It's Not About Me?

In his excellent book, Everything Belongs, Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr, writes, “Your life is not really about you! Surprising, isn’t it?”

I’d say so. Then who/what is it about? What am I doing here, going about my small business of each day, my joys and my sorrows, believing that it all matters very much, when, according to Fr. Rohr, it doesn’t matter at all—at least not in the Big Picture. My separate self is only an illusion created by my mind.

We would prefer that were not so, would we not? Wouldn’t we rather feel a little bit special, separate, different, significant, endowed with individual qualities that characterize us as unique?

I have to wrestle my small mind out of the way to even come close to grasping what he is saying, but I think it is worth the effort because I know in my gut he is speaking truth: complicated and challenging truth, but truth nonetheless. Every now and then, by some grace, I catch a glimpse of what he is suggesting, but it is as fleeting as a star shooting through the dark summer sky.

Rohr argues: “I’m still carrying my grandfather’s genes and my mother’s unlived life and my grandmother’s sorrow and my grandfather’s pain. Their genes are in me. You see that,” he goes on, “in a little sparrow that knows how to build the exact kind of nest that mama sparrow built. If a sparrow carries that much,”—genetic material—“think how much more information we carry.” His point being that we are less in control than we imagine, that our lives are driven and shaped by genetic information.

We have become DNA conscious particularly as it relates to body structure and certain illnesses, but I wonder if we give credence to Rohr’s thought that we carry emotional and intellectual content from our endless progenitors as well. I am aware that I am somehow Quaker to the bone, as my grandmother and her family were. Something very deep in me resonates with Quaker beliefs and worship and, also, with the similar simplicity of Buddhism.

When at forty-five years old, I called my atheistic father to tell him I had enrolled in a theological seminary, there was a bit of silence on the phone and then he said with resignation, “Well, it’s in the genes.”  Certainly more than I was aware of when, to my surprise, in my class in American Theology, I discovered the writings of Solomon Stoddard and Jonathan Edwards, both ancestors of mine. It appeared that my father was right: I was just popping up, surfacing, out of an already theological family stream.

How original, how separate are we? In the famous words of William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

 Rohr tells us our individual lives are “clearly illusions” largely created by our thinking. “My life not about me. I am about life!”  According to Rohr, we are part of a much larger mystery. “Don’t take this private thing so seriously,” he declares. He adds that Western emphasis on individualism and the separate self “makes community almost impossible. It makes compassion almost impossible. We have overdone the notion of the private self.”

It’s not about me? My concerns, aches and pains, triumphs and failures? My small, ego-self quakes at the thought.

Rohr insists that individualism, separation and self-absorption create isolation and that isolation feeds violence and hatred. Rage, anger and disappointment are spawned by the loneliness of secularism, exaggerated selfhood and disconnection from community.

As frequent witnesses to the violent acts of “loners,” it’s almost impossible for us to argue with his point. 

“We have overdone the notion of the private self.” We need to “recognize that we are in a river that is bigger than we are. The foundation and the flow of that river is love. Life is not about me; it is about God”-- the Life Force itself—“and God is about love.”

So, if you will, can you imagine the Life Force endlessly spewing out these gazillion tiny cell-bodies to which we are all genetically connected, splashing upwards to catch the light for a brief moment in time, to then simply disappear as millions more appear? We exist, oh, so temporarily, in a great rush of precious life.

By the way, this does not mean that we shouldn’t pay attention and remain as awake as we can, maximizing our positive genetic inheritance and allowing the negative content to wither and subside. All these tiny cell bodies? We are called to evolve, opening ourselves to the loving Life Force, enabling it to express itself through us for the brief time that we are here.