Continuing our
consideration of Father Richard Rohr’s Five
Hard Truths… All we write at present
is against the background of the pandemic, lockdown, much anxiety… and no one
knows how long it will go on…
The self that is not important is what contemplative teaching calls the ego… It does matter that we get this clear. Our culture, as we know, our way of life, our best teachers, counsellors, “life coaches”, generally insist that each of us is of primary importance.[1] In the current pestilence, the Director-General of Health, giving the day’s statistics, reminds us that even one death is one too many… expressing our common humanity, that each of us is of unique value and unrepeatable (unless, evidently, like Cardinal George Pell and others, we fall into public opprobrium and humiliation). But also the feeling of failure in life, even personal loss of self-esteem, are seen as lapses from our inherent importance and dignity. And in more recent times, “Me First”, “Me Too”, “Me Time”, have become respectable and even admired choices.
So what Fr Richard Rohr is teaching here is wildly counter-cultural, and we have to repeat… the self that is not important is the persona contemplative teaching calls the ego. This is the self I present, or hope I present, to the world. It may be a shining and admirable self, or it may be, as we say, warts and all. I may actually believe it myself… many do.[2] So it may come as news to me that there can be any other self than the one I always carefully tended (or in some cases neglected). It is alarming to learn that it may be a façade, that the emperor is in fact naked. But the emperor is not naked. At another level than the ego – indeed, not far away -- is the self God sees, always saw, made, knows and loves.[3] This self is unlikely (in St Paul’s words[4]) to think more highly of itself than it ought to think.
Are these however separate selves… the ego-self, and the true self? I am sure most Christians assume that our best self which pleases God is the old self tidied, reformed and brushed up. We get better and better somehow – with the result that guilt piles up year after year when we suspect this is not happening as it should, and perhaps we are not sure we want it to anyway.[5] It is not so much that they are separate selves, as that the ego is a façade, non-essential as we say these days, unreal.
The self that matters is the self that is, in life and prayer, saying Yes to God. The ego on the other hand is not able to leave self behind, as Jesus taught – it is frightened that if the public self is removed there may be nothing left, that the emperor would be naked. The ego cannot respond to Jesus saying, I am among you as one who serves… the greatest among you must be the servant of all.[6] The wounded ego finds it generally impossible to forgive as Jesus taught. And here in the unnerving experience of pandemic, the ego of course is frightened, of the unknown, of the future, of strangeness…
The self God knows and loves however is daily, in life and prayer, seeing these responses becoming possible by the ministry of the spirit of the risen Jesus, the ministry of love and grace. Hardship and adversity may indeed be among the circumstances in which God destabilises the ego.
So the tough truth, You are not important, is actually a liberating wisdom. The way of Jesus distances and frees us from the demanding ego… steadily, day by day, year by year, as we renew our Yes in the stillness and silence of our prayer. The ego remains; it still has its rôle – Jesus had an ego – but as St Paul puts it: …that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith…[7]
[1]
See Luke 12:6-7
[2] I
remember arriving at a wedding, at the door of the venue, to find the bride’s
sister-in-law running past me out to her car.
She had discovered on her arrival at the venue that she had come without
her earrings. She was rushing home to
get them. She missed the wedding
ceremony altogether. Earrings were
indispensable to her ego.
[3]
See Luke 7:44… Simon the Pharisee sees an immoral woman, Jesus sees deeper.
[4]
Romans 12:3
[5]
cf. Augustine: Lord make me pure… but not yet.
[6]
Luke 22:24-27
[7]
Ephesians 3:16-17
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