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

Popular posts from this blog

Our Diversity is Our Strength

I was riding the subway with my husband.   We were headed towards Penn Station, returning home after seeing a Broadway show in Manhattan.   It was rush hour, the subway was crowded and I was lucky to get one of the last seats.   It was amazingly quiet for such a crowded car.   Most people were looking at their phones or listening to a device.   There were quite a few pairs of wireless earphones on people.   Their heads nodded slightly to the beat of noiseless music, or their eyes glazed over as a mystery book played in their ears.   There was a rich variety of humanity on that single car- multiple ages, ethnicities, races, ages and income levels.   I marveled at the diversity and the peaceful coexistence in this tiny piece of New York City. My eyes glanced over to the man sitting next to me.   He was holding a book and reading it very intently.   Reading an actual book is a relatively rare occurrence these days, but what truly caught my attention was the unusual prin

Advent Lessons

As we come to the last days of Advent, the season in Christianity of waiting, I am reminded of the words of Sr. Joan Chittister, a Benedictine Sister of Erie Pennsylvania, known for her social justice stance and working with and for the marginalized. “Advent is that unchangeable season when the same concepts, the same words rise over and over again, year after year, to challenge our hearts and plague our minds. Advent is the season of waiting. And who hasn’t waited? When we are little children, we wait for gifts from our parents. When we are young adults, we wait for the lover who will take us to the magic world of Everything. The problem is that the presents pale and the magic world sags all too quickly into reality. But then Advent comes, relentlessly and throughout life, with its words of hope and faith—shepherds and magi, crib and star, Emmanuel and glory—and stirs our hearts to pinnacles of possibility one more time. Ruben A. Alvez wrote, ‘Hope is hearing the melody of the future;
Compassion On the radio a few days ago there was a piece about refugees arriving by boat to the shores of a country that in the past had been welcoming, but this time people were yelling angrily and running into the water to block the boats from landing.   The boats were full and there were children on board. The turmoil and anger in the crowd was audible. I don’t speak their language, but the reporter said that people blocking the boats were shouting “Go back home. We don’t care about the babies.” I was repulsed. I could not stop thinking about it. “We don’t care about the babies.” What would it take for me to say that? For my friends to say that? My neighbors? Horrible thought, that people I know might be moved to yell at desperate people “We don’t care about the babies.” I started to ask myself how that could happen, what it would feel like to push away needy people and shout “I don’t care about the babies.” Please don’t stop reading when I tell you that suddenly my hea