my ego is my enemy

The Shoemaker

I've been confused by Thomas Merton's journals.

After he became a monk, renounced the world, retreated to nature, and sunk deeper into prayer and scripture and solitude, he only wrote more about his own pride and prejudices, big-headedness and blindness. How it pained him, like a disease. How sick of it he was.

I thought his devotion to God would make him saintly, head drunk daily on divine thoughts. Not talk soberly about all the badness still inside.

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This year, I've danced with the desperate confidence that I'm growing. Making progress. Moving forward. That I'm better than I was.

The search will lead somewhere. The reams of notes in my journal. The long meandering walks. The stacks of annotated books about morality and mythology and God. The hours spent staring into space, wondering about trees and religious conversion and string quartets, how the dots will connect and whether nostalgia is worth the delusion. Hoping that the useless days will add up to something. That they aren’t as slight and inconsequential as they sometimes seem.

Pain will distill into wisdom, confusion will condense into clarity.

But, at the same time, I've been wary of my ego. This blown-up sense of self-importance. This sly, seductive voice that tells me I'm important and good and seeing the Truth about the Universe, that everyone else is conveniently avoiding¹.

I keep catching my ego in motion. Noticing how it twists, like a weed, around my experience. Every good thing I do—lending books, washing extra dishes at dinner, sending warm words to friends, offering feedback on essays—even the bad things I could do but don't, build up this smug satisfaction in my head that I'm a swell guy.

My ego wants to separate me from the pack. Put me higher. Above the rest. It says things like "Most people..." It feeds off that lightning flash of superiority, despite the cold downpour of loneliness that follows².

But that’s where the danger is: To believe evil is merely an external phenomenon. To close my eyes to any darkness inside. To wash my hands of sin³. Think it’s below me.

Pride precedes the fall.

*

Virtue demands vigilance and constancy is the purest form of courage.

I think C.S. Lewis was right: the only way I can know I'm getting better is when I understand, more and more clearly, the evil still inside. But if I'm getting worse, I become increasingly blind to my badness.

That's the paradox: When I think I'm at my best is exactly when I'm at my worst. I’m most susceptible to sin when I say I’m safe from it. My ego is biggest when I believe it doesn't exist⁴.

Rather, I'm at my best when I see all the ways I could go wrong. The blame I want to lay at the feet of others. The harsh words that bite in the back of my brain. The tug of temptation.

That awareness creates distance. A gap. The freedom to choose.

That awareness, really, is a confession. I respect myself enough to know I’m of the same flesh and bone as every other human across history, including the monsters.

I’ve decided I'm at my best when I see the razor's edge on which I tread⁵. Self-loathing on one side and superiority on the other. And decide to fight the good fight. The only fight worth fighting. That continual, difficult, not always "fun" choice of good over evil, right over wrong, heaven over hell.

It's the battle of a lifetime. Waged not between nations or religions or political parties, but in the heart of every individual. In my heart.

That, right there, is the good stuff.

As always,

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👋 what i’ve been up to:

• After my last piece struck a chord with people, I took some time away to breathe decompress and touch grass. Thank you to everyone who read it and shared kind words. I'm sorry I haven't got back to you. I've been struggling to figure out what I want my relationship with technology to be, and have felt pulled to avoid my phone like the plague.

• Days in the sun. Building stairs, clearing brush, framing windows. Constructing a corduroy road through a forest. Holding mass at the hermitage with members of the local church. Three days a week, we go out early in a small zodiac boat and catch cod for dinner.

• This, despite its difficulties, will be a summer for the books.

✍️ quote i’m pondering:

Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald on what makes a brilliant mind:

"The test of a first-rate intellect is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

📸 photos i took:

Summer in Newfoundland.

1. We are all identical in our burning conviction that we are unique.

2. That's what I've learned about the spirit of temptation: it's not some screaming voice that violently opposes your intuitions, but this soft seductive whisper, this voice of reason and rationality and intelligence. That it's not so bad. It's okay. To let it slide. Just this once. 

In the movies, it’s always an evil genius. Evil is somehow married to the intellect, rationality and reason, and somehow that always makes sense to us.

3. The modern palette tends to cringe at the word “sin” but, in origin, it was an ancient archery term meaning “to miss the mark”. To sin is to stray off the path of good.

4. The thread that weaves through all the religions and every sect of spirituality, is the necessity of overcoming the ego. Where they differ is how they prescribe doing it.

That's the core of religion, I think. Real religion. It's not meant to make people feel good, especially not better than others. Religion is not about feeling good. It's about being good. Feeling rapturously small. It's about terror just as much as joy.

Ultimately, true humility isn’t thinking less of myself, but not thinking about myself at all.

5. Matthew 7:13-14 (ESV)

“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”