The Spiritual Ego

Fr. Richard Rohr

Many Christians whittled down the great Gospel to some moral issue over which they can feel totally triumphant and superior, and which usually asks nothing of them personally. The ego always insist on moral high ground, or as Paul brilliantly put it, "Sin takes advantage of commandments to mislead me, and through obeying commandments kills me" (Romans 7:11, 13). This is a really quite extraordinary piece of insight on Paul's part, one which I would not believe myself if the  disguise were not so common (e.g., celibate priests focusing on birth control and abortion as the core of evil, heterosexuals seeing gay marriage as the ultimate threat to society, liberals invested in some current political correctness while living lives of rather total isolation from the actual suffering of the world, Bible thumpers ignoring most of the Bible because it asks them to change, a nation of immigrants being anti-immigrant, etc.).  

We see that the ego is still in charge, and it just wears different disguises on both the left and on the right side of most groups and most issues. We try to engineer our own transformation by our own rules and by our own power, which is by definition, therefore, not transformation! It seems we can in no way engineer or steer our own conversion. If we try to change our ego with the help of our ego, we only have a better-disguised ego! As physicist Albert Einstein frequently said in a different way: No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused the problem in the first place.

Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

St Maximilian Kolbe 

Welcome occasions of being disregarded and humiliated, first with patience, then willingly, without raising any difficulties, and finally, with joy. That will be perfect humility.