AARP Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

by Richard Rohr

We cannot flourish early in life inside a totally open field. Children

need a good degree of order, predictability, and coherence to grow up well,

Limit situations,

are moments, usually accompanied by experiences of dread, responsibility, guilt, or anxiety, in which the human mind confronts its restrictions and boundaries, and allows itself to abandon the false securities of this limitedness, move beyond, one hopes in a positive way, and thus enter new realms of self-consciousness.

Without elders, much of our history has been formed by juniors reacting, overreacting, and protecting their own temporary privilege, with no deep-time vision like the Iroquois Nation, which considered, “What would be good for the next seven generations?” Compare that to the present “Tea Party” movement in America.

It is interesting to me that very clear passages describing both God's conditional love and also God's unconditional love are found in the same Scriptures, like Deuteronomy and John's Gospel. The only real biblical promise is that unconditional love will have the last word!

(For all of his possible neuroses, Paul was also a spiritual genius; and somehow it is good to know that neurosis and brilliance can coexist in the same person.)

It has been acceptable for some time in America to remain “wound identified” (that is, using one's victimhood as one's identity, one's ticket to sympathy, and one's excuse for not serving), instead of using the wound to “redeem the world,” as we see in Jesus and many people who turn their wounds into sacred wounds that liberate both themselves and others.

Jesus seems to often find love in people who might not have received much love themselves. Perhaps their deep longing for it became their capacity to both receive it and give it. This surely matches my own life experience.

Despite having been directly taught to hold this creative tension, rare is the Christian believer who holds it well. We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them—both immature responses.

Actually, I have seen many Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists do it much better, but very few Christians have been taught how to live both law and freedom at the same time. Our Western dualistic minds do not process paradoxes very well. Without a contemplative mind, we do not know how to hold creative tensions. We are better at rushing to judgment and demanding a complete resolution to things before we have learned what they have to teach us.

In the Western world, it seems we cannot build prisons fast enough or have enough recovery groups, therapists, or reparenting classes for all of the walking wounded in this very educated, religious, and sophisticated society—which has little respect for limitations and a huge sense of entitlement.

Law and structure, as fallible as they often are, put up some kind of limits to our infantile grandiosity, and prepare us for helpful relationships with the outer world, which has rights too.

Most wars, genocides, and tragedies in history have been waged by unquestioning followers of dominating leaders. Yet there is a strange comfort in staying within the confines of such a leader and his ideologies, even if it leads us to do evil. It frees us from the burden of thinking and from personal responsibility.

it also keeps us trapped at the bipartisan divide—and we never achieve the transpartisan nature of mature elders.

People think that by defeating the other side, they have achieved some high level of truth! Very sad indeed, but that is as far as the angry or fearful dualistic mind can go.

When some have not been able to do the task of the first half of life well, they go back and try to do it again—and then often overdo it! This pattern is usually an inconsistent mix of old-fashioned styles and symbols with very contemporary ideologies of consumerism, technology, militarism, and individualism. This tends to be these individuals' blind spot, which makes them not true conservatives at all. In fact, neoconservatives are usually intense devotees of modern progress and upward mobility in the system, as we see in most Evangelicals, Mormons, and “traditionalist” Catholics. Only groups that have emphasized actual and costly lifestyle changes for themselves, like the Amish, the Shakers, the Mennonites, Catholic Workers, Poor Clares, and the Quakers, can be called true conservatives.

A recent study pointed out that a strong majority of young men entering seminaries in the last ten to twenty years came from single-parent homes, a high percentage having what we would call “father wounds,”4 which can take the form of an absent, emotionally unavailable, alcoholic, or even abusive father.

They are out of sequence through no fault of their own. They want a tribe that is both superior and secure—and theirs! Men join a male club, like the church, to get the male energy they never got as sons, or because they accept the male game of “free enterprise” and social advancement.

None of us can dialogue with others until we can calmly and confidently hold our own identity. None of us can know much about second-half-of-life spirituality as long as we are still trying to create the family, the parenting, the security, the order, the pride that we were not given in the first half.

Self-knowledge is dismissed as psychology, love as “feminine softness,” critical thinking as disloyalty, while law, ritual, and priestcraft have become a compulsive substitute for actual divine encounter or honest relationship.

spiritually speaking, there are no dead ends.

“The war is now over! The community needs you to let go of what has served you and served us well up to now. The community needs you to return as a man, a citizen, and something beyond a soldier.”

Western people are a ritually starved people, and in this are different than most of human history. Even the church's sacraments are overwhelmingly dedicated to keeping us loyally inside the flock and tied to the clergy, loyal soldiers of the church. There is little talk of journeys outward or onward, the kind of journeys Jesus called people to go on.

We must learn these lessons to get off to a good start! It is far easier to begin life with a conservative worldview and respect for traditions. It gives you an initial sense of “place” and is much more effective in the long run, even if it just gives you “a goad to kick against” (Acts 26:14). Many just fall in love with their first place and position, as an extension of themselves, and spend their whole life building a white picket fence around it.

If this inner and critical voice has kept you safe for many years as your inner voice of authority, you may end up not being able to hear the real voice of God. (Please read that sentence again for maximum effect!) The loyal soldier is the voice of all your early authority figures. His or her ability to offer shame, guilt, warnings, boundaries, and self-doubt is the gift that never stops giving. Remember, it can be a feminine voice too; but it is not the “still, small voice” of God (1 Kings 19:13) that gives us our power instead of always taking our power.

Psychological wholeness and spiritual holiness never exclude the problem from the solution. If it is wholeness, then it is always paradoxical, and holds both the dark and light sides of things. Wholeness and holiness will always stretch us beyond our small comfort zone. How could they not?

You will have many more Aarons building you golden calves than Moseses leading you on any exodus.

The world mythologies all point to places like Hades, Sheol, hell,

purgatory, the realm of the dead. Maybe these are not so much the alternative to heaven as the necessary path to heaven.

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.

anam chara.

St. John of the Cross taught that God has to work in 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.8 No one oversees his or her own demise willingly, even when it is the false self that is dying.