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

by Richard Rohr

If you realize that there is a further journey, you might do the warm-up act quite differently, which would better prepare you for what follows.

Yes, transformation is often more about unlearning than learning, which is why the religious traditions call it “conversion” or “repentance.”

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

There is much evidence on several levels that there are at least two major tasks to human life. The first task is to build a strong “container” or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold. The first task we take for granted as the very purpose of life, which does not mean we do it well. The second task, I am told, is more encountered than sought; few arrive at it with much preplanning, purpose, or passion.

We are a “first-half-of-life culture,” largely concerned about surviving successfully. Probably most cultures and individuals across history have been situated in the first half of their own development up to now,

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.

In any situation, your taking or giving of energy is what you are actually doing.

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

Those who walk the full and entire journey are considered “called” or “chosen” in the Bible, perhaps “fated” or “destined” in world mythology and literature, but always they are the ones who have heard some deep invitation to “something more,” and set out to find it by both grace and daring.

Most get little reassurance from others, or even have full confidence that they are totally right. Setting out is always a leap of faith, a risk in the deepest sense of the term, and yet an adventure too.

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?

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.

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.

The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling or changing or dying. 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.

The advantage of those on the further journey is that they can still remember and respect the first language and task. They have transcended but also included all that went before. In fact, if you cannot include and integrate the wisdom of the first half of life, I doubt if you have moved to the second. Never throw out the baby with the bathwater. People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place. They are not mere iconoclasts or rebels.

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

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. Both myth and mature religion understand this. The transrational has the capacity to keep us inside an open system and a larger horizon so that the soul, the heart, and the mind do not close down inside of small and constricted space.

It is often when the ego is most deconstructed that we can hear things anew and begin some honest reconstruction, even if it is only half heard and halfhearted.

Death is largely a threat to those who have not yet lived their life. Odysseus has lived the journeys of both halves of life, and is ready to freely and finally let go.

“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 overreact. Or we conform, and often overconform. Neither is a positive or creative way to move forward.

“Juniors” on the first part of the journey invariably think that true elders are naive, simplistic, “out of it,” or just superfluous. They cannot understand what they have not yet experienced. They are totally involved in their first task, and cannot see beyond it.

Higher stages always empathetically include the lower, or they are not higher stages!

There is a good and needed “narcissism,” if you want to call it that. You have to first have an ego structure to then let go of it and move beyond it.

When you get your “Who am I?” question right, all the “What should I do?” questions tend to take care of themselves.

a culture like ours, still preoccupied with security issues, enormously high military budgets are never seriously questioned by Congress or by the people, while appropriations reflecting later stages in the hierarchy of needs, like those for education, health care for the poor, and the arts, are quickly cut, if even considered. The message is clear that we are largely an adolescent culture. Religions, similarly, need to make truth claims that are absolutely absolute—and we want them for just that—because they are absolute! This feels right and necessary at this early stage, despite any talk of Biblical “faith” or trust, which can only be comprehended later.

Thus the most common one-liner in the Bible is “Do not be afraid”; in fact, someone counted and found that it occurs 365 times!

Human life is about more than building boundaries, protecting identities, creating tribes, and teaching impulse control.

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.” They alone are in a position to be true leaders in a society, or certainly in any spiritual organization. Without them, “the blind lead the blind,”

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.

Theologically and objectively speaking, we are already in union with God. But it is very hard for people to believe or experience this when they have no positive sense of identity,

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.

Of course, clergy cannot talk about a further journey if they have not gone on it themselves.

The juniors are made to think that the container is all there is and all they should expect; or worse, that they are mature and home free because they believe a few right things or perform some right rituals.

The stages of the hero's journey are a skeleton of what this book wants to say!

whatever that takes, and then has plenty left over for others. True heroism serves the common good, or it is not really heroism at all.

We are glad when someone survives, and that surely took some courage and effort. But what are you going to do with your now resurrected life? That is the heroic question.

I wonder whether we no longer have that real “obedience to the gods,” or sense of destiny, call, and fate that led Odysseus to leave father, wife, and son for a second journey. That is the very same obedience, by the way, that Jesus scandalously talks about in several places like Luke 14:26 (“If any one comes to me without leaving his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple”). I always wonder what so-called family values Christians do with shocking lines like that? Jesus was not a nuclear family man at all, by any common definition! What led so many saints to seek the “will of God” first and above their own?

it is very surprising to me that so many Christians who read the Scriptures do not see this. Yet maybe they cannot answer a second call because they have not yet completed the first task. Unless you build your first house well, you will never leave it. To build your house well is, ironically, to be nudged beyond its doors.

All that each of us can do is to live in the now that is given. We cannot rush the process;

I cannot think of a culture in human history, before the present postmodern era, that did not value law, tradition, custom, authority, boundaries, and morality of some clear sort. These containers give us the necessary security, continuity, predictability, impulse control, and ego structure that we need, before the chaos of real life shows up.

You need a very strong container to hold the contents and contradictions that arrive later in life. You ironically need a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while.

The first-half-of-life container, nevertheless, is constructed through impulse controls; traditions; group symbols; family loyalties; basic respect for authority; civil and church laws; and a sense of the goodness, value, and special importance of your country, ethnicity, and religion (as for example, the Jews' sense of their “chosenness”).

you learn how to recover from falling by falling! It is precisely by falling off the bike many times that you eventually learn what the balance feels like. The skater pushing both right and left eventually goes where he or she wants to go. People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with.

Cesar Milan, the “dog whisperer,” says that dogs cannot be peaceful or teachable if they have no limits set to their freedom and their emotions. They are actually happier and at rest when they live within very clear limits and boundaries, with a “calm and assertive” master. My dog, Venus, is never happier and more teachable than when I am walking her, but on her leash. Could it be the same for humans at certain stages?

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. Limit situations, according to the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, are moments, usually accompanied by experiences of dread, responsibility, guilt, or anxiety, in which the human mind confronts its restrictions and boundaries, and allows itself to abandon the false securities of this limitedness, move beyond, one hopes in a positive way, and thus enter new realms of self-consciousness. 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.

produces a negative building. 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?” Compare that to the present “Tea Party” movement in America.

healthiest people he has known, and those who very often grow up in the most natural way, are those who, between their two parents and early authority figures, experienced a combination of unconditional love along with very conditional and demanding love!