Waving or Drowning?

Death to the False Self

"You are too small at this point, and the God you will find will be made to fit inside of that smallness."

Those of you following along at home with Richard Rohr will know that this year the good Father has been using his daily emails to outline the seven underlying themes of his teaching. The series has been nothing short of spectactular. Today's email introduced the Fifth Theme, which says the following:

The separate self is the problem, whereas most religion and most people make the “shadow self” the problem. This leads to denial, pretending, and projecting instead of real transformation into the Divine (Transformation).

Today's email just about knocked me right off my seat. It's stunning. So, I'm going to reproduce it here in it's entirety for you,and strongly suggest that you subscribe to his daily mailings yourself if you haven't already.

The problem of “ego” is so recurring in different religions, through successive periods of history and under various disguises, that we know we are dealing with some foundational and core issue, and one that must be almost unconscious. It is an issue that cannot be dealt with by simply being “moral” about this or that, or joining the right group; but by a fundamental “dying” which almost all of us are afraid to do. As Jesus himself says in any number of ways: “Unless the grain of wheat dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). This is why I continue to say that moralism is always the cheap substitute for mysticism (or mature religion).

Since the twentieth century we have used the word ego (Latin for “I”) to describe this rather total identification with one’s own “single grain” as the reference point for life and perception. All great spiritual teachers will tell you that your small self is not the reference point for anything lasting or substantial at all, but only for a small memory bank of experiences, my feelings, and my temporary self-image—all too small and not a fitting reference point for big truth or reality. Paul, in an unfortunate choice of words, called it “the flesh,” and much of Hinduism and Buddhism would have called it “illusion” or even “emptiness.” Thomas Merton and many of us call it the “false self.”

Until this autonomous self is somehow dismantled as a worthy receiver station, one cannot get very far in spiritual seeing. You are too small at this point, and the God you will find will be made to fit inside of that smallness. Your own issues, your personal hurts, and your self-image will, on the other hand, be far too big, too exaggerated, and too grandiose—trying to overcompensate for such lack of perspective and substance. Your feeling world will be “all about you,” because it has no other center of gravity except what you feel moment by moment, and year by year—all of which is shifting sand.

So what happens at the early levels, which is where we all have to start, is that we look for something else to die instead of “me”! We normally choose a specific behavior, an action, a place, a substitute “sacrifice,” a body part to eliminate instead of our false self, which ironically is going to die anyway. This area, defined differently by each person and group, is what we mean by one’s shadow. Your shadow self becomes your enemy, and is usually plausible things like sex, drugs, and rock and roll. There are often, of course, good reasons for tackling these concerns. But “the issue” is not really the issue! Tackling them does not of itself lead you to love of God, love of neighbor, the Gospel, love in general, or even truth.

Yet we persist in attacking the shadow because, frankly, it is a bit easier than dying to who we think we are, or who we need to be, or who we just want to be! And it gives one a false sense of moral high ground. In other words, religion at the early levels largely substitutes superficial shadow boxing for significant death to the false self. It can continue for much of your life and never achieve anything except more and more ego control of the shadow—which makes you more and more anal retentive—and in a most disguised kind of way only strengthens your egocentricity. You are trying to drive out the devil in a most devilish way. This is the garden-variety religion that much of the world dislikes and mistrusts. And it should.

This, in a word, is why immature religion creates such immature, but highly defended, people. To use Jesus’ brilliant metaphor, “You clean the outside of the cup, and not the inside . . . whereas if you clean the inside—the outside takes care of itself” (Matthew 23:25-26).

A Reluctant (R)evolution

See note below*

As I write this I'm sitting quietly reflecting, having just finished reading the last pages of John A.T. Robinson's Honest To God.

Beyond the content of the book, which I'll get to momentarily, I'm still amazed, as I said in my previous post, at some of the thinking from 50, 60, even 100 years ago. Truly some of these people were well ahead of their time.

With the benefit of time and all the thinking that has occurred since these words were first written, it's possible to take some of the work of these outliers, the radical heretics of their day, and find that their thinking is a match for a missing piece of a puzzle that we have been working on.

A case in point:

"I have not attempted in this book to propound a new model of the Church or of anything else. My aim has been much more modest. I have tried simply to be honest, and to be open to certain 'obstinate questionings' which speak to me of the need for what I called earlier a reluctant revolution."

With the benefit of hindsight and fifty years of additional thought from other fine theologians and philosophers, Robinson's "reluctant revolution" (emphasis mine) looks more like the ongoing evolution of our faith that I am fascinating with.

I love following these threads back through time to see what we can find. Reading John Shelby Spong's recent work led me to John Robinson. Robinson, in turn, quotes frequently from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich, Rudolph Bultmann, and others. There are jewels of thought, perhaps rejected in their day, sitting quietly, waiting to be picked up, dusted off, and reactivated in our own thinking.

Will some of it challenge us, frighten us, even offend us? Of course! This is not for the faint of heart. But if we are to continue to develop, both personally and communally, we must overcome our fears and allow our image of ultimate reality to evolve.

I think this extended quote from the closing pages of the book reveal what Bishop Robinson was thinking about and attempting to do as he penned these words back in 1963. (While his thinking was years ahead of his time, the good Bishop was in other ways a product of his era. Perhaps we need to extend some grace for his sexist language. The italics are Robinson's, the bold passages are my own emphases. The hyperlinks are obviously my addition as well.)

"What looks like being required of us, reluctant as we may be for the effort involved, is a radically new mould, or meta-morphosis, of Christian belief and practice. Such a recasting will, I am convinced, leave the fundamental truth of the Gospel unaffected. But it means that we have to be prepared for everything to go into the melting--even our most cherished religious categories and moral absolutes. And the first thing we must be ready to let go is our image of God himself.

The need for this is again perhaps best brought out by looking at the other great debate in which Paul was engaged--not, this time, with the Jews to whom the Gospel was a stumbling-block, but with the Greeks to whom it was folly. The classic description of this debate is to be found in his encounter with the intelligentsia of his day on the Areopagus at Athens.

Here, so far from the accepted mould of religious truth proving an insuperable barrier, there was apparently no point of contact at all. His gospel seemed utterly incomprehensible. 'What is this new teaching?' they asked in ridicule and contempt. The same question, though with a different slant, had been asked by the crowds of Jesus when he began his public ministry: 'What is this new teaching?'. And so it has always been. Paul was dismissed as a setter forth of strange gods, Socrates was condemned as an 'atheist'. Every new religious truth comes as the destroyer of some other god, as attack upon that which men hold most sacred.

It is easy for us to persuade ourselves that this is a process which lies now in the past, that Christianity has supplanted the idols of heathenism and that we now know the one true God. But in fact the debate staged on the Areopagus is a debate that is never closed. It has constantly to be reopened, as one idol is knocked down, only to be replaced by another. For the Christian gospel is in perpetual conflict with the images of God set up in the minds of men, even of Christian men, as they seek in each generation to encompass his meaning. These images fulfill an essential purpose, to focus the unknowable, to enclose the inexhaustible, so that ordinary men and women can get their minds round God and have something on which to fix their imagination and prayers. But as soon as they become a substitute for God, as soon as they become God, so that what is not embodied in the image is excluded or denied, then we have a new idolatry and once more the word of judgement has to fall."

As I have said before, if our image of God does not grow, we will outgrow our image of God.

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* When I decided to get a copy of the book I wanted to read an original. I'm not sure why. Perhaps I wanted to try to experience the book as if it was 1963. I don't know. So, I ordered a used original edition through the good people at Abebooks.com. It turns out that through the years my copy had been read and highlighted by at least two other people. Most of my reading these days is electronic for practical reasons, but when I do read a paper & glue edition I'm a prolific highlighter. Being able to see what had impacted the earlier readers added greatly to the experience.

Heretics, Idolaters, and People Ahead of Their Time (UPDATED)

I took a bit of heat last week on Facebook for quoting John A.T. Robinson from Honest To God, who was himself quoting Rudolph Bultmann. (I'm not clear at this point which was the greater sin.)

Just to round out this unholy trinity it was reading John Shelby Spong that prompted me to finally read the copy of Robinson's classic that I've owned for some time. Spong names Robinson as a mentor, and that was enough for me to read on.

All that to say that this quote from Spong's latest email seemed timely:

To accuse a person of heresy assumes that the truth is actually known and that the one who makes the heresy charge actually possesses it. I think participants on both sides of that equation dangle between being ignorant and being idolatrous. They are ignorant because they think they know what ultimately cannot be known, namely the nature of God. They are idolatrous because they have identified God with a definition of God produced by the limited human mind. In effect these people have bound God inside human words and concepts. They have created God and think that their creation is God. That is the meaning of idolatry.

This is in no way directed at those friends who commented on Facebook. None of them used the H-word, and I'm actually grateful for the cautions and correctives that come my way. This is how we learn. But in a more general sense I'm often surprised and a little disappointed when those who are the first to admit that the status quo is no longer working are often also the first to object when someone offers alternatives to that same status quo. To me, this is a conflict that must be addressed if we are to move forward.

Practical Advice

I have a short but growing list of principles and values that I try to live my life by. In real terms that means I think about these a lot, and practice them occasionally, but I'm working on that shortcoming.

Here's one that I think I would do well to apply in situations like this. I throw it out there for your consideration:

When confronted with an opinion that I reflexively seem to disagree with, I must first try to prove it correct before I critique it. 

UPDATE: Now that I'm trying to look at the world through an evolutionary lens using an Integral worldview, things in the rearview mirror look very different to me.

I wonder if these earlier thinkers that I have identified as somehow being "before their time" were simply early in trying to move on to what comes next. And if so, then I wonder if some/much of theology between then and now has been a reaction to and against these heretical outliers. A defence then; lost time in the movement forward.

Then again, perhaps this "lost time" was absolutely necessary as a way to play out and eventually discard these defensive moves, and allow the rest of us to catch up with these early advancers. 

Thoughts?