To Crucify the Ego (Part I)

Fr. Ron Rolheiser

The Jesus Code - Unravelling The Secret, a recent column by Father Ron Rolheiser, comes as close as anything I've read to encapsulating in a few short paragraphs what the Christian religion is all about.

Fr. Rolheiser is a Catholic priest and president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. He writes a weekly column, available online and via various Catholic newspapers such at The Catholic Review here in Baltimore, MD. (Access Fr. Rolheiser's column archives here.) On a consistent basis, I find his pieces unusually insightful. This piece is especially so.

In it, Rolheiser plays on the human need to crack secret codes to find the hidden wisdom buried within — as evidenced by all the recent interest in Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code. Rolheiser says the code of codes of our human lives is "the Jesus Code."

"Jesus makes it very clear that there is a hidden, secret wisdom," Rolheiser writes of the Gospel of St. Mark, "that needs to be grasped if one is to understand the deep design of things. What is it?"

(Maybe not everyone would like to "grasp the deep design of things," but many of us do. I'd place my own self in this company quite readily.)

Well, according to Rolheiser, the "whole life and mission" of the Jesus of the Gospel stories "are an attempt to lay open for everyone the deepest secret of all and to make that secret accessible to everyone, as accessible as the nearest water tap or the village well. Since Jesus, the deepest secret is an open secret. What is it?"


What is it, indeed? Rolheiser says it's the "code" that's "hidden in the cross of Christ," the one "we have to break open if we are to learn the deep secrets of life. The cross contains a wisdom, the wisdom of the crucified, which is a prism through which all else is to be viewed."

What is it, this "open secret" that "love is most truly revealed in the brokenness of Jesus on the cross?"

What is it? It's that

... there is a necessary connection between certain things: Isn't a certain prior suffering and humiliation always the condition for glory? Don't we all, like Cinderella, first have to sit in the ashes before the glass slipper will fit our feet? Isn't sublimation always the means to the sublime? Isn't it precisely when we are vulnerable and unable to impress or overpower others that we are finally open to intimacy, love, and family? Aren't self-sacrifice and self-denial, in the end, the way real love manifests itself?

"Isn't the crucifixion of the private ego the route to empathy and community?" Rolheiser adds. "Isn't the forgiveness of those who hurt us the final manifestation of human maturity?"

I find that phrase, "the crucifixion of the private ego," to be the real nugget of wisdom here. One of its most important synonyms is the one Fr. Rolheiser gives in the next sentence: "the forgiveness of those who hurt us." It is the canonical synonym, even, because outright forgiveness is the hardest sacrifice we ever have to make. But I'd say there are clearly other synonyms, too.

In fact, I'd go so far to say that everything that we do that's good at least hints at the crucifixion of the private ego, and everything we do that's bad at least hints at its nemesis: the private ego's glorification.

"Glory" without "prior suffering and humiliation": isn't that what the ego is always interested in? The secret wisdom of Christ's cross is that that's an impossibility, even an oxymoron.

Now, I'm no angel. I don't want to claim that the crucifixion of my own personal private ego has actually taken place — nothing of the kind. I don't have any special handle on goodness. My inner sense, furthermore, is that my ego is usually firmly in charge of my affairs. Most of the time, I'm far from a saint.

Even so, I find that Fr. Rolheiser's concept of the crucifixion of the private ego as the open-yet-hidden message of Christ's cross resonates deeply with me. I'd like to explore some of the reasons why.

One of the first things that comes to mind when I contemplate the notion of ego crucifixion is the worry that it's an invitation to a life of self-flagellation. Some people assiduously seek their own self-mortification. Can this be right?

Jesus, though, was not a self-flagellator; no self-mortifier he. In Matthew 26, Jesus's prayer in Gethsemene in preparation for his betrayal and death included the words, "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt" (v. 39 KJV). I have always wondered about this prayer. Under the assumption that Jesus was God and privy to the sheer, ineluctable necessity of the events that were about to take place, what possible sense could his "if it be possible, let this cup pass from me" make?

It makes sense, I'd say, only in the context of revealing his nature as a non-self-mortifier, one who does not have an inner urge to self-destruction. Ergo, ego crucifixion, like Jesus's own crucifixion, is not a rationalization of suicide.

Hence, the ego crucifixion which Fr. Rolheiser speaks of is a sort of Middle Way (see also the earlier post The Middle Way: No To Sithhood). It is a path that lies somewhere between the two extremes of self-glorification and self-mortification. The fact that it is a Middle Path is one of the reasons the concept of ego crucifixion resonates deeply with me.