A dumb prayer that heals the deepest part of you
2.03.2010 | All Blog Posts, Contemplation and Meditation, How to Pray, The Prayer of the Heart
When you pray, check your ego. A product of Enlightenment rationalism and individualism, it’s got a hankering for the novel, unique, and so-called “authentic.” It wearies easily of praying the same thing because, frankly, it’s not much interested in obedience to anything besides itself.
The ego wants to be your god, but it doesn’t want you to know that. In fact, it likes that you’re trying to be spiritual, to seek God, to practice the life of prayer. So long as you’re trying, it can still boss you around. It can swell with pride when you’re good, and knock you around when you’re bad. All this only feeds the ego.
The perennial wisdom tradition in all spiritual traditions knows that humble, dogged obedience in the same direction bears the fruit of a holy life.
Modernity is quite ignorant of all that, and my ego, at least, is pretty well infected with its disease.
That’s why I pray the Jesus Prayer over and over again. It’s a dumb prayer. It’s aim is to silence my ego who can’t stand its simplicity or my dogged obedience to drawing my mind down into my heart. When my ego is brought into submission to my heart, the Center, it stands dumb before Christ.
I still can’t figure out why it resists its healing.
2.03.2010
I have been following this blog for a while with some interest, having fallen foul of institutional Christianity a year or so ago after 32 years in the church, and feeling pretty bruised by the whole experience. To my great surprise, I found sustenance and help in a community of people I met on a counselling course, with not a Christian among them. So I am trying to live out my faith (which I still feel passionate about) in a context where God as I have understood him is not recognised, but nevertheless his presence is very real to me among the people with whom I spend my time. I love the people I am with. I no longer have any desire to convert people – I am not really sure that I want these people, who I deeply love and have greatly helped me – to become ‘Christians’ – but nevertheless have had several long conversations about God, Jesus and my rather flawed and confused faith with a few of them. I feel deeply relieved that I no longer feel this sense of obligation to ‘witness’, but nevertheless have been able to talk about God in a way which appear to me to be real and meaningful.
However since I am studying counselling, I wanted to say that I think the ego is getting a bit of a bad press here. My understanding is that the ego, in its Freudian sense, is that part of us which tries to mediate the demands of the id (unbridled instinct) and the superego (constricting legalism), as well as the pressures of the real world, to attempt to attain and sustain the health of the whole being. It is pragmatic and amoral, but absolutely essential to any kind of psychological, and therefore spiritual health. A healthy ego can make its own decisions and can doubtless seek to become your god, but a spirtuality without a healthy ego is subject to too many of the appalling distortions of spiritual life that we see under the name Christian. So let’s not knock the ego too much. It will never be spiritual in its own right, but I think is capable of submitting to that which it understands to be for the good of the whole being.
I could well be completely wrong in the way I am conceiving this. But since most of my settled ideas have been turned upside down in the past year, I’m trying to re-conceive my faith in a new landscape, and trying out new ideas in the process. So thanks for this blog! – it is great to connect here from time to time and to be challenged with these disciplines. I need to hear these things.
2.04.2010
John. A beautiful (and real) reflection. Thank you. God’s mischief carries us along often dark, unfamiliar paths, disorienting paths. I’ve found these paths to be the most helpful and healing. I’ve also found them to reveal the real Christ most profoundly. Alas, too much of the church’s preaching (and this comes from a preacher!) obscures Christ. Nevertheless, the Scriptures are read each week, and the mystery of the Sacraments offered, and I’m confident, there’s plenty of mischief in this despite the way institutional Christianity can hide the real thing. And I too have found light coming from the strangest places. There’s Incarnation in that.
About the ego. You are spot on, exactly right in your analysis and in your warning (plea).
The ego is not bad (I do think I’ve said this). It must not be eradicated. Rather, it’s to be healed, restored, returned to its proper function. The ego, as I understand it, is a God-given faculty within us…part of the image of God. But because of the Fall (whatever that is), it’s not healthy. It does not properly mediate between the Id and Superego, but too often is nearly completely identified with them.
This is central to our problem as human beings, to our spiritual practice, to the union with God that is the mystery we are all intended to experience. I think sin is largely this deep and “original” (that is, at the core of our being) misidentification of ourselves with our unhealthy egos. I’ve a hunch St. Paul might identify this wounded, broken ego with the “flesh” in his writings—”flesh” that is not to be discarded or abused or despised, but healed by it’s gathering into Jesus Christ. The Incarnation informs us here too.
Perhaps I sound a bit hard on the precious little one within us. I suppose that’s because I find we’re so ignorant of its tyranny.
We’ve all been around families whose little children are unruly, unmanageable, and frankly, rude, because they’ve not learned as you’ve said so well, to submit “to that which it understands to be for the good of the whole being.” Little children need to be loved and welcomed with space to grow, but they if they are never disciplined they become unhealthy. So too with the ego.
So, I probably exaggerate a bit much, but all with the purpose of bringing the ego back into its place—like a two year old who’s learning she’s loved but is not the center of the universe. Salvation is about this wholeness. And people whose inner lives are reordered, redeemed by Christ within become agents of healing in a world tyrannized by the mass insanity of egos run amok.
A writer you might find to be a good companion: James Finley. He’s a Christian, psychotherapist, and once a novice under the guidance of Thomas Merton. His little book, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, is a masterful exploration of just what we’re talking about here.
Peace to you, John.
2.07.2010
Thanks, Chris for your wise & helpful response. ‘God’s mischief’ is a concept I will certainly explore, and I’ve been wanting to find a way into Thomas Merton for some time, so the book recommendation fits well.
2.09.2010
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