Listening to Richard Rohr

I've been listening today to audio lectures Richard Rohr gave on The True and False Self. Here are some of the key points that struck me in his teaching:

1. The False Self, which Merton wrote about, is the personal ego and body consciousness so glorified in our popular culture. The True Self is God in us or Christ in us, also known as God Consciousness or Christ consciousness. This is mystical religion that is free of all church rituals and legalisms, which are necessarily aimed at the False Self.

2. Speaking of the legalisms of churchianity, Rohr points out that the orthodox Catholic and fundamentalist protestant obsession with birth control, abortion, and gays, which as he points out Jesus never talked about, is that they are aimed at the shame involved in egoic body consciousness. It is a way church law is used to shame people. So this is church law aimed at the False Self, having nothing to do with Jesus but having a lot to do with keeping people in line and creating an us versus them paradigm where "we are the good Christians following the church rules as opposed to all those worthless horrible sinners out there."

3. Rohr points out that preaching the Gospel to the False Self is a lose-lose proposition because the personal egoic consciousness will never be able to live up to all the rules and eventually the fundamentalist preacher men are caught with male prostitutes and priests are found to be abusing children. So preaching the Gospel to the False Self rather than encouraging people to get in touch with their True Self amounts to pastoral malpractice.

4. From Rohr's Franciscan/universalistic (not sure if he or his superiors would be happy with the latter label) perspective the only goal of religion based on Jesus Christ is to help people find Christ within themselves thus helping to liberate them from the personal egoic mind of the False Self.

5. What's wrong with the personal ego so lauded and catered to in popular culture and pop psychology? Rohr used a metaphor borrowed (as much of this is) from Merton. Merton said people driven by ego climb the ladder of success, fame and fortune, only to find at the end of their lives that the ladder was up against the wrong wall. Because of the reality of death and the inability of mortals to take their precious stuff with them, sooner or later the path of the egoic mind leads to Nowhere Land.

6. And along the way up the ladder of success evidence gathers that it's not only lonely but empty at the top, which leads to depression, now epidemic in the middle ages of the middle class and often in the upper class, too. This recalls Tolstoy's version of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says: "But woe to the rich, for they have already got what they wanted, and will get nothing more. Now they are satisfied, but they too will be hungry. Now they rejoice, but they too will be sad."

7. Hope lies in the realization that your False Self is leading you nowhere and that it is time to sit down quietly and let God into your life.