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

by Richard Rohr

If you realize that there is a further journey, you might do the warm-up act quite differently, which would better prepare you for what follows.

So get ready for a great adventure, the one you were really born for. If we never get to our little bit of heaven, our life does not make much sense, and we have created our own “hell.”

Jaw. Drop.

For some reason, religious people tend to confuse the means with the actual goal. In the beginning, you tend to think that God really cares about your exact posture, the exact day of the week for public prayer, the authorship and wordings of your prayers, and other such things. Once your life has become a constant communion, you know that all the techniques, formulas, sacraments, and practices were just a dress rehearsal for the real thing—life itself—which can actually become a constant intentional prayer. Your conscious and loving existence gives glory to God.

Only when you have begun to live in the second half can you see the difference between the two. Yet the two halves are cumulative and sequential, and both are very necessary.

Mature people are not either-or thinkers, but they bathe in the ocean of both-and.

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. We are also creatures who love the familiar, the habitual, our own group; and we are all tied deeply to our early conditioning, for good and for ill. Most people will not leave the safety and security of their home base until they have to. Thus the Gospel call, again and again, is to leave home, family, and nets (Mark 1:16–20). Without that necessary separation, order itself, and my particular kind of order, will often feel like a kind of “salvation.” It has been the most common and bogus substitute for the real liberation offered by mature religion.

We are perhaps the first generation in history, we postmodern folks, who have the freedom both to know the rules and also to critique the rules at the same time. This is changing everything and evolving consciousness at a rather quick rate.3

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.

The loyal soldier is similar to the “elder son” in Jesus' parable of the prodigal son. His very loyalty to strict meritocracy, to his own entitlement, to obedience and loyalty to his father, keeps him from the very “celebration” that same father has prepared, even though he begs the son to come to the feast (Luke 15:25–32). We have no indication he ever came!

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.

There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life. It will sound an awful lot like the voices of risk, of trust, of surrender, of soul, of “common sense,” of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of your deepest self, of soulful “Beatrice.” The true faith journey only begins at this point. Up to now everything is mere preparation. Finally, we have a container strong enough to hold the contents of our real life, which is always filled with contradictions and adventures and immense challenges.

So God, life, and destiny have to loosen the loyal soldier's grasp on your soul, which up to now has felt like the only “you” that you know and the only authority that there is. Our loyal solider normally begins to be discharged somewhere between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-five, if it happens at all; before that it is usually mere rebellion or iconoclasm.

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. Instead of being ego driven, you will begin to be soul drawn. The wisdom and guidance you will need to get you across this chasm will be like Charon ferrying you across the river Styx, or Hermes guiding the soul across all scary boundaries. These are your authentic soul friends, and we now sometimes call them spiritual directors or elders. Celtic Christianity called them anam chara.

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

WOW!!!!

“How much false self are you willing to shed to find your True Self?” is the lasting question.2

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 goal in sacred story is always to come back home, after getting the protagonist to leave home in the first place! A contradiction? A paradox? Yes, but now home has a whole new meaning, never imagined before. As always, it transcends but includes one's initial experience of home.

or our consumer economy.

I had to get out of the box in order to get back in.

her own abundance and for the benefit of following generations. Because such people have built a good container, they are able to “contain” more and more truth, more and more neighbors, more and broader vision, more and more of a mysterious and outpouring God.

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.

Many depressed people are people who have never taken any risks, never moved outside their comfort zone, never faced necessary suffering, and so their unconscious knows that they have never lived—or loved!