Sermon - Does God Have an Ego?

           While shopping my book proposal around I’ve learned more than I’ve ever wanted to about the trade book business.  Few things are more important, I’ve been told, than the author’s platform. Explaining it as concisely as possible, one published author explained said, “it’s like this.  Your platform is the marketability of your brand”. Seeing my befuddlement he said,   “You are the brand. When Oprah writes a book, people buy it not so much for the content but because they know the Oprah brand. It’s about being known well enough to sell books.”

          Celebrities don’t have to worry about their platform, it’s a given. Did you know that Britney Spears has written several books? Her show biz success creates a large, ready-made platform. So when I saw pictures of a naked, pregnant Britney Spears on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, I got an idea. When I take my shirt off and sit down, I look pregnant too!  But I’m guessing that wouldn’t be enough to get me even on page one of The Onion.   

         The writing process has taught me not only about the book business, but also a thing or two about myself.  Several days after completing my manuscript, I read through a few of the chapters and thought, “Huh, that’s pretty good.” During that time, I picked up a new book by Frederick Buechner who is the author of some 30 books.  Buechner’s prose is lilting, poetic.  He is truly an artist. Several days later I looked over my manuscript again. I got a sinking feeling.  Compared to Buechner’s writing, my prose seemed wooden, lackluster and pedestrian. In my own mind my work had gone from pretty good one day, to pretty bad several days later. Nothing on paper had changed. What had changed was entirely in my mind.  

        That spasm of self-doubt wasn’t the first time my confidence has faltered.   Like many I know, I am occasionally given to bouts of severe self-criticism—especially about matters learned and literary.  I believe this can be traced to my high school experience.

        In high school, I cared only about playing football, hanging out with cute girls and going to the beach.  That’s all I cared about and that’s all I got. The high school guidance counselor told my parents I wasn’t college material. If I was lucky enough to graduate, I should get myself a skill so I could get a job.  My parents of course panicked and found a way to get me into college.   

        To their and my amazement, I graduated from college with the highest GPA in my department. So when I headed off to seminary, I thought I was pretty smart.  And this is how it’s been ever since.  Some days I think I’m pretty smart. Other days I know I’m pretty stupid.  So what am I? Smart or stupid?  No need to answer…. this is a rhetorical question!

        In Hinduism and Buddhism there is the Sanskrit word samskara. Literally translated, samskara means impressions. Samskara is the impressions on the mind that come from our experiences. We are most impressionable when we are young.  But throughout life, we all have an idea about ourselves based on our experiences and the impressions of those experiences.       

         One day Nasrudin went into a bank to cash a check.  The teller asked, “Can you identify yourself?” Nasrudin immediately took out a mirror and peered into it.  “Yes, that’s me all right!”

         The ego is that part of the mind that collects our impressions and draws conclusions about them.  The ego is like Nasrudin’s mirror.  Looking into the psychologically and socially conditioned self we say, “Yes, that’s me, all right.”    

        When I re-read my manuscript after reading Frederick Buechner’s book I got a case of the blues about my writing. The self-image I have carried since adolescence is still lodged in my ego and that ego still jerks me around. It tells me I am great one minute and a loser the next.  The ego judges us harshly and judges others even more harshly.

        The ego complicates reality. It promises happiness and sometimes even delivers—for a few minutes.  Perhaps you’ve heard celebrities talk about what it feels like to be in the limelight. At first it’s great to get all that attention.  It’s even intoxicating.  But it doesn’t last. When the lights go down and the applause fades, you are left alone with yourself.  So you sit down in a darkened room and have a drink and remember how great it was to feel so important—but now it’s over.

         Having an ego is necessary. You can’t live in this world without seeing yourself as a unique self contrasted with other selves. But our problems arise when we relate from the ego rather than to the ego. 

          For example, if you send me an email that hurts my feelings and makes me angry, and I fire back an angry and defensive response, then I am responding to your email from my ego, my separate self. But if I read your email and don’t answer right away, realizing I feel bruised and understanding my ego has been wounded; if I explore how I felt when I got your email; if I reflect on my response by asking myself what this pain is that I am feeling, where it comes from, how I can learn from it; if I decide to take a few days to live with and learn from my experience, then I am relating to my ego rather than from it. Every conflict is driven by ego energy. The spiritual journey is the process of taking charge of the ego rather than of allowing the ego to be in charge of us. This is easier said than done.

         The peacock is a legendary bird in the culture of India. Indians say that the peacock is very proud of its multicolored feathers, which when fanned out, symbolize the beauty of the whole creation.  It is said that the peacock not only smiles but laughs with great joy when it looks at its own magnificent plumage.  The peacock becomes absorbed in the vast array of colors, captivated by the textures and enthralled with the utter perfection of its feathers.

          Inevitably, the eyes of the peacock slip below its beautiful plumage to its legs, which are by comparison without any beauty at all.  In the mythology of India, whenever a peacock looks at its spindly legs it begins to weep. Eventually the peacock becomes so absorbed in looking at its legs that it forgets altogether the beauty of its feathers.

           The ego is like a peacock. When we see beauty in ourselves the ego inevitably rivets our attention to our spindly legs, fat belly, stupid mind, or the latest dumb thing we said—the ego limits us to the idea we have about ourselves. The truth is, whatever we think we are is just an idea. We are always more than we know.  

           From the Epistle of 1st John comes these words: “Beloved, we are God’s children now.  It does not yet appear what we will be, but we know when God appears we will be like God.”

           What is God?  The truth is, we can’t say—at best, God is “one in whom we live and move and have our being.” This Mystery of all mysteries cannot be reduced to mere words. Yet as creatures of language, we can’t help ourselves—so when it comes to the Ultimate Inexplicable Truth, we use the shorthand and say “God.”   The problem is the word God carries a truckload of baggage. The word God is fraught with the images that limit God to human ideas. It’s striking how people often call out to God as if God were a separate, person-like Being. We ascribe to God human characteristics, not the least of which is the ego, the separate self.

        But the Rhineland mystic Meister Eckhart comes to the rescue by giving us a different God metaphor. Eckhart said that “Divinity is like an underground river that no one can stop and no one can dam up.” God is not like some super-human personality, but a flowing river that wells up into life.    

        By implication, Eckhart says this living River of Divinity gives life to everything because it flows in and through everything that lives; it is not separate from anything. All of which implies that God does not have an ego nor is God a separate self, conditioned by psychological impressions.  The River of Divinity does not distinguish between you and me and us and them –this River just flows.

      In the Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell tells a memorable story that takes place on a wind-swept ridge in Hawaii known as Pali. One day two policemen were driving up the Pali road when they saw a young man preparing to jump off a cliff.  They stopped and one of the policemen rushed out of the car to hold on to the man who was trying to jump. The wind was fierce and it seemed for a moment that it might blow them both off the ledge. Eventually the other policeman got there and with all his might pulled both of them down off the rock wall.  Later, a newspaper reporter asked the policeman who risked his life, “Why didn’t you let him go? You could have been killed if that wind gusted and blew you out over the canyon.” He answered, “I couldn’t let go. If I had let that young man go I couldn’t have lived another day of my life.”

       As that police officer reached out to save the suicidal man—even at risk to himself—in those few moments, he was not relating from his own ego.  The cop got out of his own way. The ego loses its power when we get out of our own way. And when the separate self is no longer an obstacle, love becomes the way.   

         The word love is as misunderstood, misused and abused, as is the word God.  Most of the time when people speak about love, it’s the ego talking about what it likes.   

       Much of what we hear about love in this culture is based on the ego’s desire to be reinforced as a separate self. Too often, our understanding of love is based not on what we give but on what we get.  In this way the ego is a trickster.  The more we seek our own pleasure, the more unhappy we become. The more I seek to gratify my own ego, the more I feel alone.    

        I often hear people talk about how they are trying to love themselves more or better. Spiritual truth turns the ego on its head because in the end, we can only finally love ourselves by loving others. We can connect with ourselves only when we connect with others.  The spiritual life is about practice. It is not about practice until you’re perfect. Practice is the work of a lifetime. We are never over our need for practice.  The idea is to deepen it. We practice and practice getting out of our own way.  We don’t have to risk our lives by stopping someone from jumping off a cliff.  To love is simply to swim in the River of Divinity. And we do this whenever we put the ego—the separate self—aside.  

         A sweet and simple story is told of a bus that was bumping along on a back road in the South on a beautiful spring day.  In one seat a wispy old man sat holding a bunch of fresh, beautiful flowers.  Across the aisle was a young girl whose eyes came back and back again to the man's flowers.  The time came for the old man to get off.  Impulsively he thrust the flowers into the girl’s lap.  "I can see you love these flowers,” he said, looking at the little girl.  "And I think my wife would like for you to have them.  I'll tell her I gave them to you."  The girl smiled and thanked the man. She watched him limp off the bus as he walked through the gate of the small cemetery.  Such a little thing—to give over the flowers for his wife’s grave—but the old man got out of his own way. And this is love.

         This is love: swimming in the River of Divinity in simple and ordinary moments.  Love is not a feeling.  It is a spiritual practice.  We wake up when we see that the ego tells us what we have been and who we are; only love can open us to what we may become.  

“Beloved, we are God’s children now. It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know when God appears we shall be like God.”    

                                                                                                                                                           Blessed be