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

by Richard Rohr

By that I mean that most people's concerns remain those of establishing their personal (or superior) identity, creating various boundary markers for themselves, seeking security, and perhaps linking to what seem like significant people or projects.

But, in my opinion, this first-half-of-life task is no more than finding the starting gate. It is merely the warm-up act, not the full journey.

sadly, from those who never seem to move on.

As you will see from the chapter titles, I consider the usual crossover points to be a kind of “necessary suffering,” stumbling over stumbling stones, and lots of shadowboxing, but often just a gnawing desire for “ourselves,” for something more, or what I will call “homesickness.”

All spiritual language is by necessity metaphor and symbol.

The Light comes from elsewhere, yet it is necessarily reflected through those of us still walking on the journey ourselves.

believe that God gives us our soul, our deepest identity, our True Self,1 our unique blueprint, at our own “immaculate conception.”

True religion is always a deep intuition that we are already participating in something very good, in spite of our best efforts to deny it or avoid it.

the best of modern theology is revealing a strong “turn toward participation,” as opposed to religion as mere observation, affirmation, moralism, or group belonging.

There is nothing to join, only something to recognize, suffer, and en...

You are already in the eternal flow that Christians would call the divin...

Each thing and every person must act out its nature fully, at whatever cost.

The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it.

So get ready for some new freedom, some dangerous permission, some hope from nowhere, some unexpected happiness, some stumbling stones, some radical grace, and some new and pressing responsibility for yourself and for our suffering world.

What is a normal goal to a young person becomes a neurotic hindrance in old age. —CARL JUNG

We are a “first-half-of-life culture,” largely concerned about surviving successfully.

We all try to do what seems like the task that life first hands us: establishing an identity, a home, relationships, friends, community, security, and building a proper platform for our only life.

But it takes us much longer to discover “the task within the task,” as I like to call it: what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing.

Two people can have the same job description, and one is holding a subtle or not-so-subtle life energy (eros) in doing his or her job, while another is holding a subtle or not-so-subtle negative energy (thanatos) while doing the exact same job. Most of us are somewhere in between, I suppose.

Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions and a growing honesty about our actual motives.

Most often we don't pay attention to that inner task until we have had some kind of fall or failure in our outer tasks.

Some young people, especially those who have learned from early suffering, are already there, and some older folks are still quite childish.

We are led by Mystery, which religious people rightly call grace.

Someone has to make clear to us that homes are not meant to be lived in—but only to be moved out from.

Our institutions and our expectations, including our churches, are almost entirely configured to encourage, support, reward, and validate the tasks of the first half of life.

Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.

the way up is the way down.

it is still a secret, probably because we do not want to see it. We do not want

to embark on a further journey if it feels like going down, especially after we have put so much sound and fury into going up. This is surely the first and primary reason why many people never get to the fullness of their own lives. The supposed achievements of the first half of life have to fall apart and show themselves to be wanting in some way, or we will not move further. Why would we?

Only people unfamiliar with sacred story are surprised that they ate the apple. As soon as God told them specifically not to, you know they will! It creates the whole story line inside of which we can find ourselves.

It is not that suffering or failure might happen, or that it will only happen to you if you are bad (which is what religious people often think), or that it will happen to the unfortunate, or to a few in other places, or that you can somehow by cleverness or righteousness avoid it. No, it will happen, and to you!

You cannot avoid sin or mistake anyway (Romans 5:12), but if you try too fervently, it often creates even worse problems.

Such a down-and-then-up perspective does not fit into our Western philosophy of progress, nor into our desire for upward mobility, nor into our religious notions of perfection or holiness.

This is how I would interpret Jesus' enigmatic words, “The children of this world are wiser in their ways than the children of light” (Luke 16:8).

have met too many rigid and angry old Christians and clergy to deny this sad truth, but it seems to be true in all religions until and unless they lead to the actual transformation of persons.

In this book I would like to describe how this message of falling down and moving up is, in fact, the most counter-intuitive message in most of the world's religions, including and most especially Christianity. We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.

In fact, I would say that the demand for the perfect is the greatest enemy of the good. Perfection is a mathematical or divine concept, goodness is a beautiful human concept that includes us all.

was a good Star Scout myself and a Catholic altar boy besides, who rode my bike to serve the 6 A.M. mass when I was merely ten years old. I hope you are as impressed as I was with myself.

The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo, even when it is not working. It attaches to past and present, and fears the future.

Like skaters, we move forward by actually moving from side to side.

constant loss and renewal, death and transformation, the changing of forms and forces. Some even see it in terms of “chaos theory”: the exceptions are the only rule and then they create new rules. Scary, isn't it?

What I hope to do in this small book, without a lot of need to convince anybody, is just to make the sequencing, the tasks, and the direction of the two halves of life clear.

Those who are ready will see that this message is self-evident: those who have gone “down” are the only ones who understand “up.”

This is probably why Jesus praised faith and trust even more than love.

It takes a foundational trust to fall or to fail—and not to fall apart.

Our first understanding of law must fail us and disappoint us. Only after breaking the first tablets of the law is Moses a real leader and prophet.

The Dalai Lama said much the same thing: “Learn and obey the rules very well, so you will know how to break them properly.”

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.

We are the obvious exception, and have replaced these effective and healing story lines with ineffective, cruel, and disorienting narratives like communism, fascism, terrorism, mass production, and its counterpart, consumerism. In other words, we all have our de facto worldviews that determine what is important and what is not important to us. They usually have a symbolic story to hold them together, such as that of “Honest Abe” chopping wood in Kentucky and educating himself in Illinois. “Myths” like this become a standing and effective metaphor for the American worldview of self-determination, hard work, and achievement. Whether they are exact historical truth is not even important.