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Center for Action and Contemplation
Integrating the Negative
Integrating the Negative

Unworthiness Is the Ticket

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Richard Rohr explores our human and religious temptation to hide qualities we think of as negative or “less than” in order to make ourselves seem better than we are.  

Entering the spiritual search for truth and for ourselves through the so-called negative, dealing squarely with what is—in ourselves, in others, or in the world around us—takes all elitism (its most common temptation) out of spirituality. It makes arrogant religion largely impossible and reveals any violent or self-aggrandizing religion as an oxymoron (although sadly that has not been widely recognized). In this upside-down frame, the quickest ticket to heaven, enlightenment, or salvation is unworthiness itself, or at least a willingness to face our own smallness and incapacity. Our conscious need for mercy is our only real boarding pass. The ego doesn’t like that very much, but the soul fully understands.  

In different ways, we humans falsely divide the world into the pure and impure, the totally good and the totally bad, the perfect and imperfect. It begins with dualistic thinking and then never manages to get beyond it. Such a total split or clean division is never true in actual experience. We all know that reality is a lot more mixed and “disordered” than that; so, in order to continue to see things in such a false and binary way, we really have to close down. That is the hallmark of immature religion. It demands denial, splitting, and mental pretense. It moves from the first false assumption of purity or perfection toward an entire ethical code, a priesthood of some sort, and various rituals and taboos that keep us on the side of the seeming pure, positive, or perfect—as if that were even possible.  

I mean this next point kindly: Organized religion is almost structurally certain to create hypocrites (the word literally means “actors”), those who try to appear to be pure and good, or at least better than others. Jesus uses the word at least ten times in Matthew’s Gospel alone! We are unconsciously trained to want to look good, to seek moral high ground, and to point out the “speck” in other people’s eyes while ignoring the “log” in our own (Matthew 7:3–5). None of us lives up to all our spoken ideals, but we have to pretend we do in order to feel good about ourselves and to get others of our chosen group to respect us.  

Honest self-knowledge, shadow work, therapy, and tools like the Enneagram are sometimes dismissed with hostility by many fervent believers, perhaps because they are afraid of or hiding something. They disdain this work as “mere psychology.” If so, then the desert fathers and mothers, the writers of the Philokalia, Thomas Aquinas, and Teresa of Ávila were already into “mere psychology,” as was Jesus. Without a very clear struggle with our shadow self and some form of humble and honest confession of our imperfections, none of us can or will face our own hypocrisy.  

Reference: 
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media, 2014, 2024), 109–112. 

Image credit and inspiration: Nadya Spetnitskaya, Untitled (detail), 2018, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Making bread requires the integration of dry and liquid ingredients that must be kneaded and combined. They move from messiness to a cohesive form, just like any kind of integration process. 

Story from Our Community:  

I grew up in the Lowcountry of South Carolina in the 1950s. After the death of my mother when I was 10, my father remarried an elementary school teacher, Miss Bonnie, who turned out to be an incredible role model for me. When we would clean the house together, we would sing at the top of our lungs because she understood the importance of using your voice. My stepmother had also been raised by adoptive parents—but unlike her—they did not recognize and encourage her gifts. For me, she was a true example of transforming one’s pain into a loving example for others.  
—Judith G. 

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