When the Ego Meets the Sacred
Why religion so often reinforces what it claims to dissolve
WHAT THIS NEWSLETTER OFFERS
After reading Inside the Invisible for a while, you will begin to notice a quiet
groundedness beneath the noise of daily life — greater calm, clarity, and a
growing awareness of God in ordinary moments. This newsletter will not give
you new beliefs. It will help you see with new eyes.
Here's a question I've chewed on for most of my adult life, first as a parish priest, later as someone who has watched a great deal of religious life from both the outside and the inside: why does organized religion so often leave the ego fully intact – or, worse, make it stronger?
You've seen this. Maybe you've lived it. The person who grows more certain, more rigid, more quietly (or not so quietly) superior after their conversion or their deepening involvement in a faith community. The congregation that becomes a battleground for status and control, dressed up in spiritual language. I'm not saying this to knock religion – I gave a good chunk of my life to serving the institutional church, and I believe its structure offers real good – but we do the spiritual life a disservice if we pretend this problem isn't real and isn't widespread.
Early in my ordained ministry I sat on a parish committee where two of the most committed members spent an entire meeting arguing about a five-dollar plumbing part and who could get it cheaper. Nobody in that room would have called it ego. Everybody would have called it faithful stewardship. But I watched it happen and recognized the machinery underneath the pious language. Later I saw the identical machinery running in boardrooms with no religious language attached at all. Same mechanism, different costume.
“Genuine encounter with the Divine tends to destabilize the ego, not comfort it.”
Here is the mechanism, plainly. The ego is extraordinarily good at what psychologists sometimes call co-opting – taking hold of anything valuable, including genuine spiritual experience, and repurposing it for its own maintenance. Give the ego a religious vocabulary and it will use that vocabulary exactly the way it uses everything else: to feel superior, to feel safe, to feel certain, to have a story about itself it doesn't have to examine too closely. 'I am saved and you are not.' 'I understand the deep truths and you're still asleep.' Notice how easily spiritual language slides into ego language wearing a costume –and notice, honestly, whether you recognized any of your own recent thoughts in that last sentence.
There's a related trap worth naming directly: spiritual bypassing. The use of transcendent-sounding language –'everything happens for a reason,' 'I've moved beyond anger,' 'I'm at peace with it' – to avoid doing the actual, uncomfortable inner work real transformation requires. It isn't always dishonest. Sometimes it's simply easier to talk about transcendence than to sit with genuine grief, genuine anger, genuine confusion. But easier is not the same as true, and the traditions worth trusting are the ones honest enough to say so out loud.
Here is the distinction to hold onto: genuine encounter with the Divine tends to destabilize the ego, not comfort it. Read the actual accounts. Moses at the burning bush, terrified and arguing with God rather than comforted, protesting he isn't the right man for the job. Isaiah, undone, crying 'woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips' rather than feeling spiritually superior. Paul, knocked flat on the road to Damascus, blinded for days, needing another man to lead him by the hand into the city. None of these are comfortable experiences. None of them leave the ego feeling more secure in its story. That is precisely the tell. If an experience of God leaves you feeling smugly certain and superior to everyone around you, examine, without flinching, whether you encountered the Divine or simply borrowed new material for your ego's ongoing project.
This is the real difference between believing in God and being encountered by God. Belief is something the ego can hold, manage, and use. Encounter is something that happens to the ego, usually against its will, and tends to leave it smaller and quieter afterward – which, if this series has done its job so far, you'll recognize as exactly the direction we're heading.
This is where the mystics come in, and where this series will spend a great deal of time in the weeks ahead. What sets the mystics apart from ordinary religious believers isn't better theology. It's that they took the possibility of actual encounter seriously enough to let it change them, cost them, sometimes cost them dearly. Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart – we'll meet all of them in Part III, and you'll find they were far braver, and far stranger, than the tame versions of them handed down in most church history classes.
For now, plant this: the spiritual life worth pursuing is not the one that leaves your sense of self feeling flattered. It's the one that leaves it a little unsettled, because something more real just walked through the room.
Here is a practical marker you can actually use, since abstractions like this are easy to nod along with and hard to apply on a Tuesday. The next time you come away from a sermon, a worship service, a retreat, or a private prayer time feeling unusually certain, unusually superior, unusually sure you now see what others don't – pause. That feeling, more often than not, is the ego collecting a trophy, not the soul meeting God. Genuine encounter tends to leave you quieter, humbler, and less sure you have it all figured out. If you walk away from church feeling more sure of yourself, look again. Don't take the good feeling as proof of anything.
SPIRITUAL EXERCISE – Examine One Belief
Pick one belief you hold about God or spirituality – something you'd say fairly easily if asked. Then ask yourself honestly: does this belief cost me anything? Does it ask anything difficult of me, or does it mostly let me feel settled and certain without requiring change? There's no wrong answer here. Just look honestly.
THIS WEEK'S CHALLENGE
Has your religious or spiritual life, on balance, made your ego stronger or weaker over the years? Sit with that question before you answer it. It deserves more than a reflexive response.
Part I of this series ends here, and I hope it's left you with the first productive discomfort – a sense that the self you've built your life around isn't quite the whole story. Next week we widen the lens to something most spiritual writing skips entirely: the 'we' beneath the 'I.' See you then.
I hope you have a splendid week. I look forward to continuing our time together in the next issue. May God enfold you and make his face to shine upon you, this day and always!
P.S. These newsletters form a structured course, designed to be read in
sequence. If this issue arrived out of order, visit the archive to start from the
beginning: insidetheinvisible.com/archive →
FROM THE AUTHOR
Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual
Transcendence
Are you looking for clarity in difficult times? Longing for a deeper sense of
purpose and meaning? This book is for you.
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