The Sum Of People's Egos

Some people assume that guilt is an adequate controller or regular of behaviour. It is not. The ego with the sum total of its integrative capacities and object relatedness is the agency that determines behaviour.

R.W. Richard Sipe, A Secret World

Like Richard Sipe I entered religious life, he Catholic and I Protestant. Both of us did it for purely relational reasons. We learned the rubrics, we scrutinized our own motivations. And we each wound up realizing that what each of our respective churches taught was vastly different than how they behaved. He made his way into the field of psychology/psychiatry, I received training in psychotherapy but remained in a pastoral office, eventually serving in four different denominations, the last of which was Catholic. In spite of what each of them formally professed, the same psychological dynamic pervaded each one, and this applies to local churches as well.

Each of these organizations had well-defined identities coupled with the manner in which their adherents could gauge whether they were genuine Christians or not, each according to their respective denomination. That is, each organization has set parameters by which one my gauge themselves as to whether they are in or out. But after twenty-eight years of formal church ministry I can professionally attest that they had little actual effect on member's behaviours. In other words, the threat of guilt neither controlled nor regulated. If people were that way beforehand, then they were that way during their membership tenure. And the same was true for leaders as it was for members. Instead it was indeed the complexities of people's egos that afforded both rationale as well as agency regarding their actions. At first these were difficult to discern as a young clergy. I was often caught unaware by their actions because their words were so otherwise convincing. But slowly, at first through reading critical literature, and then through greater experience, and finally by formal training the rubrics of administration began to fall away. Egos became very quickly discernible by reading actions - one of which being the manner in which people used words and not the words themselves. And in the end I, like Sipe, withdrew from formal ministry, which is not really interested experiencing God by denying ego and returning to the id. Object relatedness is that which one places under their control. This, coupled with the need to project oneself onto others in order to control.

It is the denial of self, the refusal to objectify others, the stripping away of culture and expectations, these are essential in experiencing God directly. To simply take one's place gracefully in the natural world is at root the existential invitation that God offers to all people, in all places, and at all times. There is no attention paid to this in the daily affairs of the churches and certainly no formal education applied to finding it, and it is antithetical to contemplative living...a life of simple emptiness in serving the genuine needs to those around you.