Mirrors are covered during shiva, the Jewish seven-day mourning period, both to encourage contemplation of the relationship between God and man and to discourage vanity and self-concern. The Book of Proverbs teaches that pride is spiritually deleterious: “Pride goes before ruin, / Arrogance, before failure.”
Many Christians believe pride is not only a sin, but the original one, and the worst of them. It is demonic, “the complete anti-God state of mind,” as C.S. Lewis wrote in “Mere Christianity.” Pride is a turning away from God, and an exultation of oneself. The mirror is a symbol of pride and vanity, but it also symbolizes our incomplete, earthly knowledge. As the apostle Paul wrote about God in his first letter to the Corinthians: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.”
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