Reflection for Tuesday August 9th 2011

What does Jesus liberate us from? This won’t sound too different from what we now call the ego, which was not the term Jesus used. His phrase, and we all know it, was “unless you lose yourself, you cannot find yourself” (John 12:25). Jesus did not have access to psychological language. He did not need it. He spoke in a straightforward way that his contemporaries could understand. But the interesting thing is, although his teaching is clearly about freedom from the false self, both Catholic and Protestant scholars, trapped inside the same European worldview, arrived at the same conclusions: liberation from the body self, not the false self.

I think this happened because the body carried shame. The body carried guilt. When one had too much to drink, too much to eat, or had been involved in superficial or dishonest sex, the body knew it. We knew that this was not what we were about, so we naturally felt shame and guilt in regard to mistakes we made with our body. It was easy to capture this. But do you know what? Mistakes we made with our ego, like pride and ambition, did not cause us to feel shame. We actually felt them as an empowerment. This is the ego we have to free ourselves from.