The Cosmic Egg

We are missing THE story.

I was talking to a friend the other day who is trying to hammer out a proposal for a memoir. She’s a great writer, which helps; and her life has been exceptional. But she’s been circling her story for more than a year, unclear how to break it open, or where to start.

“It sounds like you’re one metaphor away,” I offered. “You have to figure out how your ME story is really a WE story.”

Hilma af Klimt, “Tree of Knowledge,” 1913-1915. I love this video of Joy Harjo interpreting this drawing. (You can listen to my podcast conversation with Joy here.)

I read a lot of books, including many memoirs of various quality—some are about extraordinary lives; many are boring; and some, though not enough, achieve something entirely rare: They nail a paradox. Some authors manage to ladder the story of their singular, exceptional life to larger, cultural themes. Yes, our stories are unique, but more often than not, our stories are shared. I think this is why my editor was adamant that I write myself into On Our Best Behavior and pull the reader through the material by showing how I relate to all of the book’s themes—not because my life is remarkable, but actually because it’s not. One of the most frequent things I hear is, “I feel like we’re the same person.”

I don’t take this feedback as strange or as projection, I take it as truth. So many of us are essentially the same person, insomuch as we experience similar and universal rites of passage, heartbreak, joy, and loss. We’re living in a strange time, though, a time that insists that we need to primarily define ourselves by our differences, that we need to assert and lead with what makes us unique. We are wholly focused on the parts, rather than how those parts create something that’s whole.

Yes, I’m a Richard Rohr stan, but I think The Wisdom Pattern was my favorite book of 2023. The essential premise is that over the course of time, consciousness and culture have moved and evolved according to a pattern: ORDER, DISORDER, REORDER.

Plainly put:

Order, by itself, normally wants to eliminate any disorder and diversity, creating a narrow and cognitive rigidity in both people and systems.

Disorder, by itself, closes us off from any primal union, meaning, and eventually even sanity in both people and systems.

Reorder, or transformation of people and systems, happens when both are seen to work together.

We are in a time of DISORDER, attacking and pulling apart structures, systems, and stories that feel antiquated, profoundly unjust and unfair, and restrictive. This is postmodernism in a nutshell, where we break free from these ties that bind. The problem is that we don’t yet know how to reconstitute ourselves, to reassemble a common faith, narrative, or story that’s big enough to contain us all and hold us steady on a higher plane. We are in free fall between DISORDER and REORDER, where it feels quite literally like the center cannot hold.

Here’s Rohr:

“We no longer are so sure that the laws of nature are predictable and that human nature consists in knowing all the laws and controlling the universe as best we can. If you doubt this, simply look at the emergence of superstition and magic, UFO theories, New Age fundamentalism of every sort, shamanic journeys, and an actual reveling in the unconscious, the irrational, the non-rational, the symbolic, and the ‘spiritual’—and much of this among very educated people! The gods of the body, belly, and heart are demanding to be heard, not just the god of reason.

“There’s bad news and good news here. Living in a transitional age is scary: It’s falling apart, it’s unknowable, it doesn’t cohere, it doesn’t make sense, it’s all mystery again, and we can’t put order in it. This is the postmodern panic. It lies beneath most of our cynicism, our anxiety, and our pandemic violence.”

And again (sorry for the long quotes, but it’s just so good):

“The word change normally refers to new beginnings. But transformation, the mystery we’re examining, more often happens not when something new begins, but when something old falls apart. The pain of something old falling apart—chaos—invites the soul to listen at a deeper level. It invites, and sometimes forces, the soul to go to a new place because the old place is falling apart. Most of us would never go to new places in any other way. The mystics use many words to describe this chaos: fire, dark night, death, emptiness, abandonment, trial, the Evil One. Whatever it is, it does not feel good and it does not feel like God. We will do anything to keep the old thing from falling apart. This is when we need patience and guidance, and the freedom to let go instead of tightening our controls and certitudes. Perhaps Jesus is describing just this phenomenon when he says, ‘It is a narrow gate and a hard road that leads to life, and only a few find it’ (Matthew 7:13-14).”

Right now, in our exceptionally secular culture, one where we’re tearing apart so many of the stories that held us as a whole, it can be particularly hard to recognize that we’re in the midst of an unfolding pattern. And for this, Rohr offers another metaphor: That our Cosmic Egg is broken. That in a REORDERED world, the ME story is nestled in the WE story, which is nestled in THE story. But right now, the three are shattered and separate—and when they’re no longer in coherence, we get a shattered and separate world. Per Rohr, the ME is the realm of the secular individualist and all of our “me, me, meeeee-ness”; the WE is the realm of the cultural conservative and its insistence on conformity; and a false version of THE is occupied by “fundamentalists in any form.” It is only “the saint/whole/healed person [who] lives happily inside of all three.”

You can substitute any word you’d like for God, but Rohr argues that when some larger force is not at the center of our world and collective lives, “we are burdened with being the center ourselves.” This is our current ME world, where we can’t get very far because we’re trying to go it alone. Here he is again: “Without the inherent dignity that comes from who-we-are-in-God, we have to become more and more outrageous, more and more bizarre, more and more exaggerated or isolated to make sure that we stand out amid billions of people. The eccentric is the one who lives outside the center. We expect this of a young person, who is still finding his or her Center but now many in their eighties still live with such fragile or over-padded egos.”

Now first, there is much to celebrate about the ME world, including the cultivation of identity and essential individuation. But absent a connection to the dome of the WE, or THE, we’re left with only our egos: “My Story is not big enough or true enough to create large or meaningful patterns by itself…many people live their whole lives at this level of anecdote and nurtured self-image, without ever connecting with the larger domes of meaning. They are what they have done and what has been done to them—nothing more. You can see how fragile and unprotected, and therefore constantly striving, this self will be. It is very easily offended, fearful, and therefore often posturing and pretentious. … Jean Houston puts it this way: ‘When mythic material remains latent, unused and unexplored, it can lead to pathological behavior.’ This small and fragile self needs to be a part of something more significant—and so it creates dramas, tragedies, and victimhoods to put itself on a larger stage.”

The WE story is that larger stage, it’s the space of the mythic and the collective, where we find our shared values, rituals, initiations, and stories—when it doesn’t snuff out individual experience it provides the scaffolding for meaning, that we are not, in fact, going this alone. We desperately need and desire group belonging, to contextualize our own lives on a larger playing field. The truth is that the WE story inherently belong to all of us, if we care to look.

And then from the plain of WE, we get to THE STORY. Here’s Rohr:

“This is the realm of universal meaning, The Story that is always true, the patterns that every culture and religion discover in some manner. This level assures and insures the other two. It holds them together in sacred meaning. This is true transcendence, authentic Spirit, which informs all soul and body work. This is what secularism has rejected. Postmodernism says there are no universal narratives that are always true.”

If there’s one thing that storytellers can do—screenwriters, memoirists, novelists—it’s remind us that there are, in fact, universal narratives, including this moment we find ourselves in right now. More of us need to take the ME to the WE.

Before I go, Rohr makes the promise that the pattern will endure, writing:

“There will be societal reconstruction. It will come from people who can see in this way. True reconstruction will be led by those who can see reality at all three levels simultaneously. They can honor the divine level and live ultimately inside of a great big story line. They will appreciate the needs and context of Our Story and not dismiss it as mere cultural trappings or meaningless traditions. They won’t say that My Story is not important either. They won’t demean or dismiss people who are working on personal issues or addressing the important identity concerns of the first half of life.

From one Rohr stan to a sea of others, may we be these people.

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My New York Times bestselling book—On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good—is out now.