Ego and Indifference

Devastated.  That’s the word I hung on to since my middle-of-the-night dream, one of those that you are grateful to have awakened.  I have had a very affirming life.  My wife loves me, my kids love me, my grandkids love me, and back in Detroit there are a lot of people who are happy when I happen to come around.  Here in our new home town, I become aware of the genesis of this kind of right feeling in a society, of finding happy fit.  A smile and a “how are you today” to an otherwise depersonalized clerk, a quick favor for a neighbor, a phone call to a friend, following up on something that he said, afternoons spent with people who need encouragement and support; all of these threads seem to make one appreciated. 

In my dream, I was sitting with someone who tore down the set of my life’s happy stage by informing me that all of this affirming language of theirs over all of these years was their attempt to build up my pitiful, wrong-headed self.  The person was the messenger of the truth that I was not actually liked at all, was worthless to them.  In my waking, I looked for a word to hold on to the awful feeling that I had, because I knew that there was a truth in it that I wanted to write about this morning, to share with you.  The word was devastated.

What struck me was not the feeling of devastation, but how much I was relying for validation on what people thought of me, on their building me up with their approval.  How much do I value ego?  Ignatian Spirituality, the way of the Jesuits, suggests that a “blessed indifference” is the way to live – to want neither a long life or short one, a healthy or sick one, one in which we are respected or one in which we are reviled, as long as we are following Christ.    They talk about “inordinate attachments” as things in our lives that are distractions, things that get us off the trail, farther and farther, until we lose our way.  When a sense of my being liked and appreciated was snatched from me in my dream, it was the vastness of the gaping hole that struck me, the huge space that it had taken up like a tumor – alien, fast-growing, and deadly.  

This morning, I am grateful for the devastation, the gaping hole, the freshened awareness of my ego and the way it can grow, killing me.  But I sit here and cross my arms for a moment or two, knowing that I’ve had this conviction before, and I’ll likely forget this feeling again.  I have an idea.  A smile and a “How are you today” to an otherwise depersonalized clerk, a quick favor for a neighbor, a phone call to a friend, following up on something that he said, afternoons spent with people who need encouragement and support; all of these threads, woven out of concern for others and not their impression of myself, may help me learn to be indifferent to ego.  In “Murder in the Cathedral”, T.S. Eliot provides the critical distinction: 

The final temptation is the greatest treason: 

to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.