Is there another sense of the word? To be without a self: what would that be?
There is a great fascination among humans about the self - both among followers of Jesus, among those who subscribe to the world’s institutional religions, and even among atheists. There is a great deal of talk about the self.
Note how the topic of the self arises in an otherwise unrelated discussion, written by Francis Chan, of having love for God:
It confuses us when loving God is hard. Shouldn’t it be easy to love a God so wonderful? When we love God because we feel we should love Him, instead of genuinely loving out of our true selves, we have forgotten who God really is. Our amnesia is flaring up again.
Chan seems to feel that it’s ideal to love God “out of our true selves.” What would our “false selves” be?
This topic exerts such a powerful hold on the human mind that Richard Rohr wrote a book subtitled, “The Search for Our True Self.”
Rohr begins the book by a considering the reaction of the people who first discovered the Resurrection: they fled. After discovering that Jesus had risen from the dead, they ran away, frightened, and said nothing to anyone. Why? Rohr speculates:
Such running from resurrection has been a prophecy for Christianity, and much of religion, just as in these early Scriptures. I interpret this as the human temptation to run from and deny not just the divine presence, but our own true selves, that is, our souls, our inner destiny, our true identity. Your True Self is that part of you that knows who you are and whose you are, although largely unconsciously. Your False Self is just who you think you are — but thinking doesn’t make it so.
From Francis Chan to Richard Rohr: a ceaseless rumination on the self. Why? And is this fascination a good thing?
Perhaps instead we might follow the advice of the New Testament, and fix our eyes on Jesus (Hebrews 12:2). Maybe Jesus should occupy more of my attention, and I should occupy less of it.
How easily those practices are hijacked - those practices which are intended to help us focus on Jesus, but which are instead hijacked to allow our attention to drift to ourselves: reading, study, prayer, meditation.
Introspection and reflection are good things, in moderation, and are useful in philosophy and psychology. The brilliance of Descartes, Locke, Hume, and others arises from such thought.
But in the spiritual realm, our self may prove to be barren soil. Jesus is far more fascinating. The self, by contrast, seems often empty or confused.
Those who devote effort to searching for the self, or even the “true self,” hope to find something of value. Rohr promises that the found self will be the basis for finding and understanding God:
The clarification and rediscovery of what I am going to call the True Self lays a solid foundation — and a clear initial goal—for all religion. You cannot build any serious spiritual house if you do not first find something solid and foundational to build on — inside yourself.
Do I really want to make the self the foundation of my religion, my belief, my faith, my understanding of God or my relationship to Him? The self isn’t reliable. It is the self, after all, which is affected by original sin, and which further commits its own active sins.
The self is limited in its ability to know, and prone to make mistakes.
Far from being the foundation of spiritual life, the self my prove to be empty, even absent. Are we human beings simply hollow in the middle? Waiting for the Holy Spirit to fill us during our encounter with baptismal waters?
The self is underwhelming. Even more, does it even truly exist?
The search for the self may be doomed to failure, if there is no self.
Is the discovery of the self really the ‘initial goal’ of all religion? That would be to begin the enterprise in entirely the wrong direction. Might we rather not begin by observing God as He approaches us with mercy and grace?
If we observe the self at all, it is only to discover our sin, which then prompts us to return our gaze to Jesus, Who is the only cure for our sinful status.
Jesus is only only omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, but He is simply much more interesting that the self.
