Biography
Richard Rohr, O.F.M., was born in Kansas, attended Notre Dame University, and received his Master Degree in Theology from Dayton University. Fr. Rohr was founder of the New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati, Ohio, an experiment in lay ministry involving adults and children in the same working-class neighborhood. This ministry was so successful that he was recently called to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he is beginning the process of community building and seeking a holistic response to the gospels. He is in great demand as a speaker at retreats and conferences. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Will the True Self Please Stand Up?" 
In Mark 8:34-35 we hear Jesus speak of losing ourselves and finding ourselves, and it’s obvious that he must be talking about self in two different ways. And it’s probably unfortunate that we haven’t spent a lot of time in clarifying what those two different selves are.

Perhaps one of the most unfortunate results is that a lot of people, especially after a really religious experience, after coming to know the Lord — however that has happened in a life — they tend to think that the self they are supposed to become is — maybe we could call it — a religious self. So they put on all the externals of religiosity as they understand them in their culture, or in their time or age. Very often we find that that self that they put on is, yes, a religious self. But it’s also sometimes a false self. I’m not saying that they’re hypocritical, it’s just that the ego-stripping process that the love of God calls us to — demands of us — never really happens in their life.

And the wonderful thing about the love of God is that, in a certain sense, it might shock some people, but the Lord isn’t really trying to change us. The Lord is trying to get us to become who we are and that is the most radical kind of conversion you can imagine.

In fact, I think a rather small percentage of people achieve it, or allow the Lord to achieve it in them. They become instead, religious, and take on a certain kind of jargon, a certain kind of external behavior. But the true self, which demands a great transcendence of the ego, really never happens. And that’s unfortunate. And I think in many cases that’s why so many people are, unfortunately but sadly true, turned off by religion and by religious people, because they don’t feel they are encountering the real! They don’t feel that they are encountering something that’s solid — that they can get their hands on — which, if Christ is anything, is certainly that. They don’t feel, when all is said and done, that they’re encountering Christ. They’re encountering a religious persona, if you will, a mask, a sort of stage presence that we take on.

So the Lord is telling us that a certain self has to die for another self to live. Let’s put it this way (I know when I first discovered this in my own Franciscan journey, it was a revelation) all we really have to do, and this will sound like doing nothing, is get ourselves out of the way!

You see, God is obvious. God is self-evident. The problem is that human nature tends to be so filled with itself, with its reputational self, with its self image, that there’s no room for the Presence, there’s no room for an encounter, there’s no room for union. Union is not possible, and that’s what it’s all about. To come to the place where all things are one.

So losing the self and finding God are really the same thing. That sounds so simple that I’m afraid that an awful lot of us miss it. And I believe that is what Jesus is talking about when he says you have to lose yourself to find yourself.

We live in a very sophisticated western culture, which, after all is said and done, is pretty much defined externally in terms of the material, external self, and we forget that we bring all of that to our religious experience, even after we are converted, as it were. And we still try again and again, each in our own cultural way, to change
ourselves externally.

Sometimes it becomes — at least I’ve seen it in a lot of religious movements in all religious traditions in many denominations that we get involved in what I’d like to call a trip of religious ego fulfillment. But the ego is still center stage — the self, my holy self, my religious self, my feelings, my experiences, my opinions, my thoughts, my sacred explanations, my theology, my understanding of my theology, my limited experience — that’s what is protected, that’s what is treasured, that’s what is supported, that’s what is communicated.

And if anybody else gets in the way of that, we immediately think of them as a heretic, as untrue, as not born again, or whatever. And what it comes down to very often is simply that their experience isn’t the same as our experience.

What we end up doing, brothers and sisters, is not really putting Christ at the center, but our own inflated ego, and absolutizing our limited religious experience. What else can it be because I am one person in one little moment of time. And we exalt that. We inflate that. We demand that of other people. And we call that being converted to Christ when sometimes what we are asking them to do is to be converted to us. And it’s almost an example of our own weak faith that we need someone else to use the same jargon we use, to have the same experience we have had, to confirm that our experience was correct and was valid.

So we see that sometimes in the name of seeking Christ, what we really do is seek ourselves. In the name of surrendering to Christ, very often we can end up protecting our own ego, and protecting ouvselves.

What we have to do is get out of the way. And yet, as simple as that sounds, it’s extraordinarily difficult. We have been so infatuated with ouvselves — that’s all we’ve known — that’s all we’ve had — we’ve lived with this body, this self, all of our life — so we don't know how to let go of these opinions, these explanations, these cultural feelings and responses. We don’t know how to be nothing so that Christ can be something. We don’t know how to be on the side so that Christ can be the center.

So how is it supposed to happen? Well, I suppose there are a lot of ways that we can come at it. But I think that more than anything else it is a willingness to let go of self-image. You say, “Well, that’s repeating the problem again. I don’t know how to let go of self-image.”

Maybe just to state it will let us see how deep the problem is. We don’t know how to do that. How trapped we all are in how we perceive ourselves, what we think about ourselves.

And I think, after all is said and done, the only person who can really do that is one who is centered in a love, in a person, in a presence, in a realization that absorbs and overcomes and makes unnecessary that preoccupation with the self, that preoccupation with how I look, how I’m coming across, am I successful — even the question, am I spiritually successful? After all is said and done, it’s still an egotistical question.

I think a lot of our churches, not meaning to, have let us be preoccupied with the question of — am I holy? am I right? am I good? am I saved? am I? What’s always at the center is the “I”. find what I see in the saints, what I see in God’s holy people, is a loss of preoccupation — and obsession with that question. Because a new center, a new life, a new love has come into their world — the love of Christ, the love of God.

Authentic religious experience is always an experience of extraordinary connectedness, of extraordinary union. That union is so real that we lose the preoccupation with individuation, with our individuality. and my self-image, and my reputational self.

We have all enjoyed in this century as westerners, as Americans, the great discoveries of self-knowledge, of psychology. We all feel we have a better self-knowledge in many ways, and we thank God for that. But in many cases it has led people to a kind of willful preoccupation with their own self-growth, with their own self-fulfillment.

I know in my own Catholic tradition, we came (especially before our Second Vatican Council) from a spirituality that could be called a kind of spirituality of self-hatred, as if God was pleased when we hated ourselves. I don’t think that’s what the Bible is saying. I don't think that’s what Jesus is saying. And we had to react to that, and I see a lot of Christians did that. We reacted to a spirituality of self-hatred. We’ve been on a sort of 20-year swing into a spirituality of what I would call self-fulfillment. We’ve got to scrub ourselves up. We have to have loads of self-knowledge. We’ve got to be healed. We’ve got to be affirmed. We’ve got to feel good about ourselves. That’s our frame.

I don’t think feeling good about ourselves is the same thing as loving ourselves in Christ. And I think a truly Biblical spirituality is not a spirituality of self-hatred, neither is it a spirituality of self-fulfillment which we are very tempted to today. But it is a spirituality of self-transcendence.

Brothers and sisters, have no doubt about it. The self has to be transcended because we were so filled with the self, there’s no room for the other. It’s that simple. We’re just coming down to the nature of human relationship, and therefore the nature of divine relationship. The rules of relationship are the same. And that’s what Christ in becoming a human being has made possible — that the rules of relationship are the same. We are all terrified by intimacy. We’re terrified by true relationship, because in true intimacy, in true relationship, we all stand naked! We have to risk losing the self to become a part of a greater unity. And if that’s true in the marriage relationship, which those of you who are married certainly understand, if that’s true in building any kind of community or friendship, how much more is the terror of intimacy and the terror of union when we begin to talk about relationship with God.

Most of us will do almost anything to avoid it and the most common mistake we religious folk make is we decide, as I said earlier, to become religious.

And to be religious, ironically — and this might shock and surprise some of you — is one of the safest ways to avoid God. To simply be religious, to use a certain kind of jargon, and to be involved in a certain kind of external behavior, is one of the safest ways to avoid true union, which is always going to be terrifying because the fear will be that I will lose myself. And that’s exactly what Jesus is telling us must happen.

We've got to lose this preoccupation with my self-image, with my reputation, even the need to be holy. Even the need to appear holy, because after all is said and done, we’re not even sure what that means.

As a Franciscan, our vocation has always been as St. Francis’ vocation was — to live in the world, especially among the poor, but also to move apart from that world into contemplative experience. I had a wonderful experience last year. I was able to spend thirty days in Thomas Merton’s Hermitage in Kentucky. I wasn’t sure that I could be thirty days in absolute silence and absolute solitude out there in the Kentucky woods. In the beginning, I wanted to do it almost more than anything else, and yet I was scared to death. What is going to happen when there is no one to please, there’s no one to prove myself to, there’s no one to preach to — and I’ve been a preacher for fifteen years — there’s no one to like me or dislike me? No one needs me. I’m not important in anybody’s world. All my titles or so-called degrees, or whatever I think makes me important in the world, were gone. It meant nothing out there in the woods.

That’s what the Lord does in that context. Now I see why the saints and Jesus himself went off to the desert, went off to the quiet places, because there much of the false self is not so much stripped away as it just falls away. It becomes an illusion. It becomes unnecessary. It gets in the way. And all of those voices that we define ourselves by, those relationships that each moment we define ourselves by, are no longer there.

After about ten days I found myself terribly naked, and terribly afraid, and overwhelmed by my own inner darkness. And at the same time, ironically almost at the same moment, paradoxically true in facing that darkness, that inner poverty, that inner emptiness, that nothingness that I am when all those external roles are taken away, I felt that I was able to discover a self, or the Lord was able to reveal a self, that was beyond any kind of goodness that I had created, any kind of roles or functions that I had, anything that I had done right or wrong. There in that poverty, in that nothing-ness (nothingness), in that space beyond words, there I felt I experienced a joy, a freedom, and a life that at least I had never touched upon before, a richer self that I never knew existed after forty years of life.

I think, brothers and sisters, the Lord is leading all of us to that place of nakedness and that place of freedom, where at last the Lord can get through, where at last the gospel in its purity, in its radicalism, in its demand, in its immense love and freedom can at last get through.

I don’t say you have to go off to the woods for thirty days. But I think we have to allow some of these roles, some of these titles, some of these definitions, some of this self-importance that we all give to ourselves, we have to allow the Lord to strip it away, to take it away, and then say, “Who am I now? Who am I now?”

And what we come up with is “Whose am I now?” After all is said and done, all I am is I’m in relationship, and that’s what defines me. That’s what gives me my name, my life, my freedom, my joy, and then I’m at the place of poverty which is, ironically, the place of the greatest freedom because then, brothers and sisters, I have nothing more to prove and nothing more to protect. Then I think I am free for the Lord, and the Lord is free to get through to me.

When I was in that Hermitage where Thomas Merton spent many of the last years of his life, I picked up one of his own books, and I read a very short meditation which I would like to end with and offer to you as a prayer. He said this:

Everything is mine precisely because everything is His.
If it were not His, it could never be mine.
If it could not be mine, He would not even want it for Himself.

Think about that. Try to image that. Such perfect love. Has anyone ever loved you that way that if they could not give it to you, they would not even want it for themselves? Total share-ability. Total vulnerability. Total you. All that is his is his very self. All that he gives me becomes in some way my own self. Have you ever been handed over, or been given to, in that kind of way where the ego boundaries break down and you don’t know where one ends and the other begins? What then is mine? After all is said and done — what then is mine?

He is mine.

And what is His?

I am His.

The Lord is calling all of us, brothers and sisters, to that place of union, that place of freedom, that true self. Beyond all of our roles and all of our titles, where we have nothing more to prove to anybody, even to ourselves, and nothing more to protect. Where we live no longer “I” — in the separated, isolated, false sense — but truly with Christ living in me and through me.