Ego Death, New Life, and the Crucial-ness of Christ

I have one month left here in the Dominican Republic, and I feel like recent events have marked/ shaped a sort of re-emergence; a re-emergence of the gospel’s centrality and magnitude and a subsequent re-emergence of my true self. These two increase proportionately: the more Christ is the foundation, the more we come into harmony with the life God has for us. This, I feel, is one important message Jesus illustrates in Matthew 10:39: “Whoever finds his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

This has to do with the letting go of the ego- our life- and doing so for the sake of Jesus, seeing the gloriously transcendent and eternal life he offers far exceeds what we currently have. To find the sort of life he has in mind, we must begin to let go of our own life, shifting our hopes and force and passion and allegiances and loves- the fundamentals of our heart- to him.

Deepak Chopra writes: “the ego keeps its grip by making us feel needy and powerless. From this sense of lack grows the enormous hunger to acquire everything in sight. Money, power, sex and pleasure are supposed to fill up the lack, but they never do. You can escape this whole package of illusion if you see yourself not as a shadow fighting to get to God but as in the light from the first moment.”

If I begin the recognize in a more complete way that I am, right now, in the light of Jesus; that God sees me in light of what Christ did: redeemed, forgiven, saved, holy, perfect, pure and new, the ego would begin to lose its grip. It would be washed away and carried out to sea by the enormous wave of satisfaction that comes rushing in- God’s very righteousness, flowing like the ocean’s tide. In my journal I wrote down a list of “not enoughs” that commonly plague my heart and steal my priorities:

Not enough style, good clothing
Not enough women, charm
Not enough eloquence, popularity
Not enough confidence, practical skill
Not enough money, stuff
Not enough friends, community
Not enough strength, conditioning
Not enough achievement, success
Not enough…Jesus?

Now we’re hitting on something. All those other lusts precede Christ simply because I’ve been thinking upside down; in terms of worldly power and accumulation and hierarchy, rather than in the counterintuitive but surpassing power of sacrifice and humility. “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” cries Paul in 1 Corinthians 1. Now it’s up to me to get my logic right-side-up again.

I like how G.K. Chesterton puts it: “This is what I call being born upside down. The skeptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy; for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstasies while his brain is in the abyss. To the modern man the heavens are actually below the earth. The explanation is simple; he is standing on his head; which is a very weak pedestal to stand on. But when he has found his feet again, he knows it. Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man’s ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small.”

In the Bible, the tree of life is referred to in Genesis and Revelation, and in Proverbs it is described like this: “[wisdom] is a tree of life to those who embrace her; those who lay hold of her will be blessed.” In paradise there was this tree in the middle of the garden. What does it represent? I believe it has to do with fullness of life; our desires for creativity, beauty, romance and knowledge being absolutely satisfied. Adam and Eve lost this; a fiery sword prevented them from ever approaching. A deep part of our condition is this sense of irretrievable loss- cosmic nostalgia. We’re longing for something we remember, yet never had; in all music and relationships and pursuits; something grasped at, but which fades away in reality.

As our ego drags us around our sprits become drained and crushed. What is our hope? Jesus became human and came down to clean up the mess. Spiritually, he was ground to dust- cut off from the Father- so that we could once again find that perfect fulfillment God intended for us; a place where we can rest in wholeness and bliss. This is my hope and, in the end, the only sure foundation we can put our trust in- a sun and a shield all at once, protecting and guiding us on the path of life.

“All ye that pass by- behold and see
Man stole the fruit, now I must climb the tree
A tree of life for all, but only me.”
-George Herbert, The Sacrifice