Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

by Richard Rohr

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.

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. We are the clumsy stewards of our own souls. We are charged to awaken, and much of the work of spirituality is learning how to stay out of the way of this rather natural growing and awakening.

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.

We are here to give back fully and freely what was first given to us—but now writ personally—by us! It is probably the most courageous and free act we will ever perform—and it takes both halves of our life to do it fully. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Ernest Becker said some years ago that it is not love but “the denial of death” that might well make the world go round. What if he is right?

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.

Mature people are not either-or thinkers, but they bathe in the ocean of both-and. (Think Gandhi, Anne Frank, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, and the like.) These enlightened people tend to grease the wheels of religious evolution. As Albert Einstein said, “No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it in the first place.” God moves humanity and religion forward by the regular appearance of such whole and holy people.

The hero or heroine is by definition a “generative” person, to use Erik Erikson's fine term, concerned about the next generation and not just himself or herself. The hero lives in deep time and not just in his or her own small time. In fact, I would wonder if you could be a hero or heroine if you did not live in what many call deep time—that is, past, present, and future all at once.

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.

As St. Gregory of Nyssa already said in the fourth century, “Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.”

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. Just the Biblical notion of absolute forgiveness, once experienced, should be enough to make us trust and seek and love God.

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 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.

Now he can go home because he has, in fact, come home to his true and full self. His sailing and oaring days of mere “outer performance” are over, and he can now rest in the simplicity and ground of his own deeper life. He is free to stop his human doing and can at last enjoy his human being.

Strangely, all of life's problems, dilemmas, and difficulties are now resolved not by negativity, attack, criticism, force, or logical resolution, but always by falling into a larger “brightness.” Hopkins called it “the dearest freshness deep down things.” This is the falling upward that we have been waiting for! One of the guiding principles of our Center for Action and Contemplation puts it this way: “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” I learned this from my father St. Francis, who did not concentrate on attacking evil or others,

but just spent his life falling, and falling many times into the good, the true, and the beautiful. It was the only way he knew how to fall into God.

Your persona is what most people want from you and reward you for, and what you choose to identify with, for some reason. As you do your inner work, you will begin to know that your self-image is nothing more than just that, and not worth protecting, promoting, or denying.

The reason that a mature or saintly person can be so peaceful, so accepting of self and others, is that there is not much hidden shadow self left. (There is always and forever a little more, however! No exceptions. Shadow work never stops.) This denied and disguised self takes so much energy to face, awaken, and transform all one's life that you have little time to project your fear, anger, or unlived life onto terrorists, Muslims, socialists, liberals, conservatives, or even hate radio.

As the shadows of things continue to show themselves (shadow, even in the physical universe, is created by an admixture of darkness and light), you lose interest in idealizing or idolizing persons or events, especially yourself. You no longer “give away your inner gold” to others. You keep yours, and you let them keep theirs. That does not mean you stop loving other people; in fact, it means you actually start. It does not mean self-hatred or self-doubt, but exactly the contrary, because you finally accept both your gold and your weaknesses as your own—and they no longer cancel one another out. You can finally do the same for others too, and you do not let one or another fault in a person destroy your larger relationship.

People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting.

Learn and obey the rules very well, so you will know how to break them properly.