Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

by Richard Rohr

As Desmond Tutu told me on a recent trip to Cape Town, “We are only the light bulbs, Richard, and our job is just to remain screwed in!”

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.

Scott Peck's major insight in his best-selling book, The Road Less Traveled.

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

People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.

When you get your “Who am I?” question right, all the “What should I do?” questions tend to take care of themselves.

Ken Keyes so wisely said, “More suffering comes into the world by people taking offense than by people intending to give offense.”

This is why mature societies were meant to be led by elders, seniors, saints, and “the initiated.” They alone are in a position to be true leaders in a society, or certainly in any spiritual organization.

Those who are not true leaders or elders will just affirm people at their own immature level, and of course immature people will love them and elect them for being equally immature.

Plato and Jefferson said democracy was not really the best form of government. It is just the safest.

Jesus the Jew criticizes his own religion the most, yet never leaves it!

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

those at deeper (or “higher”) levels beyond you invariably appear wrong, sinful, heretical, dangerous, or even worthy of elimination.

one of the best covers for very narcissistic people is to be polite, smiling, and thoroughly civilized. Hitler loved animals and classical music, I am told.

religious people, who tend to love the past more than the future or the present.

Ken Wilber says that most of us are only willing to call 5 percent of our present information into question at any one point—and again that is on a very good day.

authentic God experience always “burns” you, yet does not destroy you

authentic God experience is always “too much”! It consoles our True Self only after it has devastated our false self.

most people get so preoccupied with their stable, and whether their stable is better than your stable, or whether their stable is the only “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” stable, that they never get to the birth of God in the soul.

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.

True heroism serves the common good, or it is not really heroism at all.

The very first sign of a potential hero's journey is that he or she must leave home, the familiar, which is something that may not always occur to someone in the first half of life.

The crucial thing is to get out and about, and into the real and bigger issues.

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.

Law and structure, as fallible as they often are, put up some kind of limits to our infantile grandiosity, and prepare us for helpful relationships with the outer world, which has rights too.

Most wars, genocides, and tragedies in history have been waged by unquestioning followers of dominating leaders.

Most people will not leave the safety and security of their home base until they have to.

We are perhaps the first generation in history, we postmodern folks, who have the freedom both to know the rules and also to critique the rules at the same time.

People think that by defeating the other side, they have achieved some high level of truth! Very sad indeed, but that is as far as the angry or fearful dualistic mind can go.

actual and costly lifestyle changes for themselves, like the Amish, the Shakers, the Mennonites, Catholic Workers, Poor Clares, and the Quakers, can be called true conservatives.

None of us can know much about second-half-of-life spirituality as long as we are still trying to create the family, the parenting, the security, the order, the pride that we were not given in the first half.

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

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.

There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life. It will sound an awful lot like the voices of risk, of trust, of surrender, of soul, of “common sense,” of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of your deepest self, of soulful “Beatrice.” The true faith journey only begins at this point.

“Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.”

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.

Life is inherently tragic, and that is the truth that only faith, but not our seeming logic, can accept.

Jesus had no trouble with the exceptions, whether they were prostitutes, drunkards, Samaritans, lepers, Gentiles, tax collectors, or wayward sheep. He ate with outsiders regularly, to the chagrin of the church stalwarts, who always love their version of order over any compassion toward the exceptions.

we have a history of excluding and torturing people who do not “think” right.

we invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question—even when it is not entirely true—over the mercy and grace of God.

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.

Did you know that the Greek word for tragedy means “goat story”?

Lady Julian put it even more poetically: “First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God!”

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

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.

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?

The tragic sense of life is not unbelief, pessimism, fatalism, or cynicism. It is just ultimate and humiliating realism, which for some reason demands a lot of forgiveness of almost everything.

We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die. —W. H. AUDEN