The Path of Descent

The path of descent involves letting go of our self-image,

our titles, our public image. I think this is one of the many

meanings of the First Commandment: “You shall have no other

gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). What is at stake here is not just

false images of God (which mostly serve our purposes), but also

comfortable images of ourselves. That’s probably what the saints

meant when they said we have to move to the place of faith, to

the place of self-forgetfulness, of nothingness, which ironically is

the place of abundance!

The German Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart (c. 1260—c. 1328)

said in essence that the spiritual life has more to do with subtraction

than with addition. But in the capitalistic West, we keep trying to

climb higher up the ladder of spiritual success. Some Buddhists call it

spiritual materialism or spiritual consumerism. We’ve turned the Gospel

into a matter of addition instead of subtraction. When we are so full of

 ourselves, we have no room—and no need—for God or others, or

otherness in general.

When C. G. Jung was an old man, one of his students read John

Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and he asked Jung, “What has your

pilgrimage really been?” Jung answered: “In my case Pilgrim's Progress

consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could

reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.”  That’s a free man.

We aren’t really free until we’re free from ourselves: our ego, our reputation,

our self-image, our need to be right, our need to be successful, our need to

have everything under control, even our need to be loved by others—

or to think of ourselves as loving. 

- Fr. Richard Rohr