I’ve been listening to a seminar/conference/book on tape by Richard Rohr called “False Self/True Self.” Such good stuff! You will probably find words of Rohr’s wisdom sneaking into my sermons in the next month or so. In the seminar, Rohr shares that we have two selves, a “false self” (he sometimes uses the term “ego self” or “small self” and the “true self”, the self we fall into (please note not “climb” into) when we realize that at the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of it all we are loved. (The “bottom of the bottom of the bottom” are my words not his).
We, as humans, begin life completely in the “true self.” We know (hopefully if we are blessed by a loving home environment) instinctively that we are loved. That we are surrounded by grace. Some might call this the “garden” experience. We are surrounded in love, and we don’t know any different really. But then, Rohr says that this happens about age 7, we start growing up. We start leaving the garden. We start exploring the rest of the world. And this is where we start discovering our “false self” or our “ego self.” It’s not anyone’s fault. There was never an “original sin” that sent us off, it is just what happens to us when we grow up. And as we grow up, and leave the garden, many of us start forgetting where we came from. We start forgetting that at the very bottom of the bottom of the bottom we are loved. We start worrying about how we look, and what people say about us. We become consumed with the “me” in us and pretty soon we are totally consumed with what Rohr calls our “false self.”
According to Rohr we spend the first half of our life…up to about 35 or 40 building our “little empire”. Building up our careers, getting into that “forever” house, climbing the social ladder, getting our children into the right schools, etc. According to Rohr, there is nothing wrong with all of this. It’s who we are, but at some point, we come to realize that this can’t be all there is. And for Rohr he believes the second half of our life is realizing that, and also realizing that my life, up until now, has been all about me. And that that is just not enough! It’s like we begin to realize that our ladder has been on the wrong wall all our life, and that it’s time to start building our ladder up a different wall…finding or rediscovering (uncovering) our trues self.
What’s interesting about all this, is that according to Rohr anyway, we can’t just ascend to this. In order to find the true self, we need to shed ourselves of the “false self”. And the only way we humans tend to do that is by falling and failing. It’s only then that we kind of “get it” and begin to do the challenging work of shedding the clothes of the “false self” and letting the Sacred clothe us in the true self.
One of the sure-fire signs that we are still living in the “false self” (and we always kind of are?) is that we get mad and hurt a lot. According to Rohr, the true self never gets offended by others. When we find ourselves hurt or offended, it’s almost always the “false self,” the ego-centered self, the “small” self. And most of us, I’m sorry to say, are totally consumed by our own “head.”
The only way out of this “head talk,” according to Rohr, is to get out of “your own head”! How? Well, not by more thinking. The way out of “false self” is not through the head, but through the heart. And the only way the heart works is by doing, by acting. We find ourselves working out of our own heads when we let our hands and feet start doing heart work…acts of love. In fact, when we are doing love…we are almost always “not” in our “false self”!
I don’t know about you, but Rohr really speaks to me today. I have found myself getting smaller these last couple of years. I think some of it is what we are going through as a world, but part of my “smallness” has come from not doing more acts of love. I haven’t been on a mission trip in a while. The church hasn’t been doing “random acts of kindness” events like we did pre-pandemic. I’m not blaming the church; I’m just saying I need those “physical and concrete ways of expressing and living love” in my life. Just saying I love just doesn’t pull me out of the “self-funk” that I’m often in.
Dear God, move my eye from its frozen fixation on the “awful” that’s happening out there, and refocus my heart on the “exceptional and true” that is truly there. And when I do see this, help me not just to say “cool” and walk on by, but inspire me to “do cool” with my hands and feet and heart.
Your pastor and friend, trying to let God help me re-member who I truly am, Brook
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