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

by Richard Rohr

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 change of frame and venue is called living in “the kingdom of God” by Jesus, and it is indeed a major about-face.

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. Everyone is in heaven when he or she has plenty of room for communion and no need for exclusion.

If you go to heaven alone, wrapped in your private worthiness, it is by definition not heaven. 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. How could anyone enjoy the “perfect happiness” of any heaven if she knew her loved ones were not there, or were being tortured for all eternity? It would be impossible.

you accept a punitive notion of God, who punishes or even eternally tortures those who do not love him, then you have 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 logical possibility. There must be the logical possibility of excluding oneself from union and to choose separation or superiority over community and love. No one is in hell unless that individual himself or herself chooses a final aloneness and separation.

Jesus touched and healed anybody who desired it and asked for it, and there were no other prerequisites for his healings.

Why would Jesus' love be so unconditional while he was in this world, and suddenly become totally conditional after death? Is it the same Jesus? Or does Jesus change his policy after his resurrection? The belief in heaven and hell is meant to maintain freedom on all sides, with God being the most free of all, to forgive and include, to heal and to bless even God's seeming “enemies.” How could Jesus ask us to bless, forgive, and heal our enemies, which he clearly does (Matthew 5:43–48), unless God is doing it first and always?

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

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,”

Up to now we have been more in love with elitism than with any egalitarianism; we liked being the “one,” but just did not know how to include the many in that very One.

I did not see many examples of God “smiting” his enemies; in fact, it was usually God's friends who got smited, as Teresa of Avila noted! If God asked me to love unconditionally and universally, then it was clear that God operated in the same way.

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.

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). The God I have met and been loved by in my life journey is always an experience of “how much more!” 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.

I further believe that a free and loving God would create things that continue to recreate themselves, exactly as all parents desire for their children.

it is this very quiet inner unfolding of things that seems to create the most doubt and anxiety for many believers. They seem to prefer a “touch of the magic wand” kind of God (Tinker Bell?) to a God who works secretly and humbly, and who includes us in on the process and the conclusion. This is the only way I can understand why a Christian would think evolution is any kind of faith problem whatsoever. The only price we pay for living in the Big Picture is to hold a bit of doubt and anxiety about the exact how, if, when, where, and who of it all, but never the that. Unfortunately, most Christians are not well trained in holding opposites for very long, or living with what could be very creative tension.

Faith in any religion is always somehow saying that God is one and God is good, and if so, then all of reality must be that simple and beautiful too.

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

Wisdom happily lives with mystery, doubt, and “unknowing,” and in such living, ironically resolves that very mystery to some degree.

In the 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.

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. Finally, at last, one has lived long enough to see that “everything belongs,”4 even the sad, absurd, and futile parts.

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.

There is a gravitas in the second half of life, but it is now held up by a much deeper lightness, or “okayness.” Our mature years are characterized by a kind of bright sadness and a sober happiness, if that makes any sense. I am just grabbing for words to describe many wonderful older people I have met. If you have met them, you know for yourself, and will find your own words. 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.

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.

If we know anything at this stage, we know that we are all in this together and that we are all equally naked underneath our clothes. Which probably does not feel like a whole lot of knowing, but even this little bit of honesty gives us a strange and restful consolation. When you are young, you define yourself by differentiating yourself; now you look for the things we all share in common.