By Leonardo Blair, Senior Reporter Monday, June 30, 2025

A lot of what passes as religion in America today only helps perpetuate false narratives people create for themselves about who they think they are, says noted theologian Fr. Richard Rohr.

If they really want to find their true selves, Rohr, who founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, suggests that they can only see their most stable self in God.

"By the middle of life, we all become aware that there is this unwholeness within every one of us. And I say that after 55 years as a priest," Rohr, 82, told journalist Ray Suarez earlier this month in the first episode of a new PBS series "Wisdom Keepers: Healing a Divided People."

The episode reflects a search for togetherness "in times like these filled with crisis and tumult." The program also features faith and ethics leaders like the Rev. A. R. Bernard, leader of New York City's largest Evangelical church, the Christian Cultural Center; Rachel Timoner, senior rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim in New York City; Rev. Kelly Brown Douglas, an Episcopal priest and public theologian; and Kwame Anthony Appiah, a professor of philosophy and law at New York University.

"People are so aware that there's a crazy part of them, an afraid part of them, an angry part of them. The most common word used today [to describe it] is 'broken.' There's something in me that's broken," Rohr stated.

"My earlier books are on the true self and the false self. Helping people distinguish between who they think they are ... and who they really are in God. Who you are in God is untouchable. It's unchangeable. It's eternal," Rohr said, noting that the untouchable part of the self is the soul.

"There's no good souls and bad souls. There's all this bit of participation in God. And what healthy religion is about is the discovery of your soul and then living from that source, and it'll feel like you're drawing from inside. Your inner voices and God's voice will be harder and harder to distinguish. But you've got to go deep," Rohr advised.

He warned that when people get trapped in defining themselves by superficial identities rooted in things like race, wealth or sexuality, they don't get to "draw from the source."

"In God's eye, who were you before you were American? Who were you before you were black? … That naked self is what authentic religion is supposed to help us find. Once you're working with that, religion is healthy, holy and happy. But unfortunately, a lot of religion itself is dressing up the false self, kaking my white self feel superior," he said.

"The only stable self, as St. Francis told us, who you are is who you are in God. Nothing more. Nothing less. You can't improve it; You can't lose it. It's absolute and exists forever. And it is loved by God infinitely."

Asked to diagnose America's current condition, Bernard cited Proverbs 13:12.

"You know, there's a wonderful passage in Proverbs, and it says, 'Hope deferred makes the heart sick.' And the word 'sick' in Hebrew is not just speaking of physical illness, but it means to have your patience and tolerance exhausted. And I think that's what we're seeing with these old conversations," Bernard said.

"These unresolved issues — racism. Some will call it America's original sin. Inequities in our systems and structures. It's a cycle."

Bernard said that after World War II, "America experienced a great deal of prosperity," but life started changing in the 1960s when "every revolution imaginable" was taking place.

"I think it stunned our nation and raised the American consciousness in its relationship to government that just maybe there are forces at work, even within our own nation, who have determined that they know best how democracy should be managed and that our elected officials are simply there as a front," Bernard said.

"So we began to think conspiratorially, and we began to push for change. Some of it was good, some of it was not thought through carefully, and now here we are, a generation later and we're experiencing the effects of it."

News Source : https://www.christianpost.com/news/richard-rohr-suggests-turning-to-god-ditching-identity.html