Ash Wednesday
CAC faculty member James Finley reflects on Thomas Merton’s teaching about the True Self and the separate (or false) self:
Our true self is a self in communion. It is a self that subsists in God’s eternal love. Likewise, the false self is the self that stands outside this created subsisting communion with God that forms our very identity. As Merton puts it,
When we seem to possess and use our being and natural faculties in a completely autonomous manner, as if our individual ego were the pure source and end of our own acts, then we are in illusion and our acts, however spontaneous they may seem to be, lack spiritual meaning and authenticity. [1]
In our zeal to become the landlords of our own being, we cling to each achievement as a kind of verification of our self-proclaimed reality. We become the center and God somehow recedes to an invisible fringe. Others become real to the extent they become significant others to the designs of our own ego. And in this process the ALL of God dies in us and the sterile nothingness of our desires becomes our God. . . .
Merton makes clear that the self-proclaimed autonomy of the false self is but an illusion. . . .
My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love—outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion. [2]
Father Richard Rohr describes further how the false self lives disconnected from God and from what is ultimately real:
Our false self, which we might also call our “small self,” is our launching pad: our body image, our job, our education, our clothes, our money, our car, our sexual identity, our success, and so on. These are the trappings of ego that we all use to get us through an ordinary day. They are a nice enough platform to stand on, but they are largely a projection of our self-image and our attachment to it. None of them will last! When we are able to move beyond our false self—at the right time and in the right way—it will feel precisely as if we have lost nothing. In fact, it will feel like freedom and liberation. When we are connected to the Whole, we no longer need to protect or defend the mere part. We are now connected to something inexhaustible.
To not let go of our false self at the right time and in the right way is precisely what it means to be stuck, trapped, and addicted to ourselves. If all we have at the end of our life is our false self, there will not be much to eternalize. It is essentially transitory. These costumes are all “accidents” largely created by the mental ego. Our false self is what changes, passes, and dies when we die. Only our True Self lives forever. [3]
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