Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

by Richard Rohr

Without laws like the Ten Commandments, our existence here on this earth would be pretty pathetic. What if you could not rely on people to tell you the truth? Or not to steal from you? What if we were not expected to respect our parents, and we all started out with cynicism and mistrust of all authority? What if the “I love you” between partners was allowed to mean nothing? What if covetousness, which Rene Girard calls “mimetic rivalry,” was encouraged to grow unstopped, as it is in capitalist countries today? Such shapelessness would be the death of any civilization or any kind of trustworthy or happy world. I wonder: Are we there already?

A completely open field does not do the job nearly as well or as quickly. Yahweh was creating a good limit situation for Adam and Eve when he told them not to eat the apple, fully knowing that they would.

much of our history has been formed by juniors reacting, overreacting, and protecting their own temporary privilege, with no deep-time vision like the Iroquois Nation, which considered, “What would be good for the next seven generations?” Compare that to the present “Tea Party” movement in America.

It has been acceptable for some time in America to remain “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,”

Jesus seems to often find love in people who might not have received much love themselves. Perhaps their deep longing for it became their capacity to both receive it and give it.

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. How could this happen?

You must first eat the fruit of the garden, so you know what it tastes like—and what you are missing if and when you stop eating it.

Nevertheless, this new tribalism is being found in all of the world religions—a desire for rediscovery of one's roots, one's traditions, one's symbols, one's ethnic identity, and one's own unique identity. Some call it the “identity politics” that rules our country. This is understandable in the midst of massive and scary globalization among six billion people, but it also keeps us trapped at the bipartisan divide—and we never achieve the transpartisan nature of mature elders. People think that by defeating the other side, they have achieved some high level of truth!

oar. If you ever read the Divine Comedy, note that Dante lets go of Virgil, who had accompanied him through Hades and Purgatory, knowing now that only Beatrice can lead him into Paradise.

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

Organized religion has not been known for its inclusiveness or for being very comfortable with diversity. Yet pluriformity, multiplicity, and diversity is the only world there is! It is rather amazing that we can miss, deny, or ignore what is in plain sight everywhere.

I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you. Otherwise, it will only return in new forms, as Jesus says of the “unclean spirit” that returns to the house all “swept and tidied” (Luke 11:24–26); then he rightly and courageously says that “the last state of the house will be worse than the first.” One could say that the tragedy, the “goat stories” of racism, slavery, sexism, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the two World Wars, all of which emerged in and were tolerated by Christian Europe, are a stunning manifestation of our disillusionment and disgust with ourselves and one another, when we could not make the world right and perfectly ordered, as we were told it should be. We could not love the imperfection within ourselves or the natural world, so how could we possibly build any bridges toward Jews, Muslims, people of color, women, sinners, or even other Christians? None of them fit into the “order” we had predecided on. We had to kill, force, imprison, torture, and enslave as we pursued our colonization of the rest of the world, along with the planet itself. We did not carry the cross, the

The Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, are an amalgam of at least four different sources and theologies (Yahwistic, Eloistic, Deuteronomic, and Priestly).

So the church is both my greatest intellectual and moral problem and my most consoling home. She is both pathetic whore and frequent bride. There is still a marvelous marriage with such a bride, and many whores do occasionally become brides too. In a certain but real sense, the church itself is the first cross that Jesus is crucified on, as we limit, mangle, and try to control the always too big message. All the churches seem to crucify Jesus again and again by their inability to receive his whole body, but they often resurrect him too. I am without doubt a microcosm of this universal church.

One does not even need to believe in his divinity to realize that Jesus is seeing at a much higher level than most of us.

Any discovery or recovery of our divine union has been called “heaven” by most traditions. Its loss has been called “hell.” The tragic result of our amnesia is that we cannot imagine that these terms are first of all referring to present experiences.

When you do not know who you are, you push all enlightenment off into a possible future reward and punishment system, within which hardly anyone wins.

Only the True Self knows that heaven is now and that its loss is hell—now. The false self makes religion into the old “evacuation plan for the next world,” as my friend Brian McLaren puts it. Amnesia has dire ...

I left the garden, just as Adam and Eve had to do, even though my new Scripture awareness made it obvious that Adam and Eve were probably not historical figures, but important archetypal symbols. Darn it! My parents back in Kansas were worried! I was heady with knowledge and “enlightenment” and was surely not in Kansas anymore. I had passed, like Dorothy, “over the rainbow.” It is sad and disconcerting for a while, outside the garden, and some lovely innocence dies, yet “angels with flaming swords prevented my return” to the first garden (Genesis 3:24). There was no going back, unfortunately.

Life was much easier on the childhood side of the rainbow.

I totally believe in Adam and Eve now, but on about ten more levels. (Literalism is usually the lowest and least level of meaning.)

Soon there was a much bigger world than the United States and the Roman Catholic Church, which I eventually realized were also paradoxes. The e pluribus unum (“out of many, one”) on American coinage did not include very “many” of its own people (blacks, gays, Native Americans, poor folks, and so on), and as a Christian I finally had to be either Roman or catholic, and I continue to choose the catholic end of that spectrum. Either Jesus is the “savior of the world” (John 4:42), or he is not much of a savior at all. Either America treats the rest of the world democratically, or

it does not really believe in democracy at all. That is the way I see it.

But many get stopped and fixated at lower levels where God seems to torture and exclude forever those people who don't agree with “him” or get “his” name right. How could you possibly feel safe, free, loved, trustful, or invited by such a small God? Jesus undid this silliness himself when he said, “You, evil as you are, know how to give good things to your children.… If you, then how much more, God!” (Matthew 7:11).

time. I don't need to push the river as much now, or own the river, or get everybody in my precise river; nor do others have to name the river the same way I do in order for me to trust them or their goodwill. It takes lots of drowning in your own too tiny river to get to this big and

good place.

You fight things only when you are directly called and equipped to do so. We all become a well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. You lose all your inner freedom.

Holier-than-thou people usually end up holier than nobody.

The Eight Beatitudes speak to you much more than the Ten Commandments now. I have always wondered why people never want to put a stone monument of the Eight Beatitudes on the courthouse lawn. Then I realize that the Eight Beatitudes of Jesus would probably not be very good for any war, any macho worldview, the wealthy, or our consumer economy. Courthouses are good and necessary first-half-of-life institutions. In the second half, you try instead to influence events, work for change, quietly persuade, change your own attitude, pray, or forgive instead of taking things to court.

Just watch true elders sitting in any circle of conversation; they are often defining the center, depth, and circumference of the dialogue just by being there!

When elders speak, they need very few words to make their point.

I now realize that I have been gratuitously given to—from the universe, from society, and from God. I try now, as Elizabeth Seton said, to “live simply so that others can simply live.”

Their God is no longer small, punitive, or tribal. They once worshiped their raft; now they love the shore where it has taken them. They once defended signposts; now they have arrived where the signs pointed. They now enjoy the moon itself instead of fighting over whose finger points to it most accurately, quickly, or definitively.

It always deeply saddens me when old folks are still full of themselves and their absolute opinions about everything. Somehow they have not taken their needed place in the social fabric. We need their deep and studied passion so much more than their superficial and loudly stated principles. We need their peace more than their anger.

Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have—right now.

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

Be especially careful therefore of any idealized role or self-image, like that of minister, mother, doctor, nice person, professor, moral believer, or

president of this or that. These are huge personas to live up to, and they trap many people in lifelong delusion. The more you are attached to and unaware of such a protected self-image, the more shadow self you will very likely have.

Did anyone ever tell you that the name Lucifer literally means the “light bearer”? The evil one always makes darkness look like light—and makes light look like darkness.

Mystics often intuit and live what scientists later prove to be true.

Just remember this: no one can keep you from the second half of your own life except yourself. Nothing can inhibit your second journey except your own lack of courage, patience, and imagination. Your second journey is all yours to walk or to avoid.

When in the Soul of the Serene Disciple

to be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom Of men without visions.