{"id":26822,"date":"2026-04-13T09:35:30","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T13:35:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=26822"},"modified":"2026-04-13T09:59:41","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T13:59:41","slug":"26822","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=26822","title":{"rendered":"Surrendering Ego"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Matt Maher - Lord, I Need You (Official Lyric Video)\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/LuvfMDhTyMA?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/cac.org\/themes\/contemplation-liberation-and-action\/\">Contemplation, Liberation, and Action<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sunday, April 12, 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Give me a place to stand, and I will move the whole earth with a lever.<br>\u2014Archimedes<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Father Richard Rohr uses the images of a lever and a place to stand to explain why social transformation needs both action and contemplation:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Archimedes, a third-century BCE Greek philosopher and mathematician, noticed that a lever balanced in the correct place, on the correct fulcrum, could move proportionally much greater weights than the force actually applied. He calculated that if the lever stretched far enough and the fulcrum point remained fixed close to Earth, even a small weight at one end would be able to move the world at the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>The fixed point is our place to stand. It is a contemplative stance: steady, centered, poised, and rooted.<\/strong> <strong>To be contemplative, we have to have a slight distance from the world to allow time for withdrawal from business as usual, for contemplation, for going into what Jesus calls our \u201cprivate room<\/strong>\u201d (Matthew 6:6). <strong>However, we have to remain quite close to the world at the same time, loving it, feeling its pain and its joy as our pain and our joy<\/strong>. <strong>Otherwise, our distance can become a form of escapism.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>True contemplation, the great teachers say, is really quite down to earth and practical, and doesn\u2019t require life in a monastery. It is, however, an utterly different way of receiving the moment, and therefore all of <strong>life. In order to have the capacity to \u201cmove the world,\u201d we need some distancing and detachment from the diversionary nature and delusions of mass culture and the false self. <\/strong>Contemplation builds on the <strong>hard bottom of reality as it is without ideology, denial, or fantasy.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Unfortunately, many of us don\u2019t have a fixed place to stand, a fulcrum of critical distance, and thus we cannot find our levers, or true \u201cdelivery systems,\u201d as Bill Plotkin calls them [1], by which to move our world. <strong>We do not have the steadiness of spiritual practice to keep our sight keen and alive.<\/strong> (COFew?) Those who have plenty of opportunities for spiritual practice\u2014for example, <strong>those in monasteries\u2014often don\u2019t have an access point beyond religion itself from which to speak or to serve much of our world.<\/strong> <strong>We need a delivery system in the world to provide the capacity for building bridges and connecting the dots of life.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Some degree of inner experience is necessary for true spiritual authority, but we need some form of outer validation, too. <strong>We need to be taken seriously as competent and committed individuals and not just \u201cinner\u201d people.<\/strong> <strong>Could this perhaps be what Jesus means by being both \u201cwise as serpents and innocent as doves\u201d (<\/strong>Matthew 10:16)? <strong>God offers us quiet, contemplative eyes; God also calls us to prophetic and critical involvement in the pain and sufferings of our world\u2014both at the same time.<\/strong> <strong>This is so obvious in the life and ministry of Jesus that I wonder why it has not been taught as an essential part of Christianity<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=26814\">Previous Entry:&nbsp;A Place to stand<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Liberation from the Ego\u2019s Agenda<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>Monday, April 13, 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Father Richard considers how Jesus calls us to be liberated from the agendas of our inflated egos:&nbsp;<\/em>&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What was Jesus liberating us from? This\u202fprobably won\u2019t seem too different from what we would now call the ego or the\u202ffalse self. As Jesus put it, <strong>\u201cThose who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it\u201d <\/strong>(Matthew 10:39). Buddhists tend to describe this process with much greater clarity, but Jesus didn\u2019t have access to psychological language. He just spoke in a straightforward way that his contemporaries could understand.\u202f\u202f<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Scholarship today is discovering a much more radical and demanding Jesus than either Catholicism or Protestantism was ever ready for. <strong>We distorted the\u202fmessage so it wasn\u2019t primarily about a transformation of the ego but freedom from the body self. We largely transferred everybody\u2019s guilt concerns toward the body. <\/strong>We concentrated on repressing and punishing the body, not giving the body too much pleasure, freedom, or delight. It\u2019s not that there aren\u2019t issues there, but <strong>the ego, in my opinion, has gotten away scot-free in the Western church. W<\/strong>e allowed egos to get out of control while being quite anxious to appear chaste, self-disciplined, and not too greedy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Christianity has largely paid little attention to the real things Jesus talked about. Instead,<\/strong> <strong>we tend to be preoccupied with things that Jesus never talked about. But who can reform Christianity except Jesus?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Understanding Jesus\u2019s<\/strong><em> <\/em><strong>teachings on powe<\/strong>r <strong>is the key to reforming Christianity and other power structures:\u202f<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Jesus tells his followers that they should never have what we would call dominative power. He calls it \u201clording it over others\u201d:<\/strong> \u201cYou know that the rulers of the gentiles lord it over them \u2026 but not so with you\u201d (Matthew 20:25\u201326). <strong>How did so many Christians come to believe that exercising power over others is what religion is all about?<\/strong> There\u2019s no indication\u202fthat Jesus ever intended there to be a head church office somewhere, with upper, middle, and lower management. As a priest, I\u2019m lower management\u2014and even we expected the laity, the people in the pews, to be passive followers. This is so contrary to what Jesus taught and expected. <strong>He clearly gives power to people by giving them an&nbsp;<em>inner authority<\/em>.\u202f\u202f<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Liberation from the ego self is liberation from the world of forms and images. Jesus\u2019s word for that was&nbsp;<em>mammon:&nbsp;<\/em>\u201cYou cannot serve God and mammon\u201d (Matthew 6:24). <strong>If we\u2019re playing the game of appearance and power, prestige, and possessions, Jesus says we cannot know God. That\u2019s\u202fpretty\u202fabsolute! There\u2019s a correlation between our preoccupation with image and how much\u2014or how little\u2014we\u2019ve\u202fexperienced the inner life.\u202f\u202f<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Jesus also liberates us from the ego self by his constant warnings against negativity and oppositional thinking. In general, his word for that liberation is&nbsp;<em>forgiveness<\/em>. Two thirds of Jesus\u2019s teaching is directly or indirectly about forgiveness.<\/strong> <strong>To live\u202foppositionally\u202fis to be holding some degree of resentment or unhealed negative energy that we have not brought to the divine presence for transformation.\u202f\u202f\u202f<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Contemplation, Liberation, and Action Sunday, April 12, 2026 Give me a place to stand, and I will move the whole earth with a lever.\u2014Archimedes Father Richard Rohr uses the images of a lever and a place to stand to explain why social transformation needs both action and contemplation: Archimedes, a third-century BCE Greek philosopher and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26822"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26822"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26827,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26822\/revisions\/26827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}