We, We, We, All the Way Home.

Often when I’m writing, Kathy’s reality comes to me.  Not Kathy, who is wise enough to get a good night’s sleep, but her part of “me” that is not just...me.  If I describe “my” life, she occurs to me, because it is not “my” life but “ours”.  We’ve been married twice as long as we were single; how can I consider life to be “mine”?  A clearer description of this false ego is when I start to say something about “my” daughters or “my” son.  Well, duh! I didn’t make them myself!  It is at times like these that even as mine is the only body in my study while I am writing that I know it is not just “me”.

I’ve begun listening to Eckhart Tolle read his second book, A New Earth on my morning walks while the rest of the world sleeps.  He spends a lot of time helping us understand ego, adeptly using story, metaphor, and example.  While ruminating on this, I was struck by the Papal “we”, the way of the Catholic Pope, when speaking, to say “we” instead of “I”.  He would not say “I am troubled by what I see when….”  He would, rather, say “We are troubled by what we see when….”  This bothered me because the I felt the Pope was making himself bigger, more imposing by pluralizing himself; “we” is at least one more than “I”.  But I thought of the honesty that comes

to me when I describe what I think of as “mine” but realize that it is not exclusively mine at all.  And in the footprints that this honesty leaves in my mind, I notice bright glimmers that on closer inspection show themselves to be intimacy, the “we-ness” that stops me with gratitude and awe. 

So I’m thinking that the Pope has something to offer us in his use of “we”.  And each of us might benefit from reflecting on what I'll call “the lie of I”.  It I-solates us.  Self-protection, self-deception, self-control, self-sufficiency, self-awareness…when we consider these things, how do we feel?  How do you?  When, on the other hand, we are aware that we are in relationship, that we belong, that we live in someone else and they live in us, how do we feel then?  Do we perhaps feel a certain at-home-ness?  Do we feel that we have entered someplace, and are welcomed there?

Try it.  Say the word “we”.  Who is with you; who are you with?  How does it feel?  If the Pope’s we refers to himself and God who is Jesus, and Spirit, and Creator, then indeed he is in good company, and their voice is preferred to merely his.  Of course, if he is not in their company, but says “we”, he is a guilty of egoism as “I”.