Don’t Let Your Ego Run the Agenda.

My wife Lorna had a hip replacement about four months ago.  Since that time she has been working diligently to gain/regain the fullest use of her new hip.  I have been most impressed with her tenacious dedication to her rehab routine which until recently required her to do various exercises three times a day.  As she noted in a recent blog, New dawn for an old hip https://lmgharris.wordpress.com/, she mentioned that she had missed only one day doing her exercises.  I am truly impressed with her determination and dedication and I sure I would have difficulty in being so disciplined in similar circumstances. 

One of the reasons—although by no means the only one—why she has been able to be so disciplined is the consistent progress she experienced doing the exercises.  She noted that she could see some improvement—however slight—each day.  This naturally gave a direct payoff from the effort she was making and encouragement for her to continue each day.  I have often wished that my spiritual life had this kind of immediate and consistent payoff.  I have been attempting to maintain and deepen my relationship with God for many years through such things as prayer, meditation, being attentive to my dreams, and journaling.  However, in my experience the spiritual life does not give as direct and immediate payoff or reinforcement for spiritual practitioners.  This is of course my ego-based expectation.  My ego desires the immediate gratification and assessment that yes, what I am doing is the right thing and I am getting more and more spiritual and having a closer relationship with God which can be measurable on its terms.  As I have written, the ego can be considered God’s greatest gift and God’s greatest challenge for humankind.  The ego wants to be the center of existence and want to run each person’s life on its basis.  It doesn’t like to give over authority to God and believes it knows best what is right for the individual for its limited perspective.  If it acknowledges God it will at least initially be a God that is a reflection of the ego and believes it knows the mind of God which just happens to be the same as the ego’s view of the world.  Therefore, if life doesn’t work out as it believes it should, it believes that God is not living up to God’s end of the bargain.

Our spiritual life does not run on our agenda and to our schedule.  We have times in the desert—as Jesus did before his public ministry began.  There will be dry times when God does not seem to be in our lives—at least on our terms.   We will encounter the dark nights of the soul.  However, it is our ego speaking when it decides that this means that God has abandoned us.  God does not abandon us even if God understanding is not our understanding of our journey with God.

The best advice I know in these times is, “Be still and know that I am God”.  Don’t let your ego run the agenda. 

Readers of might enjoy my book The Ego and The Bible.  It is available on Amazon.ca:

 http://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=THe%20Ego%20and%20the%20Bible%20z

 It is also available on Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Ego-Bible-Stories-Divinely-Intended/dp/1500759155/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419870942&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Ego+and+the+Bible

Our Time is Not God’s Time—Yes But?

Richard Rohr is one of my spiritual guides.  I find much of what he writes to be meaningful for me and to contain deep wisdom.  I subscribe to his Daily Meditations which arrive in my email on a daily basis as the name suggests.  I would strongly recommend and can be found at https://cac.org/sign-up.

Recently one of the daily missives was entitled Giving Birth to God (Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation January 28, 2015).   This meditation spoke of God’s creation as a process which is still happening or ‘winding up’ in Rohr’s words.  This is an understanding of creation that is attractive to me and one in which I generally believe.  Others such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin have spoken of a process of cosmic evolution in which all of creation is still evolving and therefore is, in our terms, improving and which will lead to the evolution of consciousness in which the human species will become closer to God.  This view holds that God intends that God’s creation reach what Teilhard terms an Omega Point.  Liberals (of the theological variety and other varieties) will maintain that the world is progressing and becoming better.  They can look back and see how the human race had progressed; slavery has been eliminated (at least officially), science and technology have made our lives much better and more livable than people in previous millennia, medical science has brought us wonder drugs that will cure many diseases and brought us hip replacements and other medical miracles.  In many ways our lives (at least some of our lives) are much better than if we lived a thousand or a hundred or even fifty years ago.

In his Meditation Rohr speaks of what I understand to be the inevitable progress of history, “There is no doubt that history, like the biblical text itself, goes three steps forward and two steps back”.    He is proposing that although there is inevitable progress it is not a straight line—there are ups and downs, hills and valleys in the journey:

Even though we see violence, war, genocide, and stupidity, and we see religions and factions circling the wagons around their own tiny identities, yet always it happens that something like Vatican II, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, or Pope Francis comes out of seeming nowhere!

I am, as I noted, a believer in the evolution of human consciousness and the cosmos.  I do acknowledge that evolution and progress is not a straight line it is indeed three steps forwards and two back as Rohr notes. However, looking at events today I have to question whether the evolution of humanity is inevitable.  We have the obvious rise of terrorism in this century which seems to arise from forces from the collective unconscious of civilization and with it occurrences of slavery, torture, rape, murder, religious intolerance.  The predictable reaction against this in the West is increased intolerance and restriction in freedom (in the name of protecting those freedoms).  The consciousness of humanity does not seem to evolving but seems just as caught by these unconscious forces as they were in the past.  In addition we see the failure of science and technology as the panacea which will solve all our problems.  The diseases we thought had been eliminated are raising their ugly heads a la measles due to wilful ignorance and carelessness.   Bacteria are becoming more and more resistant to miracle drugs apparently through their God-given power to evolve.  The ecology of the planet is heading for the seemingly inevitable tipping point which will cause mass destruction and harm to much of this part of God’s creation—again through wilful ignorance as well as materialistic greed and short-sightedness.  On reflection, I do not believe that progress or evolution is inevitable—at least for the human part of God’s creation.  We may well destroy ourselves as our capacity to create for worst as well better out strips any evolution of consciousness which may be occurring.  If we do destroy ourselves God’s plan for creation will continue in perhaps a different part of creation or perhaps begin again in this world but there is no guarantee that that this iteration of humanity will be a part of it. 

My perspective may be nothing but my limited perspective—it is indeed limited.  My time is definitely not God’s time.  My understanding is not God’s understanding—thank God.   However, God has given us free will to do with this world and ourselves what we will—for better and for worse.  Let us make it for better. 

Readers of this blog might enjoy my book The Ego and The Bible.  It is available on Amazon.ca:

 http://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=THe%20Ego%20and%20the%20Bible%20z

 It is also available on Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Ego-Bible-Stories-Divinely-Intended/dp/1500759155/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419870942&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Ego+and+the+Bible

I Have to Talk to God About This

Yesterday I attended the induction service for the new rector, Matt Martin, in the neighbouring parish of St. James Clandeboy and Holy Trinity Lucan.  It was a wonderful celebration of new ministry with a large combined choir and a full to overflowing in the church.  One of the many things which resonated with me was a story that the preacher, Rev. Ken Anderson, related as part of his sermon.  He and his family including his five year old grandson were visiting Savannah Georgia.  They came upon a statue which represents a modern black family that has risen from the shackles of slavery. The base of the monument bears an inscription by poet Maya Angelou:

We were stolen, sold and bought together from the African continent. We got on the slave ships together. We lay back to belly in the holds of the slave ships in each other’s excrement and urine together, sometimes died together, and our lifeless bodies thrown overboard together. Today, we are standing up together, with faith and even some joy.

The grandson was quite captivated by the statue and asked his grandfather about it.  When he heard the explanation he was rather quiet and moved away from the area.  Asked about what he was doing he answered, “I need to talk to God about it.”   The wisdom in that statement is as profound as anything I have read by spiritual guides and wise men and women.  That, for me, sums up what we all need in our spiritual journey in life when we seek a deeper relationship with God.  We need to remember to talk with God about it.  Talking to God of course is a two way conversation.  We need to listen as well as speak.  So often in my experience I forget to talk to God about what is happening in my life and my response to those events.  I reserve my conversation with God to formal and sometimes less formal periods of prayer and meditation.  Talking to God at any and all times in our lives will help us in many ways as especially more aware of the Moments of Grace which occur and which we often can overlook and be inattentive to what are all around us and that we often in the midst of. 

As Ken noted the chains that bind the feet of that family in the statue are broken and they have been set free.  This is a powerful representation of one way of looking at sin – it is those things that chain us to the past.  Let us keep talking to God about our lives and looking for those Moments of Grace.