Falling Upward, Revised and Updated: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

by Richard Rohr

In the late 1600s, Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer coined the medical term “nostalgia” to capture the homesickness he witnessed in patients who were living far from home. These patients were so overcome with the need to return that they stopped functioning and sometimes died. He created the term by combining the Greek words nostos (homecoming) and alga (pain).

Instead of displaying homesickness, Americans express hopefulness and cheerfulness, two character attributes much valued in American society. Trepidations about breaking home ties must be subordinated to sunny hopes for the future. Homesickness must be repressed.

But then, after that visit, I would leave and go back to my first-half-of-life world.

Today, I can barely be dragged out of the house. I'm drawn to different conversations and deeper connections. I want this sacred space to be my home, not somewhere I visit to buttress my “real life” that's on the outside of my connection with God. I'm starting to wonder if my alga, my pain, is fueled by my separation from God and from my True Self.

I'm just never, ever homesick for the first half of my life when I walk away from it. I'm fearful about leaving the rules I understand and the markers for success that I've established for my life. But I don't miss it. Maybe I'm not homesick for the first half of life because it's really never been my true home.

mean that most people's concerns remain those of establishing their personal (or superior) identity, creating various boundary markers for themselves, seeking security, and perhaps linking to what seem like significant people or projects.

All spiritual language is, by necessity, metaphor and symbol. The Light comes from elsewhere, yet it is necessarily reflected through those of us still walking on the journey ourselves.

“immaculate conception.”

Why does he use this term here?

Our unique little bit of heaven is installed by the Manufacturer within the product, at the beginning!

After having used the descriptor "immaculate conception" (a very unique event) he follows with a mechanical manufacturing metaphor that suggests we all get the same thing

Probably most cultures and individuals across history have been situated in the first half of their own development up to now, because it is all they had time for.

Most of us are never told that we can set out from the known and the familiar to take on a further journey. Our institutions and our expectations, including our churches, are almost entirely configured to encourage, support, reward, and validate the tasks of the first half of life.

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.

As soon as God told them specifically not to, you know they will!

“Sin is behovely!”

In this book, 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. That might just be the central message of how spiritual growth happens, yet nothing in us wants to believe it. I actually think it is the only workable meaning of any remaining notion of “original sin.” There seems to have been a fly in the ointment from the beginning, but the key is recognizing and dealing with the fly rather than needing to throw out the whole ointment!

By denying their pain and avoiding the necessary falling, many have kept themselves from their own spiritual depths—and therefore have been kept from their own spiritual heights.

the opposite of rational is not always irrational. It can also be transrational, or bigger than the rational mind can process. Things like love, death, suffering, God, and infinity are transrational experiences.

we need boundaries, identity, safety, and some degree of order and consistency to get started, personally and culturally. We also need to feel “special”; we need our “narcissistic fix.” By that, I mean we all need some successes, response, and positive feedback early in life, or we will spend the rest of our lives demanding it, or bemoaning its lack, from others. There is a good and needed “narcissism,” if you want to call it that. We have to first have an ego structure to then let go of it and move beyond it. Responding to John the Baptist's hard-line approach, Jesus maintains both sides of this equation when he says, “No man born of woman is greater than John the Baptizer, yet the least who enters the reign of heaven is greater than he is” (Matthew 11:11). Is that double-talk? No, it is second-half-of-life talk. Basically, if you get mirrored well early in life, you do not have to spend the rest of your life looking in Narcissus' mirror or begging for the attention of others.

This is an important paradox for most of us, and the two sides of this paradox must be made clear for the very health of individuals, families, and cultures. It is crucial for our own civilization right now. We have too many people on the extremes. Some make a “sacrificial” and heroic life their whole identity and end up making everyone else around them sacrifice so that they can be sacrificial and heroic. Others, in selfish rebellion and without any training in letting go, refuse to sacrifice anything.

We are not helping our children by always preventing them from what might be necessary falling, because we learn how to recover from falling by falling! It is precisely by falling off the bike many times that we eventually learn what the balance feels like.

If you want the opposite, hire someone who has been coddled, given “I Am Special” buttons for doing nothing special, had all their bills paid by others, and whose basic egocentricity has never been challenged or undercut. To be honest, this seems to describe much of the workforce and the student body of America.

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

As long as tgey were the the push to be better, not irrational abusive in orientation

The mystics tell us that God has to undo our illusions secretly, as it were, when we are not watching and not in perfect control. That is perhaps why the best word for God is actually Mystery. We move forward in ways that we do not even understand and through the quiet workings of time and grace.

This Holy Spirit guiding all of us from home and toward home is also described in John's Gospel as an “advocate” (“a defense attorney,” as paraclete literally means; John 14:16), who will “teach us” and “remind us,” as if some part of us already knew but still needed an inner buzz or alarm clock to wake us up. The Holy Spirit is always entirely for us, more than we are for ourselves, it seems. She speaks in our favor against the negative voices that judge and condemn us. This gives us all such hope—now we do not have to do life all by ourselves or even do life perfectly “right.” Our life will be done unto us, just as happened to Mary (Luke 1:38)—although, on another level, we are doing it too. Both are equally true.

This mystery has been called the conspiracy (“co-breathing”) of God, and it is still one of the most profound ways to understand what is happening between God and the soul. True spirituality is always a deep “co-operating” (Romans 8:28) between two. True spirituality is a kind of synergy in which both parties give and both parties receive to create one shared truth and joy.

Because important things bear repeating in different forms, let me summarize the direction of my thought here. I am saying that 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 depths of everything, even and maybe especially in the deep fathoming of our fallings and failures. Sin is to stay on the surface of even holy things, like Bible, sacrament, or church. 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. This “something real” is what all the world religions were pointing to when they s...

the protagonists in so many fairy tales are already nobles, royal, daughters and sons of the king, or even the gods. But their identity is hidden from them, and the story line pivots around this discovery. They have to grow up to fathom their own identity. That fathoming is the very purpose of the journey.

Daily life now requires prayer and discernment

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.

It takes such gasping several times in our life to eventually rest in a bright sadness: We are sad because we now hold the pain of the larger world, and we wish everyone enjoyed what we now enjoy; but there is brightness because life is somehow—on some levels—still “very good,” just as Genesis promised. Merton again stated this best, as he concluded my favorite of his books: “It does not matter much [now], because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. … We are [now] invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds, and join in the general dance.”

I am afraid that the closer you get to the Light, the more of your shadow you see.

One of the great surprises is that humans come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing their own contradictions, and making friends with their own mistakes and failings.

The trouble is that a lot of people don't get there. We are often so attached to our frame, game, or raft that it becomes a substitute for objective truth, because it is all we have! Inside such entrapment, most people do not see things as they are; rather, they see things as they are. In my experience, this is most of the world, unless people have done their inner work, or least some shadow work, and thereby entered into wisdom or nondualistic thinking. Through centuries of meticulous and utterly honest self-observation, Buddhism has helped people see this in themselves probably better than most of the world religions. Jesus saw it, but we did not see him very well.

Until and unless we give our life away to others, we do not seem to have it ourselves at any deep level. Good parents always learn that. Many of the happiest, most generous and focused people I know are young mothers. This is another one of those utter paradoxes! We seem to be “mirrored” into life by the response, love, and needed challenge of others.

The problem is the pulse identification here people, especially women who are told in order to be right they have to give away all of themselves

In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate us, but they also have much less power to control us or hurt us. It is the freedom of the second half to not need.

Just remember this: No one can keep you from the second half of your own life except yourself. Nothing can inhibit your second journey except your own lack of courage, patience, and imagination. Your second journey is all yours to walk or to avoid.

This is true to the extent that people have the ability to make a choice towards second extreme poverty and other reasons to keep people really getting to a second half of life

Your love overrides your judgments if you're contemplative—by which I mean being reflective.

I am just not sure this is completely true. Yes you can still continue to love, but that doesn’t mean you have no judgement. Continually he makes statements that seem to only make sense in light of an extremely healthy community. But there are loving parents or spouses who do make judgement about leaving or setting boundaries around abuse or harm.