MORE THAN BEING A GOODY-GOODY

Righteousness is much more than kept rules and life is more than our achievements. The words of the Dead Poets Society movie, ‘Sucking the marrow out of life’ can be lived in Christ our life. Never in unbelief or religion.

RIVER OF LIFE IS IN YOU
Christ is our life, in that in oneness with Him we become the self that we truly are. We have left our illusions behind and have headed out on the path to be a self in Christ, from glory to glory. How sad to come to the end of a busy life and realise that you were never you. Or worse, not realise it because you lived in a muffled version of the gospel.

UNREALITY
I was listening to a program on the Radio. Hugh Mackay was talking on ‘Discovering one's authentic inner self’. He mentioned that many people get to middle age having acquired some professional accomplishments, but they come to the realisation that the who of what they are as defined by these criteria is not the real them.
 
REAL KNOWING. REAL BEING
 
There is a great advantage in possessing eyes that see and ears that hear. We may possess both living in our inheritance of oneness with God. But this means union with Christ and not union with Christianity.
 
REAL SELF
 
If you have read any of Richard Rohr, you may come across the ‘false self.’ The real self of who we are is the self that was seen by Christ before the foundation of the earth and the self you have the potential to become when Christ is your life. But don’t expect to become the real you in the law or any version of the knowledge of good and evil posing as Christianity.
 
SUFFOCATED SELF
 
There are Christians who have never discovered their Real Self because they have absorbed themselves in building a self from their career and religion. Some have acquired a status and identity from their beliefs and religious community that they think define who they are. But it is not who they are because this self is sheathed in the illusion of the old Adam and the False Self. The Real self does not begin to emerge until we are born again and start the journey of sonship in Father. We are born again when we stop living from religion and begin to live Christ come in our flesh. Outside of Christ we can at best lack agency and at worst be an orc.
 
COMMON ILLUSION
 
James Finley writes, “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man/woman I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy. 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.” (1)
 
LAW’S DILUTION OF YOU
 
This is the illusory self of the Christian who insists on living in the false substance of the law because He cannot bring Himself to believe in Christ as his life – which would have resulted in Christ forming his real self. The law that this Christian believes is his rock, is actually the illusion in which he lives and the impediment that prevents him seeing and hearing the life of Christ.
 
NATURE OF SIN AND DEATH
 
Finley continues, “We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves—the ones we are born with and which feed the roots of sin. For most of the people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin.”  (1)
 
THE BARRIER
 
We may reject the truth that this imagination is illusionary because we would have to confess that much of what we call our life is not alive, but a construction formed from the scar-tissue of a life separated from oneness with God. Our un-self is the effect of our living in the pre-cross realm of the knowledge of good and evil. But we are now one with God in Christ. Christ our life is ours and is limitless riches of life.
 
PRESERVING THE FALSE SELF
 
Finley writes, “The false self, sensing its fundamental unreality, begins to clothe itself in myths and symbols of power. Since it intuits that it is but a shadow, that it *is* nothing, it begins to convince itself that it *is* what it *does*. Hence, the more it does, achieves and experiences, the more real it becomes. Thomas Merton writes, ‘All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own .. desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire … to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real.’” (1) This as C.S. Lewis attest in ‘Till we have Faces’ is how we live as ghosts of ourselves instead of people with agency and substance.
 
WHAT IS SIN?
 
Life is far more than eternal life and death is more than the death of the body. When we live in self-delusion, sin is the death of the self that we live in from the fictions we employ to promote a lesser gospel that has been robbed by self-delusion of spirit and life. Christ is our reality, our genuine self and our fullness of life.
 
(1)  Quoted in Richard Rohr, Daily Meditation.