Quotes about Self

You are not your gender, your nationality, your ethnicity, your skin color, or your social class. Why, oh why, do Christians allow these temporary costumes, or what Thomas Merton called the "false self," to pass for the substantial self, which is always "hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3:3)? It seems that we really do not know our own Gospel. You are a child of God, and always will be, even when you don't believe it.

Theologically and objectively speaking, we are already in union with God. But it is very hard for people to believe or experience this when they have no positive sense of identity

When you first discharge your loyal soldier, it will feel like a loss of faith or loss of self. But it is only the death of the false self, and is often the very birth of the soul.

Such utterly free and gratuitous love is the only love that validates, transforms, and changes us at the deepest levels of consciousness. It is what we all desire and what we were created for. Once you allow it for yourself, you will almost naturally become a conduit of the same for others.

Holiness has to do with who we are in God, where we abide as a "self" with an utterly reconstituted sense of our own personhood.

You can forgive the outer world only if and when you have first forgiven your own inner world.

God has to work on the soul in secret and in darkness because if we fully knew what was happening and what Mystery-Transformation-God-Grace will eventually ask of us we would either try to take charge or stop the whole process. No one oversees his or her own demise willingly even when it is the false self that is dying.

As we often tell newcomers at our meetings, give it a try—and if, after a month or so, you are not feeling happier and more peaceful, we will gladly refund your misery. And if you do give the path described in this book a try, buckle up, because Brother Rohr may just take you to places you've both avoided and longed for, to truth, union, joy, laughter, and, greatest of all, to your own precious self, here on earth with us, child of God. —Anne Lamott

The trouble is that most Christians pushed this great liberation off into the next world, and many Twelve Steppers settled for mere sobriety from a substance instead of a real transformation of the self. We have all been the losers, as a result—waiting around for "enlightenment at gunpoint" (death) instead of enjoying God's banquet much earlier in life.

One of the few generalizations we can make in the field of universal spirituality is this: No one else is your problem.

You didn't create yourself, so there is no way you can tell yourself what you were created for.

We are human beings, not human doings.