Dragon Slaying XIV

To Slay the Final and Most Terrible of All

Why?

Why do I care so much about what people think? Because I base my worth on their opinions.

Why have I based my worth there? Because I need something outside myself to confirm I matter.

Why do I have this incessant need to matter? Because to matter means I’m valuable.

Why do I need to feel valuable? Because without it, I feel like I might disappear. This is the only way “I” can be real. Because this is my means of identity. I must be the center point; the one around which everything orbits. I must have weight and gravitational pull.

Why?

Because I want to be worshipped.

That stopped me cold.

I was thirty minutes into an exploratory journey deep into my heart guided by the repeated question, “why.” In the silence an interior conversation with a confused and hurting “I” unfolded. Over and over, the repeating “why” took me down into hidden and dark corners of my psyche.

That answer, I want to be worshipped, shook me.

It erupted from the caverns of my being with all of its heat and fury, no longer held at bay by the layers of my unconscious repression.

It scared me.

It humiliated me.

The answer was so frank. No nuance, no explanations. Just the bold and brash reality of wanting to be worshipped laying bare my motivations, longings, decisions, and actions.

I felt it in every fiber of my body though: the longing, the desperation.

To be worshipped would mean I was weighty. I would have glory. My life would matter. The thing I experience as “I” would be real.

My mind flashed to a garden.

An ancient and crafty serpent, full of poisonous lies, whispering to my ancestors.

“Did God really say…?”

“You won’t die…”

“You could be like Him…”

“You can be God.”

This exploratory journey into the caverns of my heart had brought me face to face with that most primordial of dragons.

Pride.

Most of us spend most of our lives keeping this wicked demon buried in the hidden recesses of our motivations and actions. To recognize that we want what we want and do what we do because we want to be worshipped is quite disorienting, especially if we bear the moniker of Christian.

To be confronted with the belief that we are greater gods than God himself is such an appalling, devastating thought that we suppress it and quickly convince ourselves that such audacity could not exist within our soul.

But we all believe the lie.

Pride is the distorted pursuit of an identity that will never be ours — to be God.

Underneath our insecurities and our victories is the bent desire to be worshipped: more than just being like God, but to be the One.

Pride twists the heart and misguides the mind to believe that apart from God, only as a god, will we be filled and satisfied and real.

The roots of this separation go back behind the garden, back to the mysteries of a metaphysical creation and a creature that did not stay in its proper place.

The ancient Hebrew prophets did not separate the pride of Satan from the pride of human hearts when rebuking earthly kings.

Both Isaiah and Ezekiel issued words of warning for the kings of men toward their pride, but in between and behind their lines of rebuke is the story of an angelic being who came to believe its beauty and power were self-generated rather than gifted.

“In the pride of your heart you say, ‘I am a god; I sit on the throne of a god in the heart of the seas.’” (Ezekiel 28:1–2)

“You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the stars of God… I will make myself like the Most High.’” (Isaiah 14:13–14)

This was the primordial pride that corrupted Adam and Eve through the serpent’s lies, and it is the same pride carried in the hearts of every human thereafter. This eternal dragon was the first creature to look at its own excellence and decide it was sufficient grounds for self-sovereignty.

This is why pride carries a weight the other vices don’t quite reach.

Every other vice is a corruption of something good.

Gluttony is a disordered appetite. Lust is disordered love.

But pride is not a corruption of a good thing.

Pride is the creature claiming the throne of the creator.

I want to be worshiped.

This is not a quirky character flaw to manage or something a few self help techniques can transform. This is beyond the protocols of therapy and mind hacking. Pride is a theological, metaphysical, cosmic catastrophe.

Incurvatus In Se

Martin Luther said that sin had caused a curving in upon oneself.

Incurvatus in se means curved in on itself or turned inward on one’s self

For Luther, and really all of the great thinkers of Christian history, sin was not primarily rule-breaking but a fundamental curvature of the human soul, the self bent inward, using even God and neighbor as mirrors for its own reflection. The will that should be directed outward in love toward God and others instead collapses into itself.

In his commentary on Romans, Luther wrote that the human person is so deeply curved in on themselves that they bend not only corporeal but even spiritual goods toward themselves, meaning even prayer, worship, and virtue become forms of self-preoccupation.

Two Species of Pride

Cassian, that great and wise dragon slayer of the desert, saved pride for last in his list of eight vices.

He understood how it worked, distinguishing between two species.

The first is carnal pride, the visible, embarrassing kind. Comparing yourself favorably to others. Needing credit. Getting irritated when someone else is praised. An inability to say I’m sorry, confess wrong, or stand down in an argument. The pride we all recognize.

The second kind is deeper and more dangerous: spiritual pride.

Spiritual pride is when we take genuine spiritual progress and unconsciously attribute it to ourselves. Our prayer life. Our theological clarity. Our generosity. Our capacity for compassion. We believe in God and even thank God, but pride lingers in the periphery, turning the soul inward, giving thanks that it is so strong, so disciplined, so kind, so godly.

We don’t notice this happening. That’s the point. It doesn’t feel like pride. It feels like confidence, or experience. It feels like having finally arrived at a stable sense of who you are.

Cassian said the telltale signs are these: disobedience, contentiousness, contempt for those less spiritually developed, hardness of heart, an inability to receive correction. This is what pride looks like when it is governing our spiritual practices.

And here is the brutal irony and terrible power of pride; the moment we find success in rooting it out, pride is there to take credit for the victory.

We curve all things back in upon ourselves.

We want to be worshiped.

So what is our hope? How are we to be healed from such a horrendous disease.

The answer may surprise you.

Love

We tend to think, rightly, in some measure, that we must humble ourselves in the sight of the Lord. Then we do, and we’re prideful about the accomplishment. We think: I’ll serve the poor, give away all I have, live a life hidden away from platform and fame. And in the solitude, the beast still consumes the heart, congratulating itself on its discipline and self-control.

Only love can curve the heart outward and free it in humility.

While this sounds wonderful at first, it really is the most terrifying and intense of battles, because we have to see and experience our pride in all of its horror, and then believe that we are unconditionally loved despite it.

It is pride that hides from love. It is pride that tries to earn love. It is pride that chases false forms of love. It is pride that refuses to believe that only love can heal us.

Only by fighting to believe that we are infinitely, unconditionally loved in our pride will pride lose its power over us.

And when we find pride whispering, “You’ve done it, you’ve mustered enough belief to be free of me.” We are quick to slay such a thought not with frustration or hopelessness, but an awareness of how pervasive pride is and how loved we always are in it.

The cure is not about feeling more humble.

Humility often begins in humiliation, the total and utter humiliation of our self-deluded belief that we can heal ourselves.

Humility is a posture of radical receptivity. Everything I have is received.

Everything.

My gifts, my formation, my capacities, none has been earned nor developed through discipline.

Humility, in the ancient imagination, was the gift of being displaced from the center of our own life.

Every breath, every moment, every experience has been donated by an incredibly lavish God who loves us when we take credit, loves us when we love ourselves, loves us as we turn all things inward.

And only as we allow that love to become our center of gravity is our soul re-curved as it was designed to be, in love with and toward God.

Loved Unto the End

In one of the most profound interviews I have ever heard, New York Times journalist Ross Douthat sat with former senator Ben Sasse to explore the meaning of life.

Sasse, 54, was diagnosed in mid-December 2025 with stage 4 inoperable pancreatic cancer that had already metastasized. His doctor told him his “torso is chock-full of tumors.” In the days that followed, he learned he had at least five types of cancer: lymphoma, vascular, lung, liver, and pancreatic, where it originated.

He was initially given three to four months.

The experimental treatment he was on had caused severe bleeding from his skin. His face looked like minced meat as he made steady eye contact with Douthat throughout the interview.

Toward the end, Douthat shifted to unanswered prayers and stated the obvious, that Ben and his family had asked for healing and it wasn’t happening.

“Are you angry with God?”

Ben’s answer was so beautiful.

“No, not at all. I wouldn’t want a sovereign God to defer to all my prayers with a yes, because I’m not omniscient. I don’t know what the weaving of the tapestry of full redemption should look like, but I know going through the period of suffering that I’m going through is a benefit, because it is a winnowing. I’m filled with dross, and while this suffering is not salvific, it is sanctifying and I’m grateful for it… I now know in the midst of this disease the truth of my finitude more than I ever let myself believe in the past… I can’t keep the planets in orbit. I can’t even keep skin on my face.”

Douthat pressed further for the people who might find Sasse’s courage admirable but nothing more than silly fantasy in the face of death, what would he say?

“I’d say let’s read the book of Romans together… He [Paul] says in chapter one there are lots of intellectual arguments you can make against God but you kinda have to start with a more fundamental question about what do you do with this moral issue of our own conscience? Does the individual in this hypothetical situation really start with the claim that things are right in your soul? Because I can’t relate to that. Things are not right in my soul. My soul thinks Ben should be God, and I want that to die. Cancer sucks, but I’m pretty grateful that cancer is a stake against my delusional self-idolatry.”

Here, in the face of the ultimate divide between God and man, Sasse understood his place and did not resist it. He refused the lie, and though blood spilt from his pores, his countenance was aglow with the kingdom of God.

His was the face of Christ.

Christ in him and through Him expressing to the human heart the ravages of pride and our only means of escape.

Sasse’s imminent death was not cause for cynicism and deconstruction.

It was a revelation.

Sasse understands how badly he wants to be worshipped, to be the center around which all things orbit, and cancer has finally and non-negotiably taken that from him.

What sustains him now?

Love.

God’s infinite love, curving his soul heavenward toward full and complete union with his Maker, where all pride, tears, cancer, and loss will be forever healed.

As we conclude this series on the dragons of the heart, it is only love that will transform our myriad vices into virtue.

Today, how might you open the dark caverns of your soul to God?

You’ve been warned, there be dangerous and terrible dragons in these lands, but love, and only love, will slay them all.

Not love we earn.

Not love we garner by getting it right or getting right.

Love unconditional.

Love received in radical and total dependence.

Love that humiliates and then humbles in holy comfort.

Love that cannot be thwarted nor separated from.

Love that sets the soul to rest and re-curves the heart back towards God as He always intended.

Oh pride-filled Dragon Slayer…you are so very, very loved.