Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

by Richard Rohr

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.”