Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

by Richard Rohr

Before the truth “sets you free,” it tends to make you miserable.

teaching me nondualistic thinking to survive. It has also shown me that neither I nor the churches themselves really live much of the real Gospel—at least enough to actually change our present lifestyles! It is just too big a message. Refusing to split and deny reality keeps me in regular touch with my own shadow self, and much more patient with the rather evident shadow of the church.

Most of nature seems to totally accept major loss, gross inefficiency, mass extinctions, and short life spans as the price of life at all. Feeling that sadness, and even its full absurdity, ironically pulls us into the general dance, the unified field, an ironic and deep gratitude for what is given—with no necessity and so gratuitously.

The resolution of earthly embodiment and divinization is what I call incarnational mysticism. As has been said many times, there are finally only two subjects in all of literature and poetry: love and death. Only that which is limited and even dies grows in value and appreciation; it is the spiritual version of supply and demand. If we lived forever, they say, we would never take life seriously or learn to love what is. I think that is probably true.

Well, I quote Jesus because I still consider him to be the spiritual authority of the Western world, whether we follow him or

In this heading, I am talking about those most problematic lines at the beginning of this chapter, in which Jesus talks about “leaving” or even “hating” mother, father, sister, brother, and family. Everything in us says that he surely cannot mean this, but if you are talking about moving into the second half of life, where we are about to go, he is in fact directing us correctly and courageously.

culture or his religion. One of the major blocks against the second journey is what we would now call the “collective,” the crowd, our society, or our extended family. Some call it the crab bucket syndrome—you try to get out, but the other crabs just keep pulling you back in. What passes for morality or spirituality in the vast majority of people's lives is the way everybody they grew up with thinks. Some would call it conditioning or even imprinting. Without very real inner work, most folks never move beyond it.

It takes a huge push, much self-doubt, and some degree of separation for people to find their own soul and their own destiny apart from what Mom and Dad always wanted them to be and do.

It takes therapists years to achieve the same result and reestablish appropriate boundaries from wounding parents and early authority figures, and to heal the inappropriate shame in those who have been wounded. 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.

Of course, to be honest and consistent, one must ask if “church family” is not also a family that one has to eventually “hate” in this very same way, and with the same scandal involved as hating the natural family. (We will address this in a later chapter under the rubric of “emerging Christianity.”)

“How much false self are you willing to shed to find your True Self?” is the lasting question.2 Such necessary suffering will always feel like dying, which is what good spiritual teachers will tell you about very honestly. (Alcoholics Anonymous is notoriously successful here!) If your spiritual guides do not talk to you about dying, they are not good spiritual guides!

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.

Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For another union, a deeper communion —T. S. ELIOT, “EAST COKER”

want to propose that we are both sent and drawn by the same Force, which is precisely what Christians mean when they say the Cosmic Christ is both alpha and omega. We are both driven and called forward by a kind of deep homesickness, it seems.

It has been said that 90 percent of people seem to live 90 percent of their lives on cruise control, which is to be unconscious.

Until then we are homesick, although today most would probably just call it loneliness, isolation, longing, sadness, restlessness, or even a kind of depression.

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).

The ancients rightly called this internal longing for wholeness “fate” or “destiny,” the “inner voice” or the “call of the gods.” It has an inevitability, authority, and finality to it, and was at the heart of almost all mythology. Almost all heroes heard an inner voice that spoke to them. In fact, their heroism was in their ability to hear that voice and to risk following it—wherever! Sadly, such inner comfort is the very thing we lack today at almost all levels.

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 spoke of heaven, nirvana, bliss, or enlightenment. They were not wrong at all; their only mistake was that they pushed it off into the next world. If heaven is later, it is because it is first of all now. These events become the pledge, guarantee, hint, and promise of an eternal something. Once you touch upon the Real, there is an inner insistence that the Real, if it is the Real, has to be forever.