Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

by Richard Rohr

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.

There is an inherent and desirous dissatisfaction that both sends and draws us forward, and it comes from our original and radical union with God. What appears to be past and future is in fact the same home, the same call, and the same God, for whom “a thousand years are like a single day” (Psalm 90:4) and a single day like a thousand years.

The Holy Spirit is that aspect of God that works largely from within and “secretly,” at “the deepest levels of our desiring,” as so many of the mystics have said. That's why the mystical tradition could only resort to subtle metaphors like wind, fire, descending doves, and flowing water to describe the Spirit.

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

The end is already planted in us at the beginning, and it gnaws away at us until we get there freely and consciously. The most a bishop or sacrament can do is to “fan [this awareness] into flame” (2 Timothy 1:6), and sometimes it does. But sometimes great love and great suffering are even bigger fans for this much-needed flame.

This Holy Spirit guiding all of us from home and toward home is also described in John's Gospel as an “advocate” (“a defense attorney,” as paraclete literally means, John 14:16), who will “teach us” and “remind us,” as if some part of us already knew but still needed an inner buzz or alarm clock to wake us up.

conspiracy (“co-breathing”)

True spirituality is always a deep “co-operating” (Romans 8:28) between two. True spirituality is a kind of synergy in which both parties give and both parties receive to create one shared truth and joy.2

For postmodern people, the universe is not inherently enchanted, as it was for the ancients. We have to do all the “enchanting” ourselves. This leaves us alone, confused, and doubtful. There is no meaning already in place for our discovery and enjoyment.

let me summarize the direction of my thought here.

God creates the very dissatisfaction that only grace and finally divine love can satisfy.

Jesus made it into a promise, as when he tells the Samaritan woman that “the spring within her will well up unto eternal life” (John 4:14).

we come back to Ithaca, but now it is fully home, because all is included, and nothing wasted or hated; even the dark parts are used in our favor.

we all seem to suffer from a tragic case of mistaken identity. Life is a matter of becoming fully and consciously who we already are, but it is a self that we largely do not know. It is as though we are all suffering from a giant case of amnesia.

But their identity is hidden from them, and the story line pivots around this discovery.

Many have said before me that spirituality is much more about unlearning than learning, because the “growing boy” is usually growing into major illusions, all of which must be undone to free him from prison and take him back to his beginnings in God. “Unless you change, and become like a little child, you will not enter the kingdom of God,” Jesus says (Matthew 18:3).

God excludes no one from union, but must allow us to exclude ourselves in order for us to maintain our freedom. Our word for that exclusion is hell, and it must be maintained as a logical possibility.

Jesus touched and healed anybody who desired it and asked for it, and there were no other prerequisites for his healings. Check it out yourself. Why would Jesus' love be so unconditional while he was in this world, and suddenly become totally conditional after death?

In the first case, at least a few of us good guys attain glory. In the second case, all the glory is to God.

The very meaning of the word universe is to “turn around one thing.” I know I am not that one thing. There is either some Big Truth in this universe, or there is no truth that is always reliable; there is we hope, some pattern behind it all (even if the pattern is exception!), or it begins to be a very incoherent universe, which is what many postmodern people seem to have accepted. I just can't.

Mature

“beginner's mind,”

Yet it is this very quiet inner unfolding of things that seems to create the most doubt and anxiety for many believers. They seem to prefer a “touch of the magic wand” kind of God (Tinker Bell?) to a God who works secretly and humbly, and who includes us in on the process and the conclusion.

The only price we pay for living in the Big Picture is to hold a bit of doubt and anxiety about the exact how, if, when, where, and who of it all, but never the that. Unfortunately, most Christians are not well trained in holding opposites for very long, or living with what could be very creative tension.

This belief is perhaps the same act of faith as that of Albert Einstein, who said before he discovered his unified field that he assumed just two things: that whatever reality is, it would show itself to be both “simple and beautiful.”

Our youthful demand for certainty does eliminate most anxiety on the conscious level,

Without elders, a society perishes socially and spiritually.

Wisdom happily lives with mystery, doubt, and “unknowing,” and in such living, ironically resolves that very mystery to some degree.

nor do others have to name the river the same way I do in order for me to trust them or their goodwill.

As the body cannot live without food, so the soul cannot live without meaning. Victor Frankl described this so well when he pointed out that some level of meaning was the only thing that kept people from total despair and suicide during the Holocaust.

If you have forgiven yourself for being imperfect and falling, you can now do it for just about everybody else. If you have not done it for yourself, I am afraid you will likely pass on your sadness, absurdity, judgment, and futility to others. This is the tragic path of the many elderly people who have not become actual elders, probably because they were never eldered or mentored themselves.

Our mature years are characterized by a kind of bright sadness and a sober happiness,

We all become a well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly.

When elders speak, they need very few words to make their point. Too many words, the use of which I am surely guilty, are not needed by true elders. Second simplicity has its own kind of brightness and clarity, but much of it is expressed in nonverbal terms, and only when really needed. If you talk too much or too loud, you are usually not an elder.

When you are young, you define yourself by differentiating yourself; now you look for the things we all share in common.

Because such people have built a good container, they are able to “contain” more and more truth, more and more neighbors, more and broader vision, more and more of a mysterious and outpouring God.

They once defended signposts; now they have arrived where the signs pointed.

you are sad because you now hold the pain of the larger world, and you wish everyone enjoyed what you now enjoy;

In the second half of life, we do not have strong and final opinions about everything, every event, or most people, as much as we allow things and people to delight us, sadden us, and truly influence us. We no longer need to change or adjust other people to be happy ourselves. Ironically, we are more than ever before in a position to change people—but we do not need to—and that makes all the difference. We have moved from doing to being to an utterly new kind of doing that flows almost organically, quietly, and by osmosis. Our actions are less compulsive. We do what we are called to do, and then try to let go of the consequences. We usually cannot do that very well when we are young.

Human integrity probably influences and moves people from potency to action more than anything else.

Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have—right now. This is a monumental change from the first half of life, so much so that it is almost the litmus test of whether you are in the second half of life at all.

“The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” I learned this from my father St. Francis, who did not concentrate on attacking evil or others, but just spent his life falling, and falling many times into the good, the true, and the beautiful. It was the only way he knew how to fall into God.

persona (meaning “stage mask” in Greek) that you so diligently constructed in the first half of life.

Persona and shadow are correlative terms. Your shadow is what you refuse to see about yourself, and what you do not want others to see.

Conversely, the more you live out of your shadow self, the less capable you are of recognizing the persona you are trying to protect and project.

I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then I must watch my reaction to

Whenever ministers, or any true believers, are too anti anything, you can be pretty sure there is some shadow material lurking somewhere nearby.

As Jesus says in the passage above, if you can begin to “make friends” with those who have a challenging message for you, you will usually begin to see some of your own shadow.

Buddhist nun and writer Pema Chodron says that once you create a self-justifying story line, your emotional entrapment within it quadruples!

The movement to second-half-of-life wisdom has much to do with necessary shadow work and the emergence of healthy self-critical thinking, which alone allows you to see beyond your own shadow and disguise and to find who you are “hidden [with Christ] in God,” as Paul puts it (Colossians 3:3). The Zen masters call it “the face you had before you were born.” This self cannot die and always lives, and is your True Self.