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

by Richard Rohr

“Everything that rises must converge,” as Teilhard de Chardin put it.

But many get stopped and fixated at lower levels where God seems to torture and exclude forever those people who don't agree with “him” or get “his” name right. How could you possibly feel safe, free, loved, trustful, or invited by such a small God? Jesus undid this silliness himself when he said, “You, evil as you are, know how to give good things to your children.… If you, then how much more, God!” (Matthew 7:11).

If we are created in the image and likeness of God, then whatever good, true, or beautiful things we can say about humanity or creation we can say of God exponentially. God is the beauty of creation and humanity multiplied to the infinite power.

Creative doubt keeps me with a perpetual “beginner's mind,” which is a wonderful way to keep growing, keep humble, and keep living in happy wonder.

This is the only way I can understand why a Christian would think evolution is any kind of faith problem whatsoever.

very creative tension.

worry about “true believers” who cannot carry any doubt or anxiety at all, as Thomas the Apostle and Mother Teresa

To hold the full mystery of life is always to endure its other half, which is the equal mystery of death and doubt.

To know anything fully is always to hold that part of it which is still mysterious and unknowable.

After almost seventy years, I am still a mystery to myself! Our youthful demand for certainty does eliminate most anxiety on the conscious level,

I can see why many of us stay in such a control tower during the first half of life. We do not have enough experience of wholeness to include all of its parts yet.

First-half-of-life “naiveté” includes a kind of excitement and happiness that is hard to let go of, unless you know there is an even deeper and t...

First naiveté is the earnest and dangerous innocence we sometimes admire in young zealots, but it is also the reason we do not follow them if we are smart, and why we should not elect them or follow them as leaders.

It is probably necessary to eliminate most doubt when you are young; doing so is a good survival technique. But such worldviews are not true—and they are not wisdom.

Wisdom happily lives with mystery, doubt, and “unknowing,” and in such living, ironically resolves tha...

have never figured out why unknowing becomes another kind of knowing, but it surely seems to be.2 It takes a lot of learning to finally “learn ignorance” (docta ignorantia) as Dionysius, Augu...

I, like everyone else, have had my many experiences, teachings, and teachers, but as T. S. Eliot puts it in the Four Quartets, We had the experience but missed the meaning, And approach to the meaning restores the experience In a different form, beyond any meaning We can assign to happiness.

second half of life, we are not demanding our American constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness or that people must have our same experiences; rather, simple meaning now suffices, and that becomes in itself a much deeper happiness.

As the body cannot live without food, so the soul cannot live without meaning.

Victor Frankl described this so well when he pointed out that some level of meaning was the only thing that kept people from total despair and suicide during the Holocaust. Humans are creators of meaning, and finding deep meaning in our experiences is not just anoth...

This new coherence, a unified field inclusive of the paradoxes, is precisely what gradually characterizes a second-half-of-life person. It feels like a return to simplicity after having learned from all the complexity.

In the second half of life, we can give our energy to making even the painful parts and the formally excluded parts belong to the now unified field—especially people who are different, and those who have never had a chance.

If you have forgiven yourself for being imperfect and falling, you can now do it for just about everybody else.

If you have not done it for yourself, I am afraid you will likely pass on your sadness, absurdity, judgment, and futility to others. This is the tragic path of the many elderly people who have not become actual elders, prob...

Our mature years are characterized by a kind of bright sadness and a sober happiness, if that makes any sense.

There is still darkness in the second half of life—in fact maybe even more. But there is now a changed capacity to hold it creatively and with less anxiety.

In this second half of life, one has less and less need or interest in eliminating the negative or fearful, making again those old rash judgments, holding on to old hurts, or feeling any need to punish other people.

Your superiority complexes have gradually departed in all directions. You do not fight these things anymore; they have just shown themselves too many times to be useless, ego based, counterproductive, and often entirely wrong.

You fight things only when you are directly called and equipped to do so.

We all become a well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. You lose all your inner freedom.

By the second half of life, you have learned ever so slowly, and with much resistance, that most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself, along with a very inflated self-image to boot, and incites a lot of push-back from those you have attacked.

This seems to be one of the last lessons to be learned. Think of the cold Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, or the monk who tries to eliminate all humor in The Name of the Rose, or the frowning Koran burners of Florida. Holier-than-thou people usually end up holier than nobody.