Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

by Richard Rohr

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. (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.

Yet they are all used and needed to create the container.

“In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things, charity.” That is second-half-of-life, hard-won wisdom.

consoles our True Self only after it has devastated our false self.

Early-stage religion is largely preparing you for the immense gift of this burning, this inner experience of God, as though creating a proper stable into which the Christ can be born.

that they never get to the birth of God in the soul.

Of course, clergy cannot talk about a further journey if they have not gone on it themselves.

a “generative” person, to use Erik Erikson's fine term, concerned about the next generation and not just himself

the classic hero is one who “goes the distance,” whatever that takes, and then has plenty left over for others. True heroism serves the common good, or it is not really heroism at all.

To be a celebrity or a mere survivor today is often confused with heroism, probably a sign of our actual regression.

But what are you going to do with your now resurrected life? That is the heroic question.

I always wonder what so-called family values Christians do with shocking lines like that? Jesus was not a nuclear family man at all,

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!

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.

without law in some form, and also without butting up against that law, we cannot move forward easily and naturally. The rebellions of two-year-olds and teenagers are in our hardwiring, and we have to have something hard and half good to rebel against. We need a worthy opponent against which we test our mettle. As Rilke put it, “When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.”

You need a very strong container to hold the contents and contradictions that arrive later in life.

You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before ...

All of this builds the strong self that can positively obey Jesus...

The educated and sophisticated Western person today has many levers, but almost no solid place on which to stand,

Frankly, it is much easier to begin rather conservative or traditional. I know some of us do not want to hear that.

We are not helping our children by always preventing them from what might be necessary falling, because you learn how to recover from falling by falling!

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.

If you want a job done well, on time, with accountability and no excuses, you had best hire someone who has faced a few limit situations. He or she alone has the discipline, the punctuality, the positive self-image, and the persistence to do a good job. If you want the opposite, hire someone who has been coddled, been given “I Am Special” buttons for doing nothing special, and had all his or her bills paid by others, and whose basic egocentricity has never been challenged or undercut.

Eric Fromm, in his classic book The Art of Loving.1 He says that the healthiest people he has known, and those who very often grow up in the most natural way, are those who, between their two parents and early authority figures, experienced a combination of unconditional love along with very conditional and demanding love!

The only real biblical promise is that unconditional love will have the last word!

“wound identified” (that is, using one's victimhood as one's identity, one's ticket to sympathy, and one's excuse for not serving), instead of using the wound to “redeem the world,” as we see in Jesus and many people who turn their wounds into sacred wounds that liberate both themselves and others.

Mature people invariably thank their harder parent, law-driven church, kick-ass coach, and most demanding professors—but usually years later.

Mature people invariably thank their harder parent, law-driven church, kick-ass coach, and most demanding professors—but usually years later.

Actually, I have seen many Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists do it much better, but very few Christians have been taught how to live both law and freedom at the same time. Our Western dualistic minds do not process paradoxes very well. 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.

In the Western world, it seems we cannot build prisons fast enough or have enough recovery groups, therapists, or reparenting classes for all of the walking wounded in this very educated, religious, and sophisticated society—which has little respect for limitations and a huge sense of entitlement.

When they are true elders, we all fall in love with them.

(too-quick answers keep you from necessary searching),

It is not just “the exception that proves the rule” but somehow that the loss or transgression of the rule also proves the importance and purpose of the rule.

When some have not been able to do the task of the first half of life well, they go back and try to do it again—and then often overdo it! This pattern is usually an inconsistent mix of old-fashioned styles and symbols with very contemporary ideologies of consumerism, technology, militarism, and individualism.

a lot of “religious” language and Jesus talk. Again, it was a regressive restoration of a failed first half of life. It seldom works long term.

None of us can dialogue with others until we can calmly and confidently hold our own identity.

This kind of closure is much needed for most of us at the end of all major transitions in life. Because we have lost any sense of the need for such rites of passage, most of our people have no clear crossover to the second half of their own lives.

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

The loyal soldier is similar to the “elder son” in Jesus' parable of the prodigal son. His very loyalty to strict meritocracy, to his own entitlement, to obedience and loyalty to his father, keeps him from the very “celebration” that same father has prepared, even though he begs the son to come to the feast (Luke 15:25–32). We have no indication he ever came! What a judgment this is on first-stage religion, and it comes straight from the boss. He makes the same point in his story of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9–14), in which one is loyal and observant and deemed wrong by Jesus, and the other has not obeyed the law—yet is deemed “at rights with God.” This is classic “reverse theology” meant to subvert our usual merit-badge thinking. Both the elder son and the Pharisee are good loyal religious soldiers, exactly what most of us in the church were told to be, yet Jesus says that both of them missed the major point.

is far easier to begin life with a conservative worldview and respect for traditions. It gives you an initial sense of “place” and is much more effective in the long run, even if it just gives you “a goad to kick against” (Acts 26:14). Many just fall in love with their first place and position, as an extension of themselves, and spend their whole life building a white picket fence around it.

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.

The first battles solidify the ego and create a stalwart loyal soldier; the second battles defeat the ego because God always wins.

superego, which he said usually substitutes for any real adult formation of conscience.

its substituting of small, low-cost moral issues for the real ones that ask us to change, instead of always trying to change other people.

a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life.

we have a container strong enough to hold the contents of our real life,

You will feel similar to Isaiah before he was sent into exile in Babylon, “In the noontime of my life, I was told to depart for the gates of Hades. Surely I am deprived of the rest of my years” (38:10).

You will have many more Aarons building you golden calves than Moseses leading you on any exodus.