Building Community

We are from St. Paul, Minnesota.

That was part of the brief introduction my wife and I gave as we met a new group of people with whom we would be traveling. It was on the heels of ICE significantly diminishing its presence in our state. I have always had a certain measure of pride in being from Minnesota, but like many, I feel it now more than ever. As we got to know other group members and they inquired about the experience of living through what they had only read about, several group members literally thanked us for what we had done with resisting ICE. In many respects, it felt like what I imagine it is like for veterans when they hear someone thank them for their service. We, of course, knew our part was small and less consequential than others. All the same, we felt pride in our state, our city, our neighborhoods.

In many respects, spring is a season for the unleashing of pride. Parents are filled with pride as the child they have encouraged and supported walks across the stage to receive their diploma or parents simply take a measure of their child’s maturing as they dress for a prom. Family and friends are filled with joy and pride as a young couple stands facing each other, committing themselves to a lifetime of love. It is a time of year when awards are given, achievements acknowledged and in all these things, pride is like a bouquet filling the room with its gentle and fragrant presence.

As a virtue, pride is essential. It reminds us of our self-worth, our dignity. It can come from the things we do and accomplish or it can come from our identity, our belonging to a particular group or place. We are proud of our community, its many historic and new restaurants, thriving coffee shops, breweries, independent businesses, parks or annual events like the Art Crawl. Black pride, gay pride or any identity pride often came into being because people have been told that their particular identity makes them lesser and therefore not deserving of pride. To claim pride is to claim your worth. Pride is strongest, however, when it comes from the awareness we have great value and worth just by being, requiring no achievement or affiliation, but simply our existence is sufficient to feel pride. In religious terms, this is what is meant to be created in the image of God. Every human being is entitled to this pride.

Unfortunately, pride is not only recognized as a needed virtue, it can also become a destructive vice. It is considered a foundational stone on which other destructive vices are built like greed, vanity or envy. Proverbs in the Hebrew Scriptures warns. “Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Pride as a vice is the polar opposite of humility. White supremacists have pride in their identity, but it demands the diminishment of other identities. Rather than graciously receive praise, destructive pride demands adulation, including such things as having one’s name affixed in places of prominence. Pride as a vice seeks to fill a void, a hole that no amount of praise or adulation can ever fill because it is disconnected from an internal awareness of value and worth.

Pride can be either a virtue enhancing life or a vice diminishing life. Recently a friend of ours showed us her new tattoo. It was the Minnesota resistance loon sitting proudly and strongly on cubes of ice. When ICE was terrorizing children and their parents, she was part of a group of teachers who helped organize meals for families, bringing food to their homes. The loon symbolized the pride she felt in being part of a group that showed compassion and caring for those in need. Hers was a pride that enhanced life.
Communities are strongest; our state is strongest, when our shared pride is based precisely on the way we work together in building spaces and places where all are welcome and everyone can thrive, where each one can discover the pride of knowing their own value and worth.