Skip to main content

Are You an Ego Maniac?



In just one week most Christian churches will be moving into a penitential church season called Lent.  It is a six-week time of reflection on our spiritual life.  This is a time to take a spiritual inventory of our lives. This time of reflection would be beneficial for any faith. 
There seems to be an internal battle going on in many of us that is similar to some earthly skirmish.  We are not immune to conflicts and disputes, whether internal or external.  The conflict between people is often preceded and caused by some kind of internal conflict within.  This is certainly the case with such phenomena as “road rage” and “murder in the workplace” perpetrated by former employees with various grievances. 
I believe it is fair to say the chief interior desire “fighting inside” each of us is the desire of the ego to take control of the soul, or true self.  The ego is our conscious identity, everything we mean when we say “I” as we so frequently do. Instead of the ego serving the soul, as Christians understand Christ serving the Father, there seems to be a deeply ingrained inclination of the ego to make the soul serve it.  The ego wants always to be great, powerful, perfect, immortal, in control.  In short, the ego would like to be god in place of God which was the original sin behind the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden as recorded in the Pentateuch.
We are called to bring the ego into a right and subservient relationship to the soul/true self.  For the ego, badly inflated with false pride, to suffer such a deflation is as difficult and painful a choice as the prospect of laying down one’s life.  Recovering narcissists know that such ego therapy and salvation really does feel like dying.  The deflation of a pathologically bloated ego, in fact, feels like death to any person going through this experience.  Many such chronically egocentric individuals indeed choose physical death over denying themselves, usually by one form of taking one’s life or another. 
Pride and power struggles are not limited to politics or religion.  What can we do?  Well, here are four strategies gleaned from Hebrew and Christian Holy Scriptures sprinkled with a dose of my experience which may help any of us to keep our ego in a proper and healthy relationship to our soul.
1.      Regarding mistakes: admit them, don’t hide them.
2.      Regarding sin: confess, don’t deny.  Repentance is a primary antidote to ego inflation.
3.      Regarding gratitude: maintain at all times, remembering that without all that others have done for us, not least God, most of us would not have amounted to half as much.
4.      Regarding humor: never take ourselves so seriously that we lose the ability to laugh at ourselves.
I do believe that abundant new life is possible if we allow the true reality of the soul to burst forth.

Fr. Richard Visconti
Rector, Caroline Church

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Make even these days count

One of the most popular features on a local newscast of a small TV station is something rather surprising. It is a feature called- “The Day of the Week”.  Today is…….. Monday!  The station put forth this as a kind of joke at first, but it was so popular that it became a regular daily addition to the morning newscast.  Apparently, so many of us have lost track of what day it is that we need a reminder. During this stay-at-home time, every day seems to blend into the next.  It is truly difficult to remember how many days we have all been quarantined at home, what the date is and what day of the week it is.  Many of us have a few markers that help- jobs that pause for the weekend, celebrations of Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays- special days of worship.  But even with these, the days seem to bleed into each other like a striped shirt washed in hot water. The period that we are in right now in the Jewish calendar is ironically, a time of counting. A time w...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Interfaith Dialogue on Guns in America

https://www.newsday.com/long-island/suffolk/interfaith-guns-port-jefferson-1.17108637 LONG ISLAND SUFFOLK LI group urges interfaith unity to curb tide of gun violence Several speakers Sunday called for addressing mental health issues, and reducing violence in movies and video games Vivian Viloria Fisher, (from left) Jeff Keister, Marcey Wagner and Burt Benowitz discuss ways to curb gun violence Sunday in Port Jefferson Station. Photo Credit: Newsday / Thomas A. Ferrara  By Rachelle Blidner rachelle.blidner@newsday.com    @rachelleblidner  Updated March 4, 2018 9:13 PM An interfaith group of clergy members joined Sunday in Port Jefferson Station to call for more gun control measures after the recent Florida school shooting. Leaders of Muslim, Jewish, Universalist, and other congregations on Long Island urged people of all faiths to work together to reduce the frequency of mass shootings after 17 people were killed in Parkland, Florida, last month...
2 comments
Read more

Next steps?

At last night's community forum,  Belief and Truth from a Multifaith Perspective: Finding Unity in Diversity , many expressed a desire to continue these kinds of conversations and to take action together for building bridges in our community. These are some of the ideas that were shared for next steps: Find something concrete that we can work on together in our community Come out with a statement to the community about this gathering Have clergy visit other houses of worship for teaching and conversation  Invite people of other faiths or no faith traditions into our houses of worship Bring younger people into our interfaith programs Ask elected officials to talk about this kind of work Identify root causes of hatred and address them Encourage media coverage of our programs What other ideas do you have for next steps? Please share them in the comments.
2 comments
Read more