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

by Richard Rohr

I believe that God gives us our soul, our deepest identity, our True Self,1 our unique blueprint, at our own “immaculate conception.” Our unique little bit of heaven is installed by the Manufacturer within the product, at the beginning! We are given a span of years to discover it, to choose it, and to live our own destiny to the full. If we do not, our True Self will never be offered again, in our own unique form—which is perhaps why almost all religious traditions present the matter with utterly

We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.

Jesus tells the disciples as they descend from the mountain of transfiguration, “Do not talk about these things until the Human One is risen from the dead” (by

which he means until you are on the other side of loss and renewal). If you try to assert wisdom before people have themselves walked it, be prepared for much resistance, denial, push-back, and verbal debate. As the text in Mark continues, “the disciples continued to discuss among themselves what ‘rising from the dead’ might even mean” (Mark 9:9–10). You cannot imagine a new space fully until you have been taken there. I make this point strongly to help you understand why almost all spiritual teachers tell you to “believe” or “trust” or “hold on.” They are not just telling you to believe silly or irrational things. They are telling you to hold on until you can go on the further journey for yourself, and they are telling you that the whole spiritual journey is, in fact, for real—which you cannot possibly know yet.

The merely rational mind is invariably dualistic, and divides the field of almost every moment between what it can presently understand and what it then deems “wrong” or untrue.

He is to sacrifice three specific things: a wild bull, a breeding boar, and a battering ram. I doubt whether we could come up with three more graphic images of untrained or immature male energy. (Women will want to find their own counterparts here.) You cannot walk the second journey with first journey tools. You need a whole new tool kit.

Far too many people just keep doing repair work on the container itself and never “throw their nets into the deep” (John 21:6) to bring in the huge catch that awaits them.

The second insight about steps and stages is that from your own level of development, you can only stretch yourself to comprehend people just a bit beyond yourself. Some theorists say you cannot stretch more than one step above your own level of consciousness, and that is on a good day! Because of this limitation, those at deeper (or “higher”) levels beyond you invariably appear wrong, sinful, heretical, dangerous, or even worthy of elimination.

We can save ourselves a lot of distress and accusation by knowing when, where, to whom, and how to talk about spiritually mature things.

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.

Virgil is the first-half-of-life man; Beatrice is the second-half-of-life woman. In the first half of life, we fight the devil and have the illusion and inflation of “winning” now and then; in the second half of life, we always lose because we are invariably fighting God. The first battles solidify the ego and create a stalwart loyal soldier; the second battles defeat the ego because God always wins. No wonder so few want to let go of their loyal soldier; no wonder so few have the faith to grow up. The ego hates losing, even to God.

Remember that Hercules, Orpheus, Aeneas, Psyche, and our Odysseus all traveled into realms of the dead—and returned! Most mythologies include a descent into the underworld at some point. Jesus, as we said, also “descended into hell,” and only on the third day did he “ascend into heaven.” Most of life is lived, as it were, on the “first and second days,” the threshold days when transformation is happening but we do not know it yet. In men's work we call this liminal space.7

Jesus is never upset at sinners (check it out!); he is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners! Jesus was fully at home with this tragic sense of life. He lived and rose inside it. I am now personally convinced that Jesus' ability to find a higher order inside constant disorder is the very heart of his message—and why true Gospel, as rare as it might be, still heals and renews all that it touches.

Organized religion has not been known for its inclusiveness or for being very comfortable with diversity. Yet pluriformity, multiplicity, and diversity is the only world there is!

Salvation is not sin perfectly avoided, as the ego would prefer; but in fact, salvation is sin turned on its head and used in our favor.

Almost every one of Odysseus's encounters coming home from Troy are losses of some type—his men, his control, his power, his time, his memory, his fame, the boat itself. Falling, losing, failing, transgression, and sin are the pattern, I am sorry to report. Yet they all lead toward home.

In the tale of Odysseus and in other stories from world mythology, the theme of loss and humiliation was constant and unrelenting, variously presented as the dragon, the sea monster, Scylla and Charybdis, an imprisonment, plague or illness, a falling into hell, the sirens, a storm, darkness, a shipwreck, the lotus eaters, the state of fatherlessness or orphanhood, homelessness, being stranded on an island, blindness, and often the powerless state of poverty and penury.

Carl Jung said that so much unnecessary suffering comes into the world because people will not accept the “legitimate suffering” that comes from being human. In fact, he said neurotic behavior is usually the result of refusing that legitimate suffering! Ironically, this refusal of the necessary pain of being human brings to the person ten times more suffering in the long run. It is no surprise that the first and always unwelcome message in male initiation rites is “life is hard.” We really are our own worst enemy when we deny this.

Your True Self is who you objectively are from the beginning, in the mind and heart of God, “the face you had before you were born,” as the Zen masters say. It is your substantial self, your absolute identity, which can be neither gained nor lost by any technique, group affiliation, morality, or formula whatsoever. The surrendering of our false self, which we have usually taken for our absolute identity, yet is merely a relative identity, is the necessary suffering needed to find “the pearl of great price” that is always hidden inside this lovely but passing shell.

Those who do not seek their home are symbolized perhaps by the lotus eaters whom Odysseus encounters, who forgot themselves and lost their own depths and consciousness. It has been said that 90 percent of people seem to live 90 percent of their lives on cruise control, which is to be unconscious.

Persona and shadow are correlative terms. Your shadow is what you refuse to see about yourself, and what you do not want others to see. The more you have cultivated and protected a chosen persona, the more shadow work you will need to do. Be especially careful therefore of any idealized role or self-image, like that of minister, mother, doctor, nice person, professor, moral believer, or president of this or that. These are huge personas to live up to, and they trap many people in lifelong delusion. The more you are attached to and unaware of such a protected self-image, the more shadow self you will very likely have. Conversely, the more you live out of your shadow self, the less capable you are of recognizing the persona you are trying to protect and project. It is like a double blindness keeping you from seeing—and being—your best and deepest self. As Jesus put it, “If the lamp within you is, in fact, darkness, what darkness there will be” (Matthew 6:23). I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then I must watch my reaction to it. In my position, I have no other way of spotting both my well-denied shadow self and my idealized persona. I am actually surprised there are not more clergy scandals, because “spiritual leader” or “professional religious person” is such a dangerous and ego-inflating self-image. Whenever ministers, or any true believers, are too anti anything,

Your persona is what most people want from you and reward you for, and what you choose to identify with, for some reason. As you do your inner work, you will begin to know that your self-image is nothing more than just that, and not worth protecting, promoting, or denying. As Jesus says in the passage above, if you can begin to “make friends” with those who have a challenging message for you, you will usually begin to see some of your own shadow. If you don't, you will miss out on much-needed wisdom and end up “imprisoned” within

One of the great surprises at this point is that you find that the cure for your loneliness is actually solitude!

In the second half of life, all that you avoided for the sake of a manufactured ego ideal starts coming back as a true friend and teacher. Doers become thinkers, feelers become doers, thinkers become feelers, extroverts become introverts, visionaries become practical, and the practical ones long for vision. We all go toward the very places we avoided for the last forty years, and our friends are amazed.