Richard Rohr First air date April 2, 1999 – Program #4319

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Fr. RICHARD ROHR is a priest, a retreat master and a writer. A native of Kansas, Richard entered the Franciscan order in 1961 and became a priest in 1970. He was founder of the New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a member of the Franciscan community of New Mexico and now divides his public time between local work and preaching and teaching around the world. Richard Rohr is well known for his popular series of audio and video tapes, for his many books, and as a contributing editor of Sojourners magazine.

I’d really like to make one point. I hope I can make it in a way that makes sense because I think this point is essential for what we’re dealing with today. It’s probably no surprise that in many ways we are facing a crisis of spirituality in the West and we’re all moving in to fill this spiritual gap. Yet it seems to me that the self that we’re dealing with is the wrongly named self. What some would call the “private self,” I sometimes call the “private I” which is precisely not the “I” that can mean God because this “I” does not exist. It has emerged in many ways out of Western individualism. We take this little self that we are far too seriously and this little self is frankly too little to address or to be addressed by the Great Mystery that we call God. We are seeking in whatever ways we can to find the self as Paul put it, “hidden with Christ in God.”

The psychologists might call it the self with a big “S”. We live with the self with the small “s.” Even Buddhism speaks of the ego self and the Buddha self. As Christians, we would probably speak of the false self and the true self in God. The self that we are dealing with is largely an illusion. It doesn’t exist and we keep trying to dress up this false self. We try to make it more Christian, more Catholic, more Methodist, more holy, more pious, more good and it never works because the self itself is fragile, insecure, and metaphysically does not exist.

Paul was probably trying to address this in his great doctrine of the Body of Christ. Mystics have always been trying to find this larger self, this self that is not a self at all as we understand it. Maybe this is what Jesus is talking about when he says, “Unless the grain of wheat die, it remains just a grain of wheat.” And we are dealing with just this little grain of wheat and trying to convert it, trying to make it feel good about itself.

Now we’ve moved into a period of rightful concern for therapy, for healing, and for addressing the tremendous wounds that this private self carries. But I think this little self will always be wounded and will always be wound able; in fact, very wound able. The true self-and I mean this intentionally and maybe with a bit of intentional shock-the true self, “you,” can never be hurt. You can never be hurt. It’s only the tiny self that feels offended, that feels insecure, that feels inadequate, like it doesn’t have enough, like it needs more. But the self that you are, the beloved daughter, the beloved son, the self hidden with Christ in God, is basically untouchable. It is indestructible. It is. It is already and it is already in God.

Ironically, at least in my experience, there are two kinds of people who come to understand this: mystics and sinners. Mystics because they stop protecting and defending this little ego. They have had a bigger experience, a larger experience of what they often call the absolute or the holy or the good or God. Once they’ve been transformed by that experience, they can no longer take this tiny private I as if it matters, as if it could be offended and the hurts of life sort of float off their backs like water off a duck’s back.

Sinners, perhaps, because they haven’t been able to do the dance of life correctly; perhaps because they’ve made mistakes which-and, of course, this is true of all of us-they stop dressing up this false self. They stop living up to its expectations of perfection or some kind of higher superior knowledge or higher superior behavior. And almost in spite of themselves, maybe by the grace of God, they collapse back into this deeper identity of who they are in God.

I could say that the work of great religion is to lead us to an experience that I am going to call an identity transplant. Yes, we speak of kidney transplants. We speak of heart transplants. Maybe you have never thought of the idea of an identity transplant, but what characterizes the mystics and the sinners who have done that great collapse is as Paul said it, “I live no longer.” Not I. This self that I used to think was myself is precisely the self that I’m not and I stop believing it’s pretenses. I stop posturing and posing and pretending and living up to this image that this little self that I took so seriously for so many years could ever be perfect, could ever be right, could ever by itself think well of itself. This new self hidden with Christ in God now lives inside of an immense protection, an immense security, an immense safety that is not its own. It is not brought about by my perfect behavior, my right ideas. Perhaps this is what the religious reformers always meant by being saved by another, by the non-self, by Christ, by God.

It is precisely something we cannot do for ourselves. We cannot, as we say, lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We cannot save ourselves. I cannot tell myself, by myself inside of this tiny self that I am, that I am sufficient, that I am significant. All we can do-and this is what tends to happen as we get older, or when we sense that interior fragile self that we all are-is up the ante, dance faster and faster, give me some more commandments to obey, give me some more rituals to perform, give me some way that I can prove that I’m absolutely acceptable or all right. So it becomes an achievement instead of a surrender. Yet we see with the mystics and the sinners that we all are. What they talk about is not an achievement, but much more a surrender.

There are not a lot of absolute statements I can make in the realm of spirituality, but I think this is one of them. I think, brothers and sisters, that all great spirituality is about letting go: letting go of what we think we are, letting go of what we think we need to be. It will feel like letting go, or to put it more directly, it will feel like dying. If you’ve always lived out of this tiny self, this “private I,” this independent ego and that’s all you think you are, then when you first have to let go of it, it will feel like dying. It will feel like you are losing everything. You have to learn how to inhabit a different place, to abide inside of a different identity. So the essential spiritual question is, where do we abide?

Let’s try to offer a prayer, not out of that private self, but from this new self that doesn’t know how to pray by itself at all. God prays in us and through us and that, I believe, is our only prayer.

Good and loving God, we are eager to address you. We don’t know how to pray, but you are praying in us and through us and with us. All we can do is get out of the way and let you teach us how to pray. It is you within me that loves God, that knows where to look for God, that knows that God is good. It is God in me that loves God. I thank you. I am learning slowly how to love you because you have loved me first and are teaching me how to love. You are loving in me. You are loving with me. You are loving through me and, therefore, I dare to pray and believe. I am praying not alone but in Jesus’s name. Amen.

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Interview with Richard Rohr Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot: Richard, a powerful message discerning the difference between our small self and the God self. You talk about letting go, surrender. How did you happen to do that initially?

Richard Rohr: Oh, I wish I knew you were going to ask that! I don’t know that I have an answer.

Talbot: Because it’s a large assignment?

Rohr: Yes. It was no one big dramatic moment. That’s all I can say for sure. For me, and I think this is true for most people, it’s many small things that don’t work, little disappointments, betrayals and hurts that sometimes hurt a lot. Cumulatively, I think they teach you that you can’t control it all, that you can’t fix it all, and that you can’t even understand it all. It’s that context that for most of us teaches us to collapse back into the truth.

Talbot: In your retreats that you conduct all over the world, is this the message that you keep amplifying?

Rohr: If I lead a longer retreat, like a five day one, I’ve got to begin by clarifying this notion of the self, the difference between the true self and the false self. If that gets clarified, it’s amazing how far and how deep you can move in a few days. People can start hearing God at a much truer level because we stop doing this dance of performance or as I called it: dressing up the false self.

Talbot: You talk about the wounded self. People suffer. There is intense suffering and as Christians we are called to do something about the reduction of human suffering in the world. Where do we place that human suffering in the context of what you are talking about?

Rohr: I know it sounds overstated, maybe even overly dramatic, but I did want to make the point that the true self cannot be hurt. This leads us to recognize the hurts that we all carry and I don’t want to make light of those hurts because it is the transformation of those hurts that leads us to this deeper experience of God. There is a tendency, especially in America today, to play the victim and to make absolute these hurts almost as identity rights. Then they don’t become sacred wounds. They simply become wounds. So I intentionally want to say that you can never be hurt and that the true self is untouchable. It’s amazing that sometimes when people just get that point, it gives them the courage to let go of some of these wounds that have become their identity.

Talbot: And, of course, the culture in which we live is caught up in self-interest, greed and materialism. Isn’t that the connection?

Rohr: Yes. I think you got it. All we know is the false self or the individual self so, as I said, that self is always going to be addictive, insecure, and keep some kind of need because that self is not sufficient. It doesn’t feel its inherent abundance, as we put it now, and it is always saying, “This bit of wealth or this job, this will make me happy.”

Talbot: Walk us through one of your retreats. I know that you did a retreat at the turn of this century on healing time.

Rohr: Yes.

Talbot: How do you do that?

Rohr: I hope we were able to lead people through that experience. We started on December 30 and recognized that those psychically significant days, December 31 and the first day of the new millennium, were a natural time for a retreat. We had over 300 people in New Mexico. We led them in the first days to making a list of all of the memories, hurts, abandonments, betrayals, rejections that we all carry. Then we had a marvelous healing ritual on New Year’s eve where we literally committed them to fire so we could wake up on the morning of January 1 and celebrate the Eucharist with joy and with freedom knowing that all of that was let go of and handed over and praying that we wouldn’t bring it back.

Talbot: What do you mean? Literally committed them to fire?

Rohr: Well, we did. We created a great bonfire outside of this hall where we were meeting and we ceremonially walked out there. People had made these lists. I gave them a whole hour, or a whole afternoon of prayer and solitude to write down whatever they had to let go of. Some people had long lists. It was amazing but we processed out to the fire and literally tore the lists and threw them in the fire.

Talbot: In your journey, Richard, what might have been on your own personal list when you made that decision to pursue the priesthood?

Rohr: Well, you know I am, of course, from the previous generation, if I can say that. I have been a priest 30 years this year. I was raised in the old Catholic Church where it was really much easier. I was raised very conservatively in Kansas-on the other side of the Wizard of Oz, I always say-where you had a strong family structure, strong and healthy church structure. Out of that, priesthood made consummate sense. It was a way to love, to serve. I think I grew up backwards in some ways. I had to make my deeper decisions and surrenders of faith more in middle-age when I realized what I had done.

Talbot: In your current book, I know you are doing something on male initiation.

Rohr: Yes, I have been studying the universal rights of male passage from boyhood to manhood and trying to put that together to help men, especially in North America, understand spirituality. That it is not something pious or effeminate, but in fact very rugged and demanding.

Talbot: Thank you very much, Richard Rohr. Yours is a voice that needs to be amplified over and over again. Thanks for being with us.

Rohr: Thank you.