Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

by Richard Rohr

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.

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

No wise person ever wanted to be younger.

It is when we begin to pay attention, and seek integrity precisely in the task within the task that we begin to move from the first to the second half of our own lives. Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions and a growing honesty about our actual motives. It is hard work.

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.

many of us learn to do our “survival dance,” but we never get to our actual “sacred dance.”

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?

when we are lazy, we stay on the path we are already on, even if it is going nowhere. It is the spiritual equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics: everything winds down unless some outside force winds it back up. True spirituality could be called the “outside force,” although surprisingly it is found “inside,” but we will get to that later.

“The children of this world are wiser in their ways than the children of light” (Luke 16:8).

We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.

the demand for the perfect is the greatest enemy of the good.

So Jesus makes it into a central axiom: the “last” really do have a head start in moving toward “first,” and those who spend too much time trying to be “first” will never get there.

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.

God mercifully hides thoughts of dying from the young, but unfortunately we then hide it from ourselves till the later years finally force it into our consciousness. Ernest Becker said some years ago that it is not love but “the denial of death” that might well make the world go round.

Like skaters, we move forward by actually moving from side to side.

Far too many people just keep doing repair work on the container itself and never “throw their nets into the deep” (John 21:6) to bring in the huge catch that awaits them.

In a culture like ours, still preoccupied with security issues, enormously high military budgets are never seriously questioned by Congress or by the people, while appropriations reflecting later stages in the hierarchy of needs, like those for education, health care for the poor, and the arts, are quickly cut, if even considered. The message is clear that we are largely an adolescent culture.

Einstein said, “No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it in the first place.”

As a preacher, I find that I am forced to dumb down the material in order to interest a Sunday crowd that does not expect or even want any real challenge; nor does it exhibit much spiritual or intellectual curiosity.

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 seem to have an amazing capacity for missing the major point—and our own necessary starting point along with it.

To build your house well is, ironically, to be nudged beyond its doors.

Basically, if you stay in the protected first half of life beyond its natural period, you become a well-disguised narcissist or an adult infant (who is also a narcissist!)—both of whom are often thought to be successful “good old boys” by the mainstream culture. No wonder that Bill Plotkin calls us a “patho-adolescent culture.”

I think of CEOs, business leaders, soldiers, or parents who have no principled or ethical sense of themselves and end up with some kind of “pick and choose” morality in the pressured moment. This pattern leaves the isolated ego in full control,

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.

People who have not been tutored by some “limit situations” in the first half of their life are in no position to parent children; they are usually children themselves.

Jesus said that the person who finally acts and engages “does the Father's will,” even if he is a tax collector or she a prostitute and does not have the right “belief system” (Matthew 21:28–32).

Without a contemplative mind, we do not know how to hold creative tensions. We are better at rushing to judgment and demanding a complete resolution to things before we have learned what they have to teach us. This is not the way of wisdom, and it is the way that people operate in the first half of life.

Western people are a ritually starved people, and in this are different than most of human history.

Paradoxically, your loyal soldier gives you so much security and validation that you may confuse his voice with the very voice of God. If this inner and critical voice has kept you safe for many years as your inner voice of authority, you may end up not being able to hear the real voice of God.

Even Jesus, if we are to believe the “Apostle's Creed” of the church, “descended into hell” before he ascended into heaven. Isn't it strange how we missed that?

God does not seem to care who gets the credit, as long as our growth continues.

Just because something might have some dire effects does not mean it is not true or even good. Just because something pleases people does not make it true either.

Jesus had no trouble with the exceptions, whether they were prostitutes, drunkards, Samaritans, lepers, Gentiles, tax collectors, or wayward sheep.

Jesus did not seem to teach that one size fits all, but instead that his God adjusts to the vagaries and failures of the moment. This ability to adjust to human disorder and failure is named God's providence or compassion. 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.

Jesus is never upset at sinners (check it out!); he is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners! Jesus was fully at home with this tragic sense of life. He lived and rose inside it.

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.

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.

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

As has been said many times, there are finally only two subjects in all of literature and poetry: love and death.

Carl Jung, who so often says things concisely, offers this momentous insight: “Life is a luminous pause between two great mysteries, which themselves are one.”1 That is precisely what I want to say here.

Wouldn't it make sense that God would plant in us a desire for what God already wants to give us? I am sure of it.

Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, in which he says, “We have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.”

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...

If we go to the depths of anything, we will begin to knock upon something substantial, “real,” and with a timeless quality to it.

This “something real” is what all the world religions were pointing to when they spoke of heaven, nirvana, bliss, or enlightenment.

Beyond rational and critical thinking, we need to be called again. This can lead to the discovery of a “second naiveté,” which is a return to the joy of our first naiveté, but now totally new, inclusive, and mature thinking. —PAUL RICOEUR