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

by Richard Rohr

Catholics used to say at the end of their Latin prayers, Per omnia saecula saeculorum, loosely translated as “through all the ages of ages.”

Remember, the opposite of rational is not always irrational, but it can also be transrational or bigger than the rational mind can process; things like love, death, suffering, God, and infinity are transrational experiences.

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.

For me, this is what makes something inherently religious: whatever reconnects (re-ligio) our parts to the Whole is an experience of God, whether we call it that or not. He is also reconnecting his outer journey to the “inland” or his interior world, which is much of the task of the second half of life. What brilliant metaphors!

Then he is to sacrifice to the god Neptune, who has been on his trail throughout the first journey. The language of offering sacrifice is rather universal in ancient myths. It must have been recognized that to go forward there is always something that has to be let go of, moved beyond, given up, or “forgiven” to enter the larger picture of the “gods.”

You cannot walk the second journey with first journey tools. You need a whole new tool kit.

Just remember this much consciously: the whole story is set in the matrix of seeking to find home and then to return there, and thus refining and defining what home really is.

18). 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.

You cannot do a nonstop flight to the second half of life by reading lots of books about it, including this one. Grace must and will edge you forward. “God has no grandchildren.

God only has children,” as some have said. Each generation has to make its own discoveries of Spirit for itself. If not, we just react to the previous generation, and often ...

No Pope, Bible quote, psychological technique, religious formula, book, or guru can do your journey for you. If you try to skip the first journey, you will never see its real necessity and also its limitations; you will never know why this first container must fail you, the wonderful fullness of the second half of the journey, and the relationship between the two.

Almost all of culture, and even most of religious history, has been invested in the creation and maintenance of first-half-of-life issues: the big three concerns of identity, security, and sexuality and gender. They don't just preoccupy us; they totally take over. That is where history has been up to now, I am afraid. In fact, most generations have seen boundary marking and protecting those boundaries as their primary and sometimes only task in life. Most of history has been the forging of structures of security and appropriate loyalty symbols, to announce and defend one's personal identity, one's group, and one's gender issues and identity. Now we seem to live in a time when more and more people are asking, “Is that all there is?”

It was Carl Jung who first popularized the phrase “the two halves of life” to describe these two major tangents and tasks, yet many other teachers have recognized that there are clear stages and steps of human and spiritual maturation. Process language is not new; it has just used different images.

Unless you can chart and encourage both movement and direction, you have no way to name maturity or immaturity.

First of all, you can only see and understand the earlier stages from the wider perspective of the later stages. This is why mature societies were meant to be led by elders, seniors, saints, and “the initiated.”

But just remember, there is a symbiosis between immature groups and immature leaders, I am afraid, which is why both Plato and Jefferson said democracy was not really the best form of government. It is just the safest.

The “adepts” in all religions are always forgiving, compassionate, and radically inclusive.

They do not create enemies, and they move beyond the boundaries of their own “starter group” while still honoring them and making use of them.

As Albert Einstein said, “No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it in the first place.”

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.

If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage—as if it were God!

This resistance to change is so common, in fact, that it is almost what we expect from religious people, who tend to love the past more than the future or the present.

Pope John XXIII's motto might be heard here: “In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things, charity.” That is second-half-of-life, hard-won wisdom.

You see, authentic God experience always “burns” you, yet does not destroy you (Exodus 3:2–3), just as the burning bush did to Moses. But most of us are not prepared for such burning, nor even told to expect it.

As a priest of forty years, I find that much of the spiritual and pastoral work of churches is often ineffective at the levels of real transformation, and calls forth immense passivity and even many passive-aggressive responses. As a preacher, I find that I am forced to dumb down the material in order to interest a Sunday crowd that does not expect or even want any real challenge; nor does it exhibit much spiritual or intellectual curiosity.

you have spent many years building your particular tower of success and self-importance—your personal “salvation project,” as

The rebellions of two-year-olds and teenagers are in our hardwiring, and we have to have something hard and half good to rebel against.

“When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.”

You need a very strong container to hold the contents and contradictions that arrive later in life.

We have too many people on the extremes: some make a “sacrificial” and heroic life their whole identity, and end up making everyone else around them sacrifice so that they can be sacrificial and heroic.

Others, in selfish rebellion and without any training in letting go, refuse to sacrifice anything.

Basically, if you stay in the protected first half of life beyond its natural period, you become a well-disguised narcissist or an adult infant (who is also a narcissist!)—both of whom are often thought to ...

Most people are trying to build the platform of their lives all by themselves, while working all the new levers at the same time. I think of CEOs, business leaders, soldiers, or parents who have no principled or ethical sense of themselves and end up with some kind of “pick and choose” morality in the pressured moment.

This pattern leaves the isolated ego in full control, and surely represents the hubris that will precede a lot of impending tragedies. This pattern is all probably predictable when we try to live life backwards and build ourselves a wonderful superstructure before we have laid any real foundations from culture, religion, or tradition.

We are parts of social and family ecosystems that are rightly structured to keep us from falling but also, more important, to show us how to fall and also how to learn from that very falling.

We are not helping our children by always preventing them from what might be necessary falling, because you learn how to recover from falling by falling!

People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all.

It structures children's universe and gives them foundational meaning and safety. 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, as Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, and many others have taught. Chaos and chaotic parents will rightly make children cry, withdraw, and rage—both inside and outside.

What if we were not expected to respect our parents, and we all started out with cynicism and mistrust of all authority?

What if the “I love you” between partners was allowed to mean nothing?

What if covetousness, which Rene Girard calls “mimetic rivalry,” was encouraged to grow unstopped, as it is...

We now need basic parenting classes in junior high schools, because so many children have been poorly parented by people who themselves were poorly parented.

People who have not been tutored by some “limit situations” in the first half of their life are in no position to parent children; they are usually children themselves.

In other words, we ironically need limit situations and boundaries to grow up. A completely open field does not do the job nearly as well or as quickly. Yahweh was creating a good limit situation for Adam and Eve when he told them not to eat the apple, fully knowing that they would.

Many of the papers I receive in summer graduate courses at major universities are embarrassing to read in terms of both style and content, yet these same “adults” are shocked if they do not get an A. This does not bode well for the future of our country.

None of these “isms” ever create a “civilization of love” or even positive energy; they are largely theories in the head and come from the small egoic personality, leaving the soul bereft, starved, and saddened outside. 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?”

The most effective organizations, I am told, have both a “good boss” and a “bad boss,” who work closely together. One holds us strongly, while the other speaks hard truth to us and sets clear goals and limits for us. Our naive sense of entitlement and overreaction against all limits to our freedom are not serving us well as parents and marriage partners, not to speak of our needed skills as employees, students, conversationalists, team players, or citizens. It takes the pain of others to produce a humane and just civilization, it seems.

Those who whine about parents and authority for too long invariably remain or become narcissists themselves.

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),

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.