … from rejection to radical acceptance … to be those who risk touching what matters in our lives … creating space for each other to be … giving the kind of attention and acceptance that makes it safe to come out of hiding … to tell our truth … calling each other into belonging … naming one another out of the anonymous crowd and into loving and healing community.
-Nancy Steeves
No responses yet