Overcoming Pride: C.S. Lewis, Two Sons, and Several Vegetables

I grew up on VeggieTales, which is more educationally stimulating than “theological produce” may sound. Somewhere in my mental filing cabinet are the lyric sheets containing every “Silly Song with Larry.” I distinctly recall a conversation with my dad—who too can whip out verses from the VeggieTales musical motion picture Jonah—over a decade ago.

“It’s actually a pretty cool story,” he said. “Phil Vischer, who’s Bob the Tomato, right? Well, he publicly admitted he got a little too big for his britches. The entire company fell apart.”

I didn’t understand what he meant.

“But…that’s not the worst thing ever.” Third grade religion class did not cover everything. I knew about lying, cheating, and stealing; Vischer did none of that. “Idolatry” meant a golden cow, which was not prevalent in twenty-first century suburban Pennsylvania.

“It’s pride, the worst of all,” my dad responded.

Thirteen years later, let’s talk about pride.

C. S. Lewis depicts Earth as the narrowest part of an hourglass, the single point of intersection between two vertical angles: Heaven and Hell. We dictate our earthly experience by orienting ourselves toward one of these angles. In Christ’s Parable of the Prodigal Son, we recognize the younger brother’s spiritual rock-bottom—facing eternal destruction—and late conversion towards Heaven. Often, we disregard the equally crucial character, the elder son who, fully convinced he dwells in the Lord, begins and remains in Hell throughout the narrative.

Jesus of Nazareth does not speak superfluously; both sons are essential characters. If we were to gaze into an existential-mirror-of-truth, we would see both sons staring back at us: the elder represents our mind; the younger, our flesh. The sons share the same iniquity, the sin that barred Adam in the Beginning and plagued the Pharisees who heckled Christ: pride. 

While the younger son’s pride is demonstrated physically in novelty, lust, instant gratification, and thrill (Lk. 15:13), the elder son juggles gossip (15:26), anger (15:28), envy (15:29), competition, and contempt (15:30). The elder character’s pride is tougher to identify and, moreover, apply to oneself. For him, this “utmost evil” manifests entirely intangibly but will lead to exponentially regressive corruption just the same. At the parable’s conclusion, the state of the elder brother’s soul is grave—while his sibling’s is saved—because his pride has gone unrecognized and unhandled.

In Mere Christianity, Lewis calls pride the “one vice of which no man in the world is free.” In this eternal spiritual battle, Lewis wagers our first step is coming to grips with our own pride.

To successfully become like God, we must lose every sense of status, popularity, ambition, competition, conceit, and disdain. The “I hope someone sees my good works.” The “I struggle less than she does.” The “No one can know I failed.” The “My opinions are more Christian than God’s.” It cannot be taken with us. These attitudes will not pass through the narrow gate.

In the Incarnation, the perfect deity becomes a mortal. Then, the Hebrew carpenter is betrayed, sold, stripped down, nailed to a tree, and publicly executed. God is Humility with a capital “H.”

Like third-grade me, I still don’t totally get it. But now I know I can’t get it—at least not perfectly. I may evade every proud aspect of myself yet never measure up to the Humility of my dying God.

Lewis proposes a next-step. “[God] and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble—delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life.”

Recently, curiosity led me to find VeggieTales creator Phil Vischer’s story. Vischer dreamt of becoming a Christian movie mogul, changing the world through talking vegetables. For years Vischer was convinced he dwelled in the Lord, but when fame, fortune, and attention blurred his relationship with God, everything—the money, the company, Vischer’s dream—collapsed.

Once Vischer gained touch with God, his life changed.

“What I was starting to feel I can only describe as a sense of ‘giving up’—of ‘dying’…I wasn’t sure exactly what was dying in me. And then one day it was clear. It was my ambition. It was my will. It was my hopes, my dreams, my life…At long last, after a lifetime of striving, God was enough—not God and impact…Just God.”

Let us lose ourselves in God’s grandeur; let us become delightedly humble in His will.