Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

by Richard Rohr

we will not discharge our loyal soldier until he shows himself to be wanting, incapable, inadequate for the real issues of life—as when we confront love, death, suffering, subtlety, sin, mystery, and so on.

Maybe these are not so much the alternative to heaven as the necessary path to heaven.

When you first discharge your loyal soldier, it will feel like a loss of faith or loss of self. But it is only the death of the false self, and is often the very birth of the soul. Instead of being ego driven, you will begin to be soul drawn.

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

According to him, life is characterized much more by exception and disorder than by total or perfect order. Life, as the biblical tradition makes clear, is both loss and renewal, death and resurrection, chaos and healing at the same time; life seems to be a collision of opposites.

Truth is not always about pragmatic problem solving and making things “work,” but about reconciling contradictions. 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.

Such constant exceptions make us revisit the so-called rule and what we call normal—and recalibrate! The exceptions keep us humble and searching, and not rushing toward resolution to allay our anxiety.

Just the existence of a single mentally challenged or mentally ill person should make us change any of our theories about the necessity of some kind of correct thinking as the definition of “salvation.” Yet we have a history of excluding and torturing people who do not “think” right.

church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus.”

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.

Our mind, it seems, is more pleased with universals: never-broken, always-applicable rules and patterns that allow us to predict and control things. This is good for science, but lousy for religion.

Jesus is never upset at sinners (check it out!); he is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners!

In the divine economy of grace, sin and failure become the base metal and raw material for the redemption experience itself.

Salvation is not sin perfectly avoided, as the ego would prefer; but in fact, salvation is sin turned on its head and used in our favor.

Enneagram

Once you see that your “sin” and your gift are two sides of the same coin, you can never forget it.

It seems that her false attempts at love became the school and stepping-stones to “such great love.”

Our mistakes are something to be pitied and healed much more than hated, denied, or perfectly avoided. I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you.

new forms, as Jesus says of the “unclean spirit” that returns to the house all “swept and tidied” (Luke 11:24–26);

The only consistent pattern I can find is that all the books of the Bible seem to agree that somehow God is with us and we are not alone. God and Jesus' only job description is one of constant renewal of bad deals.

Faith is simply to trust the real, and to trust that God is found within it—even before we change it.

you will and you must “lose” at something. This is the only way that Life-Fate-God-Grace-Mystery can get you to change, let go of your egocentric preoccupations, and go on the further and larger journey. I wish I could say this was not true, but it is darn near absolute in the spiritual literature of the world.

If we seek spiritual heroism ourselves, the old ego is just back in control under a new name.

“God comes to you disguised as your life,” as my friend Paula D'Arcy so wisely says. So we must stumble and fall, I am sorry to say. And that does not mean reading about falling, as you are doing here. We must actually be out of the driver's seat for a while, or we will never learn how to give up control to the Real Guide.

It seems that in the spiritual world, we do not really find something until we first lose it, ignore it, miss it, long for it, choose it, and personally find it again—but now on a new level.

Falling, losing, failing, transgression, and sin are the pattern, I am sorry to report. Yet they all lead toward home.

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).

Yet we have no positive theology of such necessary suffering, for the most part.

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.

The cross exposes forever the “scene of our crime.”

In

The leper was his goad, and he learned not to kick against it, but actually to kiss it.

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! Ironically, this refusal of the necessary pain of being human brings to the person ten times more suffering in the long run.

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

In some ways, that is totally as it should be, because I was able to criticize organized religion from within, by its own Scriptures, saints, and sources, and not by merely cultural, unbelieving, or rational criteria. That is probably the only way you can fruitfully criticize anything, it seems to me.

I like to call it “incarnational mysticism.” Once

All beauty is gratuitous.

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. Being held long and hard inside limits and tension, incarnate moments—crucibles for sure—allows us to search for and often find “the reconciling third” or the unified field beneath it all. “The most personal becomes the most universal,” Chardin loved to say.

why I quote Jesus so much. You might be saying, “Does it really matter?” or “Does it have to be in the Bible to be true?”

For some of you, my quoting Jesus is the only way you will trust me; for others, it gives you more reasons to mistrust me, but I have to take both risks. If I dared to present all of these ideas simply as my ideas, or because they match modern psychology or old mythology, I would be dishonest.

many of the findings of modern psychology, anthropology, and organizational behavior give us new windows and vocabulary into Jesus' transcendent message.

Jesus was surely not following the expected and mainline script for his culture or his religion.

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.

the loyal soldier fills us with appropriate guilt, shame, and self-doubt, which, as we said earlier, feels like the very voice of God.

So Jesus pulls no punches, saying you must “hate” your home base in some way and make choices beyond it.

It takes therapists years to achieve the same result and reestablish appropriate boundaries from wounding parents and early authority figures, and to heal the inappr...

Your false self is your role, title, and personal image that is largely a creation of your own mind and attachments.

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.

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.