Song of the Soul | Ted Haggard’s Grace-full Fall | Ego and Self
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Song of the Soul
By Bevalyn CrawfordNot round,
Not perfect like a sphere.
I am cloud-like in shape
But dark in colorI cannot be known,
Cannot be illumined with bright light.
I must be felt in the dark.I am wounded by shallowness,
attempts to fix pain and
cheat death.I grow through eons of pain and suffering,
through beauty and
love under impossible circumstances,
Through earth life,
womb of my becoming.Confused, I stalk dead game:
Progress, Security, and
Success;
Trophies, mistaken for live.Solitude, loneliness and depression
are the trail back from such folly.
So is longing
to return
Home.I am clay of the clay,
Molded in the Potter's hands
until
soft and shapeless
I am formed, and
sing, at last,
The Divine Song.Ted Haggard’s Grace-Full Fall
by Bevalyn CrawfordEvangelical leader Ted Haggard’s dilemma in being exposed as a closet homosexual arises from an underlying mistake, a mistake that evangelical Christianity often embraces: emphatic moral duality. There is irony here because the story of “the Fall” in the book of Genesis warns against this very pitfall, put metaphorically as God forbidding Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, for “in the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.” (Translation: “don’t divide the world and label part of it ‘good’ and the other part ‘evil.’ It will lead to big problems.”) To a large degree, the most militant evangelical Christian leaders have missed that point and instead done exactly what the Bible warned against: embracing the dualistic mindset– defining good and evil, and pitting them against each other. This dualistic version of Christianity sets the believer against the essential unity within him or herself and makes it difficult to regain the integrity of the whole human being, a necessary step in attaining spiritual fulfillment or even a harmonious ordinary life. Rather than being a source of help, this dualistic Christianity has been part of the problem, impeding realization of the deepest religious impulse, which it ostensibly serves. It subjects the human desire for spiritual fulfillment, for wholeness, to moralistic demands which demonize parts of human experience and extol other parts. This results in repression and fragmentation, the very condition from which we need salvation, and for which we look to the church– a true Catch 22.
What has been repressed in us does not disappear. We cannot forever deny who we are. When our shadow-self does appear, it emerges in an immature and primitive manner, exaggerated and distorted by the repression. Thus we see Haggard’s homoerotic impulses manifested, not in a straightforward way, but in the distorted, secretive way they did. To heal he will need to consent to his wholeness, and understand why his life has played out as it has. He will need to find the truth within himself and even subject his understanding of scripture to discernment based on deep inner truth.
How can we be the in the "image of God" if we hate and attack ourself? It is from self-alienation that we need salvation. But the church, to the extent that it promotes the embrace of moral duality, becomes the instrument not of salvation but of the fall. Paul, in Romans 7:19-20, exhibits the convoluted, confused mentality and fragmentation that derives from self-alienation. “The good which I want to do, I fail to do; but what I do is the wrong which is against my will; and if what I do is against my will, clearly it is no longer I who am the agent but sin that has its lodging in me.” In trying to deal with his dilemma Paul then creates another mistake. In Romans 8:3 he looks to Christ as the corrective, but then attributes to God a similar judgmental attitude: “…by sending his own Son in a form like that of our own sinful nature, and as a sacrifice for sin, he has passed judgment against sin within that very nature…” This is what happens: we project on God and on Christ our own fragmented consciousness. We cannot truly know God if we do not know God dwelling within us, in our fullness. In these passages Paul surely did “see through a glass, darkly,” with the emphasis on “darkly.”
It is no accident that Haggard allowed himself to engage in behavior he consciously condemned, and be caught in it. It indicates a weakening belief system but not weakness of deep character. Something in him was willing to go through this crisis. Newsweek’s title for their recent article on Haggard reflects the dualistic mindset that he suffers from: “A Pastor’s Fall From Grace.” From a non-dual perspective we would instead say that his fall was due to grace, creating an imperative for spiritual growth. The crisis brings his self-alienation into awareness in such a way that he must come to terms with it. Hypocrisy is a direct result of moral duality: a denial of our wholeness in order to maintain a one-sided self-image of “goodness.” Spiritual life is arrested as long as this fragmentation stands. Grace is surely involved in creating the conditions whereby self-alienation must be faced, and can thereby heal. Who knows what divine work lies in Haggard’s future if he finds his way to that integration.References:
Wolffe, Richard, Susan Moran and Karen Breslau. “A Pastor’s Fall From Grace.” Newsweek November 13, 2006: 34-35; The New English Bible: With the Apocrypha, Oxford Study Edition. Ed. Samuel Sandmel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972The Ego and the Self
by Bevalyn CrawfordIn their mystical heart, all the great religions recognize a distinction between the lower self (ego) and the Higher Self and that our spiritual task and liberation is to shift our identity from the ego to the Self. This distinction, between ego and Self, is key to understanding both the dislocations of the human condition and its resolution. (The human condition is a secular term for what, in religion, is described as the “state of sin” or “the world of illusion.” Release from this limited state is called salvation, liberation or enlightenment.) We are born in an unconditioned state, at one with being. As we participate in life on this earth, this pure innocence and essential identity becomes overlaid with a constructed identity– we learn to identify with various qualities and circumstances of our birth: with our body, mind, gender, race, intelligence, family and cultural conditioning, religion etc. In this way an identity is constructed based upon provisional qualities, rather than essential being. This provisional, constructed identity is our ego (a somewhat different meaning of the word then that used in Western psychology). It is who we think we are and our identification with it causes suffering. Ego is created and maintained by our thoughts and can easily be threatened if some element of ego identity is endangered. For example, identifying with race or gender makes us emotionally vulnerable to racial or gender slurs and discrimination; identification with the body means death is a threat. The identity that resolves all these threats and fears, and therefore the human condition, is identity with that in us that does not die because it is the very essence and substrate of existence itself, the unconditioned being with which we came into this world. One comes to recognize that this unconditioned being is Divine Consciousness dwelling within us. This is the Higher Self.
The mental activity that supports ego identity is called the discursive, egoic mind, or, by Buddhists, “small mind.” It can be analytic and focused but is mostly rambling, fuzzy, and only semi-conscious; conditioned by education and past experiences, and impelled by emotions. We tend to think in the same way and with the same thoughts, over and over– habits of the mind– which cause us to inhabit a mental-emotional rut, which impairs our capacity to learn from experience. This egoic mind and our mesmerized subservience to its messages keeps us stuck in the ego-self and unable to realize our Higher Self and the potential of our human life. Much of the repetitive inner tune we march to comes from our personal history, but part of it comes from our education and the collective consciousness of our culture.