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

by Richard Rohr

This is what we actually mean by “salvation,” especially when we get our narcissistic fix all the way from the Top.

Sweeping redefinition of salvation - Jesus really did talk of a hell to avoid - to be saved from

In fact, far too many (especially women and disadvantaged people) have lived very warped and defeated lives because they tried to give up a self that was not there yet.

To quote Archimedes once again, you must have both “a lever and a place to stand” before you can move the world. The educated and sophisticated Western person today has many levers, but almost no solid place on which to stand, with either very weak identities or terribly overstated identities.

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.

Instead of being ego driven, you will begin to be soul drawn.

It seems that in the spiritual world, we do not really find something until we first lose it, ignore it, miss it, long for it, choose it, and personally find it again—but now on a new level.

Not surprisingly, many of the findings of modern psychology, anthropology, and organizational behavior give us new windows and vocabulary into Jesus' transcendent message.

For postmodern people, the universe is not inherently enchanted, as it was for the ancients. We have to do all the “enchanting” ourselves. This leaves us alone, confused, and doubtful. There is no meaning already in place for our discovery and enjoyment. We have to create all meaning by ourselves in such an inert and empty world, and most of us do not seem to succeed very well. This is the burden of living in our heady and lonely time, when we think it is all up to us.

God seems to have created things that continue to create and recreate themselves from the inside out. It is no longer God's one-time creation or evolution; rather, God's form of creation precisely is evolution. Finally God is allowed to be fully incarnate, which was supposed to be Christianity's big trump card from the beginning! It has taken us a long time to get here, and dualistic thinkers still cannot jump the hurdle.

He is free to stop his human doing and can at last enjoy his human being.

We dare not try to fill our souls and minds with numbing addictions, diversionary tactics, or mindless distractions. The shape of evil is much more superficiality and blindness than the usually listed “hot sins.” God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything, even and maybe especially in the deep fathoming of our fallings and failures. Sin is to stay on the surface of even holy things, like Bible, sacrament, or church.

You learn to positively ignore and withdraw your energy from evil or stupid things rather than fight them directly.

They once worshiped their raft; now they love the shore where it has taken them. They once defended signposts; now they have arrived where the signs pointed. They now enjoy the moon itself instead of fighting over whose finger points to it most accurately, quickly, or definitively.

Your life and your delivery system are now one, whereas before, your life and your occupation seemed like two different things. Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have—right now. This is a monumental change from the first half of life, so much so that it is almost the litmus test of whether you are in the second half of life at all.

“The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” I learned this from my father St. Francis, who did not concentrate on attacking evil or others, but just spent his life falling, and falling many times into the good, the true, and the beautiful. It was the only way he knew how to fall into God.

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.

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.

Shadow work is humiliating work, but properly so. If you do not “eat” such humiliations with regularity and make friends with the judges, the courtrooms, and the officers (that is, all those who reveal to you and convict you of your own denied faults) who come into your life, you will surely remain in the first half of life forever.

Divine union overrides any need for self-hatred or self-rejection. Such people do not need to be perfectly right, and they know they cannot be anyway; so they just try to be in right relationship. In

Christians could have been done a great service if shadow had been distinguished from sin. Sin and shadow are not the same. We were so encouraged to avoid sin that many of us instead avoided facing our shadow, and then we ended up “sinning” even worse—while unaware besides!

The persona does not choose to see evil in itself, so it always disguises it as good. The shadow self invariably presents itself as something like prudence, common sense, justice, or “I am doing this for your good,” when it is actually manifesting fear, control, manipulation, or even vengeance.

Invariably when something upsets you, and you have a strong emotional reaction out of proportion to the moment, your shadow self has just been exposed.

There will always be some degree of sadness, humiliation, and disappointment resulting from shadow work, so it's best to learn to recognize it and not obsess over it. It is the false self that is sad and humbled, because its game is over.

At the bottom, there is little time or interest in being totally practical, efficient, or revenue generating. You just want to breathe fresh air.

The human art form is in uniting fruitful activity with a contemplative stance—not one or the other, but always both at the same time.1

In your second half of life, you can actually bless others in what they feel they must do, allow them to do what they must do, challenge them if they are hurting themselves or others—but you can no longer join them in the first half of life.

Until and unless you give your life away to others, you do not seem to have it yourself at any deep level. Good parents always learn that. Many of the happiest, most generous and focused people I know are young mothers.

Much of the work of midlife is learning to tell the difference between people who are still dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you as you really are. As

God must say after each failure of ours, “Oh, here is a great opportunity! Let's see how we can work with this!” After our ego-inflating successes, God surely says, “Well, nothing new or good is going to happen here!”

Communities and commitment can form around suffering much more than around how wonderful or superior we are.

There is a strange and even wonderful communion in real human pain, actually much more than in joy, which is too often manufactured and passing.

The small self cannot see this very easily, because it doubts itself too much, is still too fragile, and is caught up in the tragedy of it all. It has not lived long enough to see the big patterns. No wonder so many of our young commit suicide. This is exactly why we need elders and those who can mirror life truthfully and foundationally for the young.

Pain is part of the deal.

God will always give you exactly what you truly want and desire. So make sure you desire, desire deeply, desire yourself, desire God, desire everything good, true, and beautiful.