The Most Painful Death
During a recent Holy Hour with St. Gemma Galgani, I found myself reflecting on a particular phrase: the pains of death. At first, my thoughts turned toward physical death, but as I sat quietly before the Lord, I sensed Him drawing my attention elsewhere—to a death that must occur long before the end of earthly life.
The death He was speaking of was the death of my old self.
Not the self He created me to be, but the false self that had been shaped by wounds, disappointments, pain, and suffering. The self that had learned to protect itself through bitterness. The self that clung to selfishness. The self that demanded control. The self that wanted life on its own terms.
And among all the deaths I have experienced in my spiritual journey, none has been more painful than the death of pride.
There is truly no greater death outside of Our Lord’s Passion than the death of pride within the human heart.
Pride does not surrender easily.
It lingers.
It resists.
It white-knuckles its grip on the soul, refusing to leave even when we know it is destroying us.
I have often found myself praying, “Lord, why is this taking so long? Why does pride still have such sway over me?” Just when I think it has been uprooted, it appears again in another form. Sometimes it hides behind self-righteousness. Sometimes behind defensiveness. Sometimes behind anger when circumstances do not unfold according to my plans.
Pride whispers, Things should be different.
People should act differently.
God should work according to your timetable.
And when reality fails to conform to those expectations, anger often follows.
As I reflected during prayer, I realized that much of my anger had not come from holy zeal or righteous indignation. It came from grieving the loss of control. It came from insisting that life unfold according to my vision rather than God’s.
The Lord was inviting me to let go.
To let go of what I wanted.
To let go of how I thought things should be.
To let go of the illusion that I knew better than He did.
That surrender felt like death.
Because it was.
The death of pride is not a gentle process. It feels more like being torn apart from the inside out. Pride sends roots deep into the soul. It intertwines itself with our identity, our desires, our opinions, our wounds, and even our virtues. It convinces us that it is part of who we are.
So when God begins to remove it, the process can feel like a ripping away of our very selves.
Yet what is actually being removed is not our true identity but everything that obscures it.
The Lord is not destroying us.
He is revealing us.
The deeper work of humility is not becoming less ourselves; it is becoming who we were always created to be.
Still, the process is agonizing.
One reason it is so painful is because pride leaves behind a void.
When God removes a vice, He does not simply take something away. He creates space.
The question then becomes: what will fill that space?
For years I unknowingly filled it with my own plans, accomplishments, opinions, and desires for control. But none of those things could sustain me. None of them could satisfy the ache within.
The void left by pride can only be filled by God Himself.
Only His love can occupy the space where self-love once ruled.
Only His will can replace my insistence on my own way.
Only His presence can heal the emptiness exposed when pride finally loosens its grip.
Pride hardens the heart.
It builds walls around our wounds and convinces us they are fortresses. It makes us resistant to correction, resistant to surrender, and resistant to grace. Pride turns our attention inward until we are working primarily for ourselves rather than for God.
Humility does the opposite.
Humility softens the heart.
Humility creates room for God to dwell.
Humility allows us to receive what pride would never permit us to accept: our dependence upon Him.
How strange that dependence, something pride fears so deeply, is actually the place of greatest freedom.
The weight of pride is crushing.
The enemy would have us carry that burden indefinitely. He would have us believe that our worth depends on our performance, our control, our success, or our ability to manage every outcome.
But Christ offers another way.
“Come to me, all who labor and are burdened.”
The burden of pride is heavy because it was never ours to carry.
The burden of self-sufficiency is exhausting because we were never created to sustain ourselves apart from God.
Every act of surrender, every hidden act of obedience, every moment of choosing His will over our own becomes a small death. And yet every one of those deaths makes room for resurrection.
This is the paradox of the spiritual life.
What dies is not the person God created.
What dies is everything preventing us from becoming that person.
And so I continue to pray:
Lord, let my pride die before I do.
Root out every hidden place where it still clings.
Fill every empty space with Your presence.
Soften my heart where pride has hardened it.
Teach me to surrender what I cannot control.
And when the death feels painful, remind me that every death embraced in You leads to new life.
For beyond the death of pride lies the freedom of a soul that finally belongs completely to God.
Thrive in Jesus, my friends!