To Crucify the Ego (Part II)

In To Crucify the Ego (Part I) I suggested that the open-yet-hidden significance of Christ's cross is that reality is surprisingly constituted. Instead of the royal road to metaphysical harmony being either of those imaginable extremes, self-glorification or self-mortification, a Middle Path exists. It is the path Father Ron Rolheiser calls "the crucifixion of the private ego."

In his article The Jesus Code - Unravelling The Secret, Fr. Rolheiser shows that the link between Jesus's crucifixion and that of our individual private egos has to do with each one of us coming to understand "the deepest mystery within the universe," namely, love:

It lies at the base of everything, the cosmic, the biological, the emotional, the psychological, the sexual, the spiritual. There is no level of reality where one doesn't see the relentless deep pull inside of all things towards a unity, community, fusion, and oneness beyond self. Love stirs all things, speaking to every element in the language it can understand. Deep inside of us, we know too that this alone can bring us home.

"Slowly, painfully, with many setbacks, over the course of a lifetime," Rolheiser says, we crack the inner code of love — its secret DNA, as it were.

And "the paragon of mature human love," says Rolheiser, was Jesus's "refusing to resort to any kind of superior physical power to overwhelm his adversaries, refusing to give back in kind, and refusing to give himself over to bitterness and cynicism."

Rather, "innocent, trusting, unwilling out of love to protect himself against suffering," Jesus was intent on "absorbing hatred and sin, understanding and forgiving those who were murdering him." Through his selfless heroism he saved us.

Thus does the cross of Christ present us with a paradigm for our personal heroism, the crucifixion of our own private egos.

It's hard to know exactly what that could mean: to crucify the ego.

I think it means something relating to the fact that we humans are unique in having self-awareness, the knowledge of "I-ness." After all, ego in Latin is the first-person singular pronoun, the one that means "I."

Psychologists speak of the ego as something that develops in our infancy. It's an aspect of the psyche that lets us negotiate a complex world as we preserve our own existence and identity. It's a lot more than just having a swelled head. And it's not necessarily "bad."

But it can make us selfish, blinding us to the importance of those people and things that don't necessarily help us get along in life.

The prerogatives of the ego within the ambit of the total human psyche turn out to be limited, short-sighted, and biased. When the ego is running things, we easily find ourselves thrown out of inner — not to mention outer — harmony and peace.

This fact, that doing all the "sensible" things that further our private interests and feather our own nests is not the royal road to happiness, makes no sense whatever to the ego-dominated human mentality.

That's why, I suspect, we need to undergo a "religious" experience to help us "crucify" our private egos. The "meaning" of Christ's cross and its messages of love from above and of our own love for our fellow beings makes sense in this light. We need to experience some sort of radical conversion, a spiritual "attitude adjustment," if our egos are ever going to be "crucified."