Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

by Richard Rohr

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.

But, in my opinion, this first-half-of-life task is no more than finding the starting gate. It is merely the warm-up act, not the full journey. It is the raft but not the shore.

I am trusting that you will see the truth of this map, yet it is the kind of soul truth that we only know “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12)—and through a glass brightly at the same time. Yet any glass through which we see is always made of human hands, like mine. All spiritual language is by necessity metaphor and symbol.

Yes, transformation is often more about unlearning than learning, which is why the religious traditions call it “conversion” or “repentance.”

All we can give back and all God wants from any of us is to humbly and proudly return the product that we have been given—which is ourselves!

There is nothing to join, only something to recognize, suffer, and enjoy as a participant. You are already in the eternal flow that Christians would call the divine life of the Trinity.

The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it.

we never get to our little bit of heaven, our life does not make much sense, and we have created our own “hell.” So get ready for some new freedom, some dangerous permission, some hope from nowhere, some unexpected happiness, some stumbling stones, some radical grace, and some new and pressing responsibility for yourself and for our suffering world.

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.

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.

The very unfortunate result of this preoccupation with order, control, safety, pleasure, and certitude is that a high percentage of people never get to the contents of their own lives! 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?”

“What will it profit you if you gain the whole world, and lose your very soul?” (Matthew 16:26).

Human maturity is neither offensive nor defensive; it is finally able to accept that reality is what it is. Ken Keyes so wisely said, “More suffering comes into the world by people taking offense than by people intending to give offense.” The offended ones feel the need to offend back those who they think have offended them, creating defensiveness on the part of the presumed offenders, which often becomes a new offensive—ad infinitum.

It was Carl Jung who first popularized the phrase “the two halves of life” to describe these two major tangents and tasks, yet many other teachers have recognized that there are clear stages and steps of human and spiritual maturation.

There is the foundational journey of Abraham and Sarah; the Exodus of Moses; Mohammed's several key flights; Jesus' four kinds of soil; the “way of the cross” images on the walls of churches; John of the Ladder; the recurring schemas of Sts. Bonaventure, John of the Cross, and Teresa of Avila; and in the modern era, Jean Piaget, James Fowler, Lawrence Kohlberg, Clare Graves, Jean Gebser, Abraham Maslow, Erik Erikson, Ken Wilber, Carol Gilligan, Daniel Levinson, Bill Plotkin, and the entire world of “Spiral Dynamics.”

every one of these constructs. First of all, 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.

I am afraid, which is why both Plato and Jefferson said democracy was not really the best form of government. It is just the safest. A truly wise monarch would probably be the most effective at getting things done. (Don't send hate letters, please!)

Mature people are not either-or thinkers, but they bathe in the ocean of both-and.

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.

Some theorists say you cannot stretch more than one step above your own level of consciousness, and that is on a good day! Because of this limitation, those at deeper (or “higher”) levels beyond you invariably appear wrong, sinful, heretical, dangerous, or even worthy of elimination. How else can we explain the consistent killing of prophets; the marginalization of truly holy people as naive; the rather consistent racism, self-protectiveness, and warlike attitudes of people who think of themselves as civilized? You can be “civilized” and still be judging from the fully egocentric position of an early level of development. In fact, one of the best covers for very narcissistic people is to be polite, smiling, and thoroughly civilized. Hitler loved animals and classical music, I am told.

Although Jesus' first preached message is clearly “change!” (as in Mark 1:15 and Matthew 4:17), where he told his listeners to “repent,” which literally means to “change your mind,” it did not strongly influence Christian history.

All we can conclude is that much of organized religion is itself living inside of first-half-of-life issues, which usually coincides with where most people are in any culture. We all receive and pass on what our people are prepared to hear, and most people are not “early adopters.” Yet even the intelligence of animals is determined by their ability to change and adjust their behavior in response to new circumstances. Those who do not, become extinct.

“Do not give to dogs what is holy, or throw your pearls before swine. They will trample them, and then they will turn on you and tear you to pieces” (Matthew 7:6).

If there is no wise authority capable of protecting them and validating them, most prophetic or wise people and all “early adopters” are almost always “torn to pieces.” Their wisdom sounds like dangerous foolishness, like most of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount to Christians, like Gandhi to Great Britain, like Martin Luther King Jr. to white America, like Nelson Mandela to Dutch Reformed South Africa, like Harriet Tubman to the Daughters of the American Revolution, like American nuns to the Catholic patriarchy.

Just don't give your life for mere style and sentiment. Pope John XXIII's motto might be heard here: “In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things, charity.” That is second-half-of-life, hard-won wisdom.

You see, authentic God experience always “burns” you, yet does not destroy you (Exodus 3:2–3), just as the burning bush did to Moses.

Unfortunately, most people get so preoccupied with their stable, and whether their stable is better than your stable, or whether their stable is the only “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” stable, that they never get to the birth of God in the soul.

As a spiritual director, I find that most people facing the important transformative issues of social injustice, divorce, failure, gender identity, an inner life of prayer, or any radical reading of the Gospel are usually bored and limited by the typical Sunday church agenda. And these are good people! But they keep on doing their own kind of survival dance, because no one has told them about their sacred dance. Of course, clergy cannot talk about a further journey if they have not gone on it themselves.

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! Their world is opened up, the screen becomes much larger, and they do too. Our very word odyssey is now used to describe these kinds of discoveries and adventures. Odysseus enters the story as a man alone weeping on a beach, d...

be a celebrity or a mere survivor today is often confused with heroism, probably a sign of our actual regression. Merely to survive and preserve our life is a low-level instinct that we share with good little lizards, but it is not heroism in any classic sense. We were meant to thrive and not just survive. We are glad when someone survives, and that surely took some courage and effort. But what are you going to do with your now resurrected life? That is the heroic question.

wonder whether we no longer have that real “obedience to the gods,” or sense of destiny, call, and fate that led Odysseus to leave father, wife, and son for a second journey. That is the very same obedience, by the way, that Jesus scandalously talks about in several places like Luke 14:26 (“If any one comes to me without leaving his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple”). I always wonder what so-called family values Christians do with shocking lines like that? Jesus was not a nuclear family man at all, by any common definition! What led so many saints to seek the “will of God” first and above their own? What has led so many Peace Corps workers, missionaries, and skilled people to leave their countries for difficult lands and challenges? I would assume it was often a sense of a further journey, an invitation from their soul, or even a deep obedience to God.

When he calls his first disciples, Jesus is talking about further journeys to people who are already happily settled and religiously settled! He is not talking about joining a new security system or a religious denomination or even a religious order that pays all your bills. Again, it is very surprising to me that so many Christians who read the Scriptures do not see this. Yet maybe they cannot answer a second call because they have not yet completed the first task. 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.

Remember, Odysseus did a lot of conquering, Abraham a lot of “possessing,” Francis a lot of partying, David and Paul a lot of killing, Magdalene a lot of loving, and all of us a lot of ascending and descending, before being ready to go onto the next stage of the journey.

The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young. —JAMES HOLLIS, FINDING MEANING IN THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE

God is both sanctuary and stumbling stone, Yahweh is a rock that brings Israel down, the Lord is a trap and snare for the people. —ISAIAH 8:14 We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die. —W. H. AUDEN

There is no practical or compelling reason to leave one's present comfort zone in life. Why should you or would you? Frankly, none of us do unless and until we have to. The invitation probably has to be unexpected and unsought. If we seek spiritual heroism ourselves, the old ego is just back in control under a new name. There would not really be any change at all, but only disguise. Just bogus “self-improvement” on our own terms.

“God comes to you disguised as your life,” as my friend Paula D'Arcy so wisely says.

Three of the parables of Jesus are about losing something, searching for it anew with some effort, finding it, and in each case throwing a big party afterwards. A sheep, a coin, a son are all lost and found in Luke 15,

Until we are led to the limits of our present game plan, and find it to be insufficient, we will not search out or find the real source, the deep well, or the constantly flowing stream. Alcoholics Anonymous calls it the Higher Power. Jesus calls this Ultimate Source the “living water” at the bottom of the well, to the woman who keeps filling and refilling her own little bucket (John 4:10–14).

They still want some kind of order and reason, instead of cosmic significance and soulful seeing.1

We, like the ox and St. Paul, largely still “kick against the goad,” instead of listening to and learning from the goads of everyday life. Christians who read such passages were still not able to see that the goads were somehow necessary or even good. Suffering does not solve any problem mechanically as much as it reveals the constant problem that we are to ourselves, and opens up new spaces within us for learning and loving.

Here Buddhism was much more observant than Christianity, which made even the suffering of Jesus into God's attempt to solve some cosmic problem—which God had largely created to begin with! The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem—our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the “scene of our crime.”

We write it off as wishful dreaming, when it is actually the foundational pattern of disguise or amnesia, loss, and recovery. Every Beauty is sleeping, it seems, before it can meet its Prince. The duckling must be “ugly,” or there will be no story. The knight errant must be wounded, or he will never even know what the Holy Grail is, much less find it. Jesus must be crucified, or there can be no resurrection.

That is the pattern, just as you will sometimes hear from recovering addicts who end up thanking God for their former drinking, gambling, or violence. They invariably say that it was a huge price to pay, but nothing less would have broken down their false self and opened them to love.

I can only think of the many men and women I met during my fourteen years as a jail chaplain here in New Mexico. No one taught them the necessary impulse control and delay of gratification, which is the job of a good parent. With poor identity, weak boundaries, or little inherent sense of their dignity, they allowed themselves to be destroyed—and to destroy others—by drugs, promiscuity, addictive relationships, alcohol, violence, or abuse. Then the enforced and cruel order of the jail was supposed to serve as their reparenting course, but now the lesson was so much harder to learn because of all the inner scarring and resentments toward all authority and toward themselves.

self-defeating ways. I am sure many slaveholders in the South were “self-made men” and perhaps never in their entire lives had to face a situation where they did not “succeed.” Such a refusal to fall kept them from awareness, empathy, and even basic human compassion. The price they paid for such succeeding was an inability to allow, join, or enjoy “the general dance.” They “gained the whole world, but lost their soul,” as Jesus put it. They did their survival dance, but never got to the sacred dance, which by necessity includes everybody else. If it is a sacred dance, it is always the general dance too.

Anyone who wants to save his life, must lose it. Anyone who loses her life will find it. What gain is there if you win the whole world and lose your very self? What can you offer in exchange for your one life? —MATTHEW 16:25–26

Carl Jung said that so much unnecessary suffering comes into the world because people will not accept the “legitimate suffering” that comes from being human. In fact, he said neurotic behavior is usually the result of refusing that legitimate suffering!