I wrote a few essays on witnessing death or dying, one "Dark Angel" and the other more recently about my father's death, and in both there was a remarkable sense of - being - about everything, as if it filled the air. In "Dark Angel," a friend and I were almost to the cabin the in UP, driving the winding road through miles and miles of forest, when we came upon a small group of cars huddled in one area by an old gravel quarry. We could feel it before we saw it, and then saw it - a car had gone off into the quarry square into a tree. Supplies for camping were scattered about the road. We stopped to see if we could help, and found that the driver, a very young man, was lying outside the car, leg twisted nearly to his ear. Inside, though, was a very quiet girl, only 17 we were to find later. We knew she was dead. A few who felt for a pulse in her foot said so, but they didn't have to - a silence hung in the air that was palpable. There was grim tragedy here because of her age, but the pall of death was neither grim or tragic - it "was," simply, and it was not "us." We felt the presence of reality, and it was a shock. Had it not been for the tragedy, we might have been uplifted by it.
With my father, I had come to visit him in his last months. He slept nearly all the time, but woke up briefly to greet me when I entered. I then began to talk about politics, which he had once loved, and to make gestures and sarcastic comments when suddenly I felt like a complete idiot. He was not listening, but that is not what made me feel stupid - rather, the presence of nearing death made all my comments and concerns seem as nothing. I was in the presence of the Real, the holy, and the rest was foolishness.
And such it is that Richard Rohr presence the False Self. It is, he said, necessary to use to find our way back to our True Self, that self in God or eternity or the absolute (as the reader prefers), but it is only a tool - like religion. Sin, claims Rohr, is not so much adultery and theft and all the rest, but the clinging to the False Self, which is and only can be ego. It is selfishness itself, no matter how it cloaks itself. In fact, he quotes Thomas Merton as saying, more or less, "be a fornicator, a cheat, a real bastard, be anything but a sanctimonious religious observer, " for it is the latter who feel too righteous to ever grow. It is they who are stuck in their false self, which is the bottom line of sin. No wonder Christ came for the sinners and berated the sanctimonious Pharisees.
The True Self- more or less synonymous with "soul" - is beyond death. Says Rohr, "we fear death for the imagined loss of an imagined individual." The False Self dies, the Soul is eternal, our color, our particular flavor in the infinitude of God. The True Self, can do no wrong - it is full and complete and as it should be, its foibles - for only pure God is perfect - quickly corrected. It cannot go to hell - only to the eternal.
Richard Rohr's take on the True Self resonates with everything I have experienced. It does, when thought about, answer most concerns about evil and suffering in the world - certainly those on a grand scale, although that still needs some deeper explanation. I believe he will have more to say on this in the pages to come. But we are left to wonder - if our False Self, our Social Self dies, is what is left recognizable? Rohr claims that once it falls off, it is as if it never were, so obvious a mask that we do not think about it again. We fear our loss of this, only to find that it was no loss at all. And so the presence of death confirms: in its shadow, things become real. This reality might shake our False Self, but when we peer behind it, we find a genuine being who is opening up to the mystery and truth of life. And death, for the two Selves at this level, is no more than night that shifts into day that shifts into night, all one. FK