The purpose of the Christian path is that the entire human being, including our ego, become a unique vessel for the Holy Spirit. These words, by Rudolf Steiner, are inspired by this truth.

“Formerly, when a human being was placed amidst the sorrows and sufferings of earth, he only had to call forth within him the state in which he could be transported into the Divine-Spiritual worlds. He was not obliged to endure suffering, for when it came to him, he could at once seek the state in which he was filled with the spirit, God-filled, and in that state — severed from his ego — he could find balm for the sorrows and sufferings of earth. Christ Jesus had to proclaim that this time too was now over. Those would now be blessed, or God-filled, who, while they could no longer look outside for help for their sufferings, might through the strengthening of their own ego seek within themselves the power to find the Holy Spirit in their inner being. ‘Blessed (God-filled) are they who do not banish sorrow by ecstatically raising themselves to the Divinity, but who endure it, developing the power of the ego whereby they can find within themselves the Holy Spirit who reveals himself through the ego. Even Buddha in his time did not recommend that sorrow should be endured, but that it should be thrown off, with all the thirst of earth. Even six hundred years before Christ Jesus, Buddha described sorrow and suffering on earth as the worst consequences of the longing for existence. Six hundred years later, in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ in the second Beatitude proclaimed that sorrow must not be done away with in that way, but must be endured, that it was a trial through which the ego might develop the strength it can find within itself: the inner support of the Holy Spirit.”