Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

by Richard Rohr

The greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally unsolvable. They can never be solved, but only outgrown. —CARL JUNG

I find that many, if not most, people and institutions remain stymied in the preoccupations of the first half of life. By that I 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. These tasks are good to some degree and even necessary. We are all trying to find what the Greek philosopher Archimedes called a “lever and a place to stand” so that we can move the world just a little bit. The world would be much worse off if we did not do this first and important task.

I believe that God gives us our soul, our deepest identity, our True Self,1 our unique blueprint, at our own “immaculate conception.” Our unique little bit of heaven is installed by the Manufacturer within the product, at the beginning! We are given a span of years to discover it, to choose it, and to live our own destiny to the full. If we do not, our True Self will never be offered again, in our own unique form—which is perhaps why almost all religious traditions present the matter with utterly charged words like “heaven” and “hell.” Our soul's discovery is utterly crucial, momentous, and of pressing importance for each of us and for the world. We do not “make” or “create” our souls; we just “grow” them up.

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.

Inside of life energy, a group or family will be productive and energetic; inside of death energy there will be gossip, cynicism, and mistrust hiding behind every interaction.

Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.

In legends and literature, sacrifice of something to achieve something else is almost the only pattern.

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? Normally a job, fortune, or reputation has to be lost, a death has to be suffered, a house has to be flooded, or a disease has to be endured. The pattern in fact is so clear that one has to work rather hard, or be intellectually lazy, to miss the continual lesson.

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.

A “perfect” person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than one who thinks he or she is totally above and beyond imperfection. It becomes sort of obvious once you say it out loud. In fact, I would say that the demand for the perfect is the greatest enemy of the good. Perfection is a mathematical or divine concept, goodness is a beautiful human concept that includes us all.

Jesus tells the disciples as they descend from the mountain of transfiguration, “Do not talk about these things until the Human One is risen from the dead” (by which he means until you are on the other side of loss and renewal). If you try to assert wisdom before people have themselves walked it, be prepared for much resistance, denial, push-back, and verbal debate.

Once your life has become a constant communion, you know that all the techniques, formulas, sacraments, and practices were just a dress rehearsal for the real thing—life itself—which can actually become a constant intentional prayer. Your conscious and loving existence gives glory to God.

Our myths are stories or images that are not always true in particular but entirely true in general. They are usually not historical fact, but invariably they are spiritual genius. They hold life and death, the explainable and the unexplainable together as one; they hold together the paradoxes that the rational mind cannot process by itself. As good poetry does, myths make unclear and confused emotions brilliantly clear and life changing. Myths are true basically because they work! A sacred myth keeps a people healthy, happy, and whole—even inside their pain. They give deep meaning, and pull us into “deep time” (which encompasses all time, past and future, geological and cosmological, and not just our little time or culture). Such stories are the very food of the soul, and they are what we are trying to get back to when we start fairy tales with phrases like “Once upon a time” or “Long ago, in a faraway land.”

After all his attempts to return there, Odysseus is fated again to leave Ithaca, which is an island, and go to the “mainland” for a further journey; he is reuniting his small “island part” with the big picture, as it were. For me, this is what makes something inherently religious: whatever reconnects (re-ligio) our parts to the Whole is an experience of God, whether we call it that or not. He is also reconnecting his outer journey to the “inland” or his interior world, which is much of the task of the second half of life. What brilliant metaphors!

the whole story is set in the matrix of seeking to find home and then to return there, and thus refining and defining what home really is. Home is both the beginning and the end. Home is not a sentimental concept at all, but an inner compass and a North Star at the same time. It is a metaphor for the soul.

As I began to say in the Introduction, the task of the first half of life is to create a proper container for one's life and answer the first essential questions: “What makes me significant?” “How can I support myself?” and “Who will go with me?” The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver.

We all want and need various certitudes, constants, and insurance policies at every stage of life. But we have to be careful, or they totally take over and become all-controlling needs, keeping us from further growth. 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! If we do not move beyond our early motivations of personal security, reproduction, and survival (the fear-based preoccupations of the “lizard brain”), we will never proceed beyond the lower stages of human or spiritual development.

Human life is about more than building boundaries, protecting identities, creating tribes, and teaching impulse control. As Jesus said, “Why do you ask, what am I to eat? What am I to wear?” And to that he says, “Is life not so much more than food? Is life not so much more than clothing?” (Luke 12:23). “What will it profit you if you gain the whole world, and lose your very soul?” (Matthew 16:26).

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,” which is typified by phenomena like violent gangs of youth or suicide bombers.

We have only to follow the thread of the hero path. Where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outwards, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL, THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES

The pattern of the heroic journey is rather consistent and really matches my own research on initiation.2 Those embarking on this journey invariably go through the following stages in one form or another. 1. They live in a world that they presently take as given and sufficient; they are often a prince or princess and, if not, sometimes even of divine origin, which of course they always know nothing about! (This amnesia is a giveaway for the core religious problem, as discovering our divine DNA is always the task.) Remember, Odysseus is the king of Ithaca, but does not “reign” there until after the second journey. 2. They have the call or the courage to leave home for an adventure of some type—not really to solve any problem, but just to go out and beyond their present comfort zone. For example, the young Siddhartha leaves the walls of the palace, St. Francis goes on pilgrimages to the Muslim world, Queen Esther and Joan of Arc enter the world of battle to protect their peoples, Odysseus sets out for the Trojan war. 3. On this journey or adventure, they in fact find their real problem! They are almost always “wounded” in some way and encounter a major dilemma, and the whole story largely pivots around the resolution of the trials that result. There is always a wounding; and the great epiphany is that the wound becomes the secret key, even “sacred,” a wound that changes them dramatically, which, by the way, is the precise meaning of the wounds of Jesus!

Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events. This deeper discovery is largely what religious people mean by “finding their soul.”

There is little social matrix to our present use of the word. A “hero” now is largely about being bold, muscular, rich, famous, talented, or “fantastic” by himself, and often for himself, whereas the classic hero is one who “goes the distance,” 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.

Many of us cannot move ahead because we have not done the first task, learned from the last task, or had any of our present accomplishments acknowledged by others.

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”). To quote Archimedes once again, you must have both “a lever and a place to stand” before you can move the world. The educated and sophisticated Western person today has many levers, but almost no solid place on which to stand, with either very weak identities or terribly overstated identities.

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. Please think about that for a while.

If you want a job done well, on time, with accountability and no excuses, you had best hire someone who has faced a few limit situations. He or she alone has the discipline, the punctuality, the positive self-image, and the persistence to do a good job.

Eric Fromm, in his classic book The Art of Loving.1 He says that the 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!

Japanese communities had the savvy to understand that many of their returning soldiers were not fit or prepared to reenter civil or humane society. Their only identity for their formative years had been to be a “loyal soldier” to their country; they needed a broader identity to once again rejoin their communities as useful citizens.6 So these Japanese communities created a communal ritual whereby a soldier was publicly thanked and praised effusively for his service to the people. After this was done at great length, an elder would stand and announce with authority something to this effect: “The war is now over! The community needs you to let go of what has served you and served us well up to now. The community needs you to return as a man, a citizen, and something beyond a soldier.” In our men's work, we call this process “discharging your loyal soldier.”

The voice of our loyal soldier gets us through the first half of life safely, teaching us to look both ways before we cross the street, to have enough impulse control to avoid addictions and compulsive emotions, to learn the sacred “no” to ourselves that gives us dignity, identity, direction, significance, and boundaries. We must learn these lessons to get off to a good start! It is far easier to begin life with a conservative worldview and respect for traditions. It gives you an initial sense of “place” and is much more effective in the long run, even if it just gives you “a goad to kick against” (Acts 26:14). Many just fall in love with their first place and position, as an extension of themselves, and spend their whole life building a white picket fence around it.

So God, life, and destiny have to loosen the loyal soldier's grasp on your soul, which up to now has felt like the only “you” that you know and the only authority that there is. Our loyal solider normally begins to be discharged somewhere between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-five, if it happens at all; before that it is usually mere rebellion or iconoclasm.

“Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.”

I remember the final words of my professor of church history, a very orthodox priest theologian, who said as he walked out of the classroom after our four years of study with him, “Well, after all is said and done, remember that church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus.” We reeled in astonishment, but the four years of history had spoken for themselves. What he meant, of course, was that we invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question—even when it is not entirely true—over the mercy and grace of God.

Every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.

In the divine economy of grace, sin and failure become the base metal and raw material for the redemption experience itself. Much of organized religion, however, tends to be peopled by folks who have a mania for some ideal order, which is never true, so they are seldom happy or content. It makes you anal retentive after a while, to use Freud's rude phrase, because you can never be happy with life as it is, which is always filled with handicapped people, mentally unstable people, people of “other” and “false” religions, irritable people, gay people, and people of totally different customs and traditions.

That is one reason I have valued and taught the Enneagram for almost forty years now.2 Like few other spiritual tools, it illustrates this transformative truth. Once you see that your “sin” and your gift are two sides of the same coin, you can never forget it. It preserves religion from any arrogance and denial. The only people who do not believe that the Enneagram is true are those who do not understand it or have never used it well.

We clergy have gotten ourselves into the job of “sin management” instead of sin transformation. “If you are not perfect, then you are doing something wrong,” we have taught people. We have blamed the victim, or have had little pity for victims, while daring to worship a victim image of God. Our mistakes are something to be pitied and healed much more than hated, denied, or perfectly avoided. I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you. Otherwise, it will only return in new forms, as Jesus says of the “unclean spirit” that returns to the house all “swept and tidied”

Any attempt to engineer or plan your own enlightenment is doomed to failure because it will be ego driven. You will see only what you have already decided to look for, and you cannot see what you are not ready or told to look for. So failure and humiliation force you to look where you never would otherwise. What an enigma! Self-help courses of any type, including this one if it is one, will help you only if they teach you to pay attention to life itself. “God comes to you disguised as your life,” as my friend Paula D'Arcy so wisely says.

The goad or cattle prod is the symbol of both the encouragement forward and our needless resistance to it, which only wounds us further.

Almost every one of Odysseus's encounters coming home from Troy are losses of some type—his men, his control, his power, his time, his memory, his fame, the boat itself. Falling, losing, failing, transgression, and sin are the pattern, I am sorry to report. Yet they all lead toward home.

We all must leave home to find the real and larger home, which is so important that we will develop it more fully in the next chapter. The nuclear family has far too often been the enemy of the global family and mature spiritual seeking.

Your True Self is who you objectively are from the beginning, in the mind and heart of God, “the face you had before you were born,” as the Zen masters say. It is your substantial self, your absolute identity, which can be neither gained nor lost by any technique, group affiliation, morality, or formula whatsoever. The surrendering of our false self, which we have usually taken for our absolute identity, yet is merely a relative identity, is the necessary suffering needed to find “the pearl of great price” that is always hidden inside this lovely but passing shell.

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. Only the True Self knows that heaven is now and that its loss is hell—now. The false self makes religion into the old “evacuation plan for the next world,”

Basic religious belief is a vote for some coherence, purpose, benevolence, and direction in the universe, and I suspect it emerges from all that we said in the last chapter about home, soul, and the homing device of Spirit.

I worry about “true believers” who cannot carry any doubt or anxiety at all, as Thomas the Apostle and Mother Teresa learned to do. People who are so certain always seem like Hamlet's queen “protesting too much” and trying too hard. 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.

In the second half, you try instead to influence events, work for change, quietly persuade, change your own attitude, pray, or forgive instead of taking things to court. Life is much more spacious now, the boundaries of the container having been enlarged by the constant addition of new experiences and relationships. You are like an expandable suitcase, and you became so almost without your noticing. Now you are just here, and here holds more than enough. Such “hereness,” however, has its own heft, authority, and influence. Just watch true elders sitting in any circle of conversation; they are often defining the center, depth, and circumference of the dialogue just by being there!

When elders speak, they need very few words to make their point. Too many words, the use of which I am surely guilty, are not needed by true elders. Second simplicity has its own kind of brightness and clarity, but much of it is expressed in nonverbal terms, and only when really needed. If you talk too much or too loud, you are usually not an elder.

When you are young, you define yourself by differentiating yourself; now you look for the things we all share in common. You find happiness in alikeness, which has become much more obvious to you now; and you do not need to dwell on the differences between people or exaggerate the problems. Creating dramas has become boring.

Erik Erikson calls someone at this stage a “generative” person, one who is eager and able to generate life from his or her own abundance and for the benefit of following generations.