Swagger Turns to Stagger
Happy Halloween everyone. I saw a little boy dressed as a firefighter get off a school bus today, and watched him walk up the driveway toward his house. His costume gave him a real swagger, a certain adult authority. It made me think how our costumes, our bodies, give us a swagger. They make us feel like we’re really something. Doesn’t matter what, just something. Firefighters, pirates (my yearly favorite as a young boy), witches, Snow Whites, accountants, athletes, telemarketers, politicians, moms, sons, any body. Any identity other than Who we are in reality.
Secretly, we’re terrified we’re nothing. Like children, we feel vulnerable and uncertain, and our costumes are designed to cover over and mask – both from ourselves and others – our deep-seated insecurities. The real costume is the ego thought system of guilt. And we think dressing up in a body and cannibalizing everything and everyone for 75 years sounds like a fun way to conceal our guilt and fill our terrible sense of lack. We soon learn it’s one long stomachache — and toothache, and ultimately, heartache — after another. So we change costumes throughout our lives, thinking the Snow Whites or maybe the witches are having all the fun. It’s not long before we learn they were faking it, too.
With all this insecurity, it’s not easy being an ego. The Course says, “…you prefer to be anonymous when you choose to separate yourself from your Author” (T-3.VI.8:7). We believe we are the author of ourselves (T-3.VI.8:2), and this terrifies us because we expect God to emerge from the shadows at any moment, darkly hooded, glinting scythe in hand, ready to swipe back what we stole from Him. Our safety, the ego tells us, is to disguise our secret sin — to become anonymous in a world of bodies dressed up in the livery of the undead. And so we crisscross dark and lonely streets, switch costumes, cover our tracks, and secretly feel guilty for every devilishly delicious and sinfully sweet treat we manage to stuff into our gaping grab-bag of gluttony. All this while spending our lives looking over our shoulders, hearing the swish of the scythe in every whisper in the wind.
No wonder we swagger. We feel so small, and unsure. So scared, and panic-stricken. It’s our only buttress against the dark forces we mistakenly believe are marshaled against us, the demons that lurk and lie waiting for us in the cold, black night of the ego thought system.
