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" Remember, please remember, you do not (you must not!) fear, attack, or hate the False Self. That would only continue a negative and arrogant death energy, and it is delusional and counterproductive anyway. It would be trying to “drive out the devil by the prince of devils,” as Jesus puts it. In the great economy of grace, all is used and transformed, and nothing is wasted. God uses your various False Selves to lead you beyond them. Note that Jesus' clear message to his beloved, Mary Magdalene, is not that she squelch, deny, or destroy her human love for him. He is much more subtle than that. He just says to her, “Do not cling to me” (John 20:17). He is saying, “Don't hold on to your needy False Self. We are all heading for something much bigger and much better, Mary.” This is the spiritual art of detachment, which is not taught much in capitalistic worldview where clinging and possessing are not just the norm but even the goal. You see how trapped we are. Great love is both very attached (“passionate”) and yet very detached at the same time. It is love but not addiction. The soul, the True Self, has everything, and so it does not require any particular thing. When you have all things, you do not have to protect any one thing. True Self can love and let go. The False Self cannot do this. The “do not cling to me” encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene is the most painted Easter scene, I am told. The artistic imagination knew that a seeming contradiction was playing out here: intense love and yet appropriate distance. The soul and the spirit tend to love and revel in paradoxes; they operate by resonance and reflection. The ego (False Self) wants to resolve all paradoxes in a most glib way and thinks that it can. It operates in a way that is mechanical and instrumental. This is not always bad, but it is surely limited. The ego would like Mary Magdalene and Jesus to be caught up in a passionate love affair. Of course they are, in the deepest sense of the term, but only the True Self knows how to enjoy and picture “a love of already satisfied desire.” The True Self and False Self see differently; both are necessary, but one is better, bigger, and even eternal. "
― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self
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" It is sadly true that most institutions and nations admire and reward sins of the "spirit," and various forms of arrogance and greed often lead to promotions and praise. But pride, ambition, and vanity are still pride, ambition, and vanity; they do not stop being capital sins because someone is pope or president. "Greed is good" in America, extravagant bonuses are envied and imitated, and careerism is rampant among the clergy . . . Sins of the flesh, however, carry shame and guilt and can always be used to bring anybody down in church, culture, or the state. "
― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self
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" Religion knew the truth of metaphor and symbol for almost all of history until the past few hundred years, and especially until the wrongly named Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. Then we started confusing rational and provable with real. We actually regressed and went backward. In trying to defend its ground in the face of rationalism and scientism, religion tried to become "rational" itself and lost its alternative consciousness, which many of us call contemplation. It's as though we tried to deal with Mystery with the entirely wrong "software". We lost access to the higher levels of consciousness, the transrational, the transpersonal, the transcendent itself. Most tragic, we lost most inner experience of our own outer belief systems. That is the heart of religion's problem today, and it is indeed a deep and serious problem for upcoming generations. My generation took the symbols to literally, and now the following generation is just throwing them all out as useless. We are both losing. It might surprise you, but both religious fundamentalism and atheism are similar in that they are self-contained rational systems. Such a system works if you stay inside its chosen logic and territory. "
― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self