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

by Richard Rohr

Mature people invariably thank their harder parent, law-driven church, kick-ass coach, and most demanding professors—but usually years later.

This is a clear sign of having transcended—and included. It is what we should expect fifty- to seventy-year-olds to say, and what you seldom hear from twenty- to forty-year-olds anymore unless they have grown up quite quickly. Some, of course, have also been wounded quite lethally, as in situations of rape or abuse or bullying, and it takes them a longer time to heal and grow.

Actually, I have seen many Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists do it much better, but very few Christians have been taught how to live both law and freedom at the same time. Our Western dualistic minds do not process paradoxes very well.

Without a contemplative mind, we do not know how to hold creative tensions. We are better at rushing to judgment and demanding a complete resolution to things before we have learned what they have to teach us. This is not the way of wisdom, and it is the way that people operate in the first half of life. “Primitive” and native societies might well have held this tension better than we do today.2 There is much evidence that many traditional societies produced healthy psyches and ego structures by doing the first half of life very well, even if they were not as “developed” or individuated as we are.

We see this in our political debates today, in people's lack of basic self-knowledge (too-quick answers keep you from necessary searching), and in scary fundamentalist thinking in all of the world religions.

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. “Keep the rules, and the rules will keep you!” we were told our first day in the seminary. Franciscans should have known better.

It is not just “the exception that proves the rule” but somehow that the loss or transgression of the rule also proves the importance and purpose of the rule.

You must first eat the fruit of the garden, so you know what it tastes like—and what you are missing if and when you stop eating it.

We are perhaps the first generation in history, we postmodern folks, who have the freedom both to know the rules and also to ...

Nevertheless, this new tribalism is being found in all of the world religions—a desire for rediscovery of one's roots, one's traditions, one's symbols, one's ethnic identity, and one's own unique identity. Some call it the “identity politics” that rules our country. This is understandable in the midst of massive and scary globalization among six billion people, but it also keeps us trapped at the bipartisan divide—and we never achieve the transpartisan nature of mature elders. People think that by defeating the other side, they have achieved some high level of truth! Very sad indeed, but that is as far as the angry or fearful dualistic mind can go.

saw this pattern in my fourteen years as a jail chaplain. The inmates would invariably be overly religious, highly moralistic, and excessively legalistic (believe it or not!), and many overly intellectualized everything. They would do anything to try to compensate for their dashed, maybe never developed, but publicly humiliated criminal self.

chaplain, and the last thing I sometimes trusted was a lot of “religious” language and Jesus talk. Again, it was a regressive restoration of a failed first half of life. It seldom works long term.

A recent study pointed out that a strong majority of young men entering seminaries in the last ten to twenty years came from single-parent homes, a high percentage having what we would call “father wounds,”4 which can take the form of an absent, emotionally unavailable, alcoholic, or even abusive father.

None of us can dialogue with others until we can calmly and confidently hold our own identity. None of us can know much about second-half-of-life spirituality as long as we are still trying to create the family, the parenting, the security, the order, the pride that we were not given in the first half.

Self-knowledge is dismissed as psychology,

while law, ritual, and priestcraft have become a compulsive substitute for actual divine encounter or honest relationship. This does not bode well for the future of any church or society.

spiritually speaking, there are no dead ends.

The community needs you to return as a man, a citizen, and something beyond a soldier.” In our men's work, we call this process “discharging your loyal soldier.” This kind of closure is much needed for most of us at the end of all major transitions in life. Because we have lost any sense of the need for such rites of passage, most of our people have no clear crossover to the second half of their own lives.

The Japanese were wise enough to create clear closure, transition, and possible direction. Western people are a ritually starved people, and in this are different than most of human history.

Even the church's sacraments are overwhelmingly dedicated to keeping us loyally inside the flock and tied to the clergy, loyal soldiers of the church. There is little talk of journeys outward or onward, the kind of journeys Jesus called people to go

The state also wants loyal patriots and citizens, not thinkers, critics, or citizens of a larger world. No wonder we have so much depression and addiction, especially among the elderly, and also among the churched. Their full life has been truncated with the full cooperation of both church and state.

The voice of our loyal soldier gets us through the first half of life safely, teaching us to look both ways before we cross the street, to have enough impulse control to avoid addictions and compulsive emotions, to learn the sacred “no” to ourselves that gives us dignity, identity, direction, significance, and boundaries.

Paradoxically, your loyal soldier gives you so much security and validation that you may confuse his voice with the very voice of God.

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. (Please read that sentence again for maximum effect!)

The loyal soldier is the voice of all your early authority ...

ability to offer shame, guilt, warnings, boundaries, and self-doubt is the gift that never stops giving. Remember, it can be a feminine voice too; but it is not the “still, small voice” of God (1 Kings 19:13) that gives us our power instead of always taking our power. The loyal soldier cannot get you to the second half of life. He does not even understand it. He has not been there. He can help you “get through hell,” with the early decisions that demand bla...

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.

The loyal soldier is largely the same thing that Freud was describing with his concept of the superego, which he said usually substitutes for any real adult formation of conscience. The superego feels like God, because people have had nothing else to guide them. Such a bogus conscience is a terrible substitute for authentic morality.

What reveals its bogus character is its major resistance to change and growth, and

its substituting of small, low-cost moral issues for the real ones that ask us to change, instead of always trying to change other people. Jesus called it “straining out ...

Psychological wholeness and spiritual holiness never exclude the problem from the solution. If it is wholeness, then it is always paradoxical,

holds both the dark and light sides of things. Wholeness and holiness will always stretch us beyond our small comfort zone. How could they not?

You will have many more Aarons building you golden calves than Moseses leading you on any exodus.

The world mythologies all point to places like Hades, Sheol, hell, purgatory, the realm of the dead. Maybe these are not so much the alternative to heaven as the necessary path to heaven.

Even Jesus, if we are to believe the “Apostle's Creed” of the church, “descended into hell” before he ascended into heaven. Isn't it strange how we missed that? Every initiation rite I studied worldwide was always about “dying before you die.” 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.

St. John of the Cross taught that God has to work in the soul in secret and in darkness, because if we fully knew what was happening, and what Mystery/transformation/God/grace will eventually ask of us, we would either try to take charge or stop the whole process.8 No one oversees his or her own demise willingly, even when it is the false self that is dying. God has to undo our illusions secretly, as

As St. Gregory of Nyssa already said in the fourth century, “Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.”

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power of evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned. —ANNIE DILLARD, TEACHING A STONE TO TALK

told his European world that they had distorted the meaning of faith by aligning it with the Western philosophy of “progress” rather than with what he saw as rather evident in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures.1 Jesus and the Jewish prophets were fully at home with the tragic sense of life, and it made the shape and nature of reality very different for them, for Unamuno, and maybe still for us.

By this clear and honest phrase, I understand Unamuno to mean that life is not, nor ever has been, a straight line forward. According to him, life is characterized much more by exception and disorder than by total or perfect order.

Truth is not always about pragmatic problem solving and making things “work,” but about reconciling contradictions. Just because something might have some dire effects does not mean it is not true or even good. Just because something pleases people does not make it true either. Life is inherently tragic, and that is the truth that only faith, but not our seeming logic, can accept.

Nature is much more disorder than order, more multiplicity than uniformity, with the greatest disorder being death itself! In the spiritual life, and now in science, we learn much more by honoring and learning from the exceptions than by just imposing our previous certain rules to make everything fit.

“Well, after all is said and done, remember that church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus.”

What he meant, of course, was that we invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question—even when it is not entirely true—over the mercy and grace of God.

This ability to adjust to human disorder and failure is named God's providence or compassion. Every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us. Just the Biblical notion of absolute forgiveness, once experienced, should be enough to make us trust and seek and love God.

But we humans have a hard time with the specific, the concrete, the individual, the anecdotal story, which hardly ever fits the universal mold.

Some theologians have called this divine pattern of incarnation “the scandal of the particular.” Our mind, it seems, is more pleased with universals: never-broken, always-applicable rules and patterns that allow us to predict and control things. This is good for science, but lousy for religion.

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.

Christians even made the cross into a mechanical “substitutionary atonement theory” to fit into their quid pro quo worldview, instead of suffering its inherent tragedy, as Jesus did himself. They still want some kind of order and reason, instead of cosmic significance and soulful seeing.