He called the
crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my
followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For
those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life
for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. [Mark 8:34-35]
In fact, it
seems to me, both things are always happening, all through our lives. I rather wish someone had pointed that out to
me about 60 years ago. Sometimes we are
able to set ego aside – at other times we seem to defend it, protect it, feed
it, pamper it, proclaim it, advertise it, study ways to enhance and develop
it.
It may seem
confusing, however. Seriously denying
myself can be, if you think about it, a very handsome exercise in ego. “From now on I will devote myself to selfless
service… look how humble I am becoming…!”
And as for what Jesus called saving your life, and the modern world
calls taking care of Number One – well, God in his goodness has equipped us
with necessary aggressive and competitive instincts, self-protection
mechanisms, flight reflexes, the capacity for justified ambition and pride,
abilities for high achievement and hard work… These are gifts we perhaps should
not suppress.
The
contemplative disciple however sees a river of grace running through it all. A
vital aspect of prayer is simply our consenting to this process. It is a process in which the ego, which
itself is a gift of God, is losing its priority as time goes by. The saddest thing about ageing in much of our
culture is the way it comes for so many to be seen as an enemy. Ageing is not for wimps, is one of our
current clever clichés – no, ageing is for the wise, for those becoming free to
lose their fears. It is sad when this
time gets to be used instead to fight off ageing, to recapture some lost youth
or retain control of people and events, to be in despair about wrinkles, to
hang on desperately to the form of faith that captured our imaginations 50 years
ago, or to join the serried ranks of elderly grizzlers. The
contemplative path is a journey of learning to live by grace… 'Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far and
Grace will lead me home.
The phrases
Jesus used, denying oneself / losing one’s life, are not pointing to some
mighty decision we make one day, that from now on I will be different. It is, as our experience teaches us, the
process of grace, initiated and energised by God as we learn to be still and
silent and welcoming to God’s Spirit.
The ego, which may have served us well in many ways, but not in other
ways, becomes steadily more attenuated, perhaps even a source of wry amusement
to us, or amazement… It is being
supplanted from within by what St Paul calls simply Spirit, what Jesus in
John’s Gospel calls the Spirit of Truth.
St Paul wrote about this to the Corinthians [II Cor. 3:17-18] --
Now
the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is
freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces,
seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being changed
into the same image, from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from
the Lord, the Spirit.
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