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

by Richard Rohr

So I offer this personal apologia for those of you who perhaps are wondering why I quote Jesus so much. You might be saying, “Does it really matter?” or “Does it have to be in the Bible to be true?” Well, I quote Jesus because I still consider him to be the spiritual authority of the Western world, whether we follow him or not. He is always spot-on at the deeper levels and when we understand him in his own explosive context. One does not even need to believe in his divinity to realize that Jesus is seeing at a much higher level than most of us.

First of all, do you recognize that he is actually undoing the fourth commandment of Moses, which tells us to “honor your father and mother”? This commandment is necessary for the first half of life, and, one hopes, it can be possible forever.

As we move into the second half of life, however, we are very often at odds with our natural family and the “dominant consciousness” of our cultures.

Even Jesus, whose family thought he was “crazy” (Mark 3:21), had to face this dilemma firsthand. The very fact that the evangelist would risk associating the word “crazy” with Jesus shows how Jesus was surely not following the expected and mainline script for his culture or his religion.

One of the major blocks against the second journey is what we would now call the “collective,” the crowd, our society, or our extended family. Some call it the crab bucket syndrome—you try to get out, but the other crabs just keep pulling you back in. What passes for morality or spirituality in the vast majority of people's lives is the way everybody they grew up with thinks. Some would call it conditioning or even imprinting. Without very real inner work, most folks never move beyond it. You might get beyond it in a negative sense, by reacting or rebelling against it, but it is much less common to get out of the crab bucket in a positive way.

It takes a huge push, much self-doubt, and some degree of separation for people to find their own soul and their own destiny apart from what Mom and Dad always wanted them to be and do.

To move beyond family-of-origin stuff, local church stuff, cultural stuff, flag-and-country stuff is a path that few of us follow positively and with integrity. The pull is just too great, and the loyal soldier fills us with appropriate guilt, shame, and self-doubt, which, as we said earlier, feels like the very voice of God.

So Jesus pulls no punches, saying you must “hate” your home base in some way and make choices beyond it. I am happy he said this, or I would never have had the courage to believe how it might be true.

Perhaps it has never struck you how consistently the great religious teachers and founders leave home, go on pilgrimage to far-off places, do a major turnabout, choose downward mobility; and how often it is their parents, the established religion at that time, spiritual authorities, and often even civil authorities who fight against them.

Carl Jung, who so often says things concisely, offers this momentous insight: “Life is a luminous pause between two great mysteries, which themselves are one.”1 That is precisely what I want to say here.

In fact, their heroism was in their ability to hear that voice and to risk following it—wherever! Sadly, such inner comfort is the very thing we lack today at almost all levels. Our problem now is that we seriously doubt that there is any vital reality to the spiritual world, so we hear no life-changing voices—true even for many who go to church, temple, or mosque.

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.

The gift of living in our time, however, is that we are more and more discovering that the sciences, particularly physics, astrophysics, anthropology, and biology, are confirming many of the deep intuitions of religion, and at a rather quick pace in recent years.

The universe really is “inspirited matter,” we now know, and is not merely inert. Now we might call it instinct, evolution, nuclear fusion, DNA, hardwiring, the motherboard, healing, growth, or just springtime, but nature clearly continues to renew itself from within. God seems to have created things that continue to create and recreate themselves from the inside out.

No surprise that this marks the end of Odysseus's journey! Now he can go home because he has, in fact, come home to his true and full self. His sailing and oaring days of mere “outer performance” are over, and he can now rest in the simplicity and ground of his own deeper life. He is free to stop his human doing and can at last enjoy his human being.

We are created with an inner drive and necessity that sends all of us looking for our True Self, whether we know it or not. This journey is a spiral and never a straight line.

We are created with an inner restlessness and call that urges us on to the risks and promises of a second half to our life. There is a God-size hole in all of us, waiting to be filled. God creates the very dissatisfaction that only grace and finally divine love can satisfy.

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 dep...

If we go to the depths of anything, we will begin to knock upon something substantial, “real,” and with a timeless quality to it. We will move from the starter kit of “belief” to an actual inner knowing. This is most especially true if we have ever (1) loved deeply, (2) accompanied someone through the mystery of dying, (3) or stood in genuine life-changing awe before mystery, time, or beauty.

It is religion's job to teach us and guide us on this discovery of our True Self, but it usually makes the mistake of turning this into a worthiness contest of some sort, a private performance, or some kind of religious achievement on our part, through our belonging to the right group, practicing the right rituals, or believing the right things.

It is the common, and in this case tragic, confusion of the medium with the message, or the style with the substance.

It was largely the fathers of the early church, and especially the Eastern Church, who never compromised on what they called theosis or “divinization,” as we see in the powerful quotes above.

The Gospel was just too good to be true—for a future-oriented, product-oriented, and win-lose worldview.

a Larger Source, the unified field, the shared Spirit. I am also relying upon your inner, deep-time recognition more than any linear cognition

Many have said before me that spirituality is much more about unlearning than learning, because the “growing boy” is usually growing into major illusions, all of which must be undone to free him from prison and take him back to his beginnings in God.

“Unless you change, and become like a little child, you will not enter the kingdom of God,” Jesus says (Matthew 18:3). And he says this in response to the egotistic and ambitious question of the apostles, who were asking him, “Who is the greatest?”

When you do not know who you are, you push all enlightenment off into a possible future reward and punishment system, within which hardly anyone wins.

A person who has found his or her True Self has learned how to live in the big picture, as a part of deep time and all of history.

This necessitates, of course, that we let go of our own smaller kingdoms, which we normally do not care to do. Life is all about practicing for heaven. We practice by choosing union freely—ahead of time—and now. Heaven is the state of union both here and later. As now, so will it be then. No one is in heaven unless he or she wants to be, and all are in heaven as soon as they live in union.

The more room you have to include, the bigger your heaven will be.

If your notion of heaven is based on exclusion of anybody else, then it is by definition not heaven.

The more you exclude, the more hellish and lonely your existence always is.

If you accept a punitive notion of God, who punishes or even eternally tortures those who do not love him,

an absurd universe where most people on this earth end up being more loving than God! God excludes no one from union, but must allow us to exclude ourselves in order for us to maintain our freedom.

Our word for that exclusion is hell, and it must be maintained as a...

No one is in hell unless that individual himself or herself chooses a final aloneness and separation. It is all about desire, both allowing and drawing from the deepest level of our desiring. It is interesting to me that the official church has never declared a single person to be in hell, not even Judas, Hitler, or Stalin.

Ken Wilber described the later stages of life well when he said that the classic spiritual journey always begins elitist and ends egalitarian. Always!

We see it in Sufi Islam and Hindu Krishna consciousness, which sees God's joy everywhere. We see it in mystics like William Blake or Lady Julian, who start with a grain of sand or a hazelnut and soon find themselves swimming in infinity.

Life moves first toward diversity and then toward union of that very diversity at ever higher levels. It is the old philosophical problem of “the one and the many,” which Christianity should have resolved in its belief in God as Trinity.

Even Pope John Paul II said that heaven and hell were primarily eternal states of consciousness more than geographical places of later reward and punishment.

The ego clearly prefers an economy of merit, where we can divide the world into winners and losers, to any economy of grace, where merit or worthiness loses all meaning.

In the first case, at least a few of us good guys attain glory. In the second case, all the glory is to God.

People are so afraid of being considered pre-rational that they avoid and deny the very possibility of the transrational. Others substitute mere pre-rational emotions for authentic religious experience, which is always transrational. —KEN WILBER

(Literalism is usually the lowest and least level of meaning.)

and yet a man who could go to any country and be at home.

was always being moved toward greater differentiation and larger viewpoints, and simultaneously toward a greater inclusivity in my ideas, a deeper understanding of people, and a more honest sense of justice.

because I was able to include and broaden.

Paul Ricoeur's first naiveté was the best way to begin the journey, and a second naiveté was the easiest way to continue that same journey, without becoming angry, split, alienated, or ignorant.

I now hope and believe that a kind of second simplicity is the very goal of mature adul...

My small personal viewpoint as a central reference point for anything, or for rightly judging anything, gradually faded as life went on. The very meaning of the word universe is to “turn around one thing.” I know I am not that one thing. There is either some Big Truth in this universe, or there is no truth that is always reliable; there is we hope, some pattern behind it all (even if the pattern is exception!), or it begins to be a very incoherent universe, which is what many postmodern people seem to have accepted. I just can't.