|
The Loyal Soldier is largely what Freud described as the “superego.” He said that our superego usually substitutes for any real adult formation of conscience. It is your early voices of guilt and shame that keep you under control. It is merely preconditioned responses, and not yet God encounter. The superego feels like God, because people have had nothing else to guide them. Such a bogus sense of conscience is a terrible substitute for authentic Spirit-led morality, yet it is what much organized religion teaches. We used to call it “pay, pray, and obey” religion.
What reveals the bogus character of this level of conscience is its major resistance to change and growth, and how it substitutes small, low-cost moral issues for the real ones that ask us to change, instead of trying to change others. It normally takes the form of “straining out gnats while swallowing camels” (Matthew 23:24), as Jesus says. (I am thinking of Catholics who are self-centered and live materialistic lives, and the only thing they confess is that they “had three distractions during Mass”!)
God, life, and destiny have to loosen the Loyal Soldier’s grasp on your small self, which up to now has felt like the only “you” that you know and the only authority that there is. To let go of the Loyal Soldier will be a severe death, an exile from your first base. However, have no doubt, discharging your Loyal Soldier will be necessary to finding authentic inner morality, or what Jeremiah promised as “the law written in your heart” (31:33). Most need guidance—and failure—to cross this boundary.
Adapted from
Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life,
pp. 47-49
Gateway to Silence:
The war has ended. Go in peace.
|
