2.1. The ego at the beginning, center and end

Placing one’s self-fulfillment as goal of a religious or priestly formation itinerary means, in reality, transferring into the psychological area what first was referred and applied to the spiritual one. In that sense and beyond appearance, self-fulfillment and self-perfectionist tension are not opposing  terms, especially by way of that self, symbol of withdrawal into oneself. The first, self-fulfillment, emphasizes the psychic aspect, completely immanent to the subject; the second moves in the transcendent and spiritual area, but often with the same logic and in view of the same objective: the logic of the ego-author-of-self, of one’s own services and successes, to reach a respect and fulfillment of self, built with one’s own hands and made up of visible and more or less exhibited results. When all’s said and done, it is always the ego, at the origin, at the center and even at the end of everything.

In the case of perfection it is an ego that is nourished by spiritual contents and journeys toward noble objectives. In the case of self-fulfillment the ego is very concerned about its gifts, qualities, various talents and self-respect, and which theorizes the primacy of the fulfillment of all of that over everything else  (including spiritual formation), or at least he places that fulfillment as condition for his self-respect and sense of personal satisfaction, his happiness.

The contents change, therefore, but the style and intra-psychic dynamism remains identical, as often strangely happens when one goes from one extreme to another in that pendulum movement that has often characterized these times of uncertain and sometimes uncommon changes.