The best egg I’ve ever had is a cosmic one.
In part one of this series, I laid the foundation. In part two, I told a story of my spiritual struggles. In this post, I’ll share the first of three metaphors that helped me through those difficult years – the Cosmic Egg. I learned about the Egg from author and teacher Richard Rohr, who adopted it from The Crack in the Cosmic Egg by Joseph Chilton Pearce.
Picture healthy spirituality as an egg. The center yolk is My Story. The white surrounding the yolk is Our Story. The shell containing the whole is The Story. The three Stories form a collective whole, one nested inside the other like the parts of an egg.
The yolk of My Story
Most of us begin life almost exclusively focused on the yolk of My Story – my needs, my desires, my dreams, my ego, my hurts, my personality, my agenda, my problems, my experiences. The lens through which we view life is largely self-referential. Our first thought about most things is, “How does this affect me?” This is a normal and necessary starting point for virtually all of us.
The egg whites of Our Story
As we hopefully mature, we move into the egg whites of Our Story. In this stage, we begin to identify more strongly with our place inside of groups. Our family, our state, our country, our race, our religion, our gender, our team, our occupation. We learn to better interact with others, to compromise, to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. We experience both the benefits and the difficulties of belonging to a larger unit. In addition to our My Story view, we now see ourselves and the world through the lens of our associations.
The shell of The Story
If we continue our growth journey, we finally move into the shell of The Story. Containing both My Story and Our Story, The Story is where we move beyond the biases and limitations of our identity groups. We recognize not only our personal shortcomings in My Story, but also the failings of Our Story, realizing at last the essence of The Story – that all of humanity and creation is an interconnected whole, held together by something bigger than us all. What that something is depends on what you believe. For me, it’s God. The Story is the realm of transcendent meaning where we find the highest virtues to which we aspire – unconditional love, real forgiveness, deep humility, true self-acceptance, authentic goodness, unshakeable peace. These lead us to a total, loving inclusion of everyone and everything, including ourselves.
A Unified Whole
Each of the three Stories is good and necessary, one building on the next. The skills acquired and lessons learned in the smaller stages prepare us for the larger ones. Each must be experienced. There is no “spiritual bypassing.” And once The Story is encountered, the goal is not to eliminate My Story or Our Story but to hold them as a unified whole. Like three notes sounding in harmony, they collectively bring beauty and color to our life’s music. That is a healthy spirituality.
Even if we’ve done the hard work necessary to reach The Story, there is no static state where we can declare, “I’ve arrived.” We slide in and out of that sense of wholeness all the time. But with experience, we can more quickly recognize when we’ve slipped into too much My Story thinking, which leads to narcissism, or too much Our Story thinking, which leads to being judgmental and exclusionary. It becomes easier to once again focus on The Story and work our way back to a unified whole.
How The Cosmic Egg helped me
The Cosmic Egg metaphor clarified my spiritual struggles and helped me understand why I’d grown increasingly dissatisfied with some of mainline Christianity’s teachings. While Our Story gives much needed context to My Story and a wonderful sense of belonging, it also opens the door to the great danger of thinking that OUR Story is THE Story. This is the trap I’d fallen into – believing that only the Our Story of Christianity provided the true path to The Story.
I had a desperate need for a stranglehold on the truth. To be right. To have all the answers. Because if someone else’s spiritual Our Story was equally valid, then my Our Story must be wrong. It took me a long time to realize that my exaggerated Our Story view was blocking my full understanding of and appreciation for the beautiful inclusiveness of The Story. The God whom I now find at the heart of The Story is bigger, more amazing, and more loving than my previous worldview allowed me to imagine.
Eating The Cosmic Egg
Unfortunately, an overly inflated view of Our Story isn’t unique to me or to Christianity. We see this on full display in American politics and culture. White nationalism is a glaring example of an Our Story gone horribly wrong. The belief held by former president Trump and some of his most ardent supporters that the 2020 election was stolen from them, without evidence, is another example of an Our Story creating its own false reality. While those are recent examples, inflated Our Story problems can be found in virtually every political party, country, religion, and group.
The metaphor of the Cosmic Egg provides a wonderful path to healthy spirituality, but as the above examples show, the painful difficulty often comes in moving from one stage to the next. In my next post, I’ll share a second metaphor that helped me make those transitions – The Three Boxes.
So where are you in The Cosmic Egg? How’s your balance of My Story, Our Story, and The Story? What does your version of The Story look like? How do you live it out? Chew on these questions. Talk about them with people you trust. Have the courage to take an honest look in the mirror. If you do, you’ll find your way to a healthy spirituality, and you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.
For a deeper look at the Cosmic Egg metaphor, I highly recommend Richard Rohr’s Cosmic Egg written meditations and podcast on Another Name for Everything.
I’ve tried those first two options before. Many times. I’ve pretended that I didn’t see people suffering because it made me feel sad and guilty. At other times I’ve hardened my heart to the pain caused by injustice because I felt powerless to do anything of significance to stop it. But over time, I’ve learned that if I’m going to become the kind of person I really want to be, I have to choose the Servant Response. To go even further, I think if there’s any hope for the world to become what I believe it should be, most people have to choose option #3. I’m guessing many of you would agree.
2. What one practical step can I take to make a difference in that area?
As you enter into the battle against injustice, it’s easy to feel defeated at times and wonder if what you’re doing really makes a difference. Martin Luther King Jr. knew that feeling but kept himself and others going with this insight: “The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.” Keep fighting. In the end, justice wins.
A boy was walking on the beach and saw that the tide had stranded thousands of starfish on the sand. The sun was coming up and the starfish were going to dry out and die. He began to pick them up, one by one, and throw them back into the ocean. A man came along and said, “What difference can you make? There are thousands of them and you’re just one boy. Who cares?” The boy bent to pick up one more. As he tossed the starfish back in the water, he said, “This one cares.”