What is it?
We are hard-wired with it at birth.
It’s natural, yet it’s destructive.
It’s not an outside enemy–it’s a necessary evil that is internal to our human disposition.
What makes it insidious is that it seems necessary, and it is.
Without it we can’t survive, but with it we carry the seeds of our own misery and destruction, harmful to us and to others.
We are at one and the same time completely aware of it and unaware of it, and absolutely overwhelmed by its presence.
It is the most basic of all realities.
It is the self.
Reading from Philippians 2:1-11.