Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

by Richard Rohr

been against law and authority for several centuries now. Tradition or any talk of limits has not been attractive since the protesting Reformation, the unenlightened Enlightenment, or the rise of democracy (all of which were necessary, by the way!). Now we all start our kids in a kind of free fall, and hope that by some good luck or insight they will magically come to wisdom. The ego cannot be allowed to be totally in charge throughout our early years, or it takes over. The entirely open field leaves us the victim of too many options, and the options themselves soon push us around and take control.

watching and not in perfect control, say the mystics. That is perhaps why the best word for God is actually Mystery.

life is not, nor ever has been, a straight line forward. According

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

impulse control and delay of gratification, which is the job of a good parent.

goad. There has been nothing to defeat your “infantile grandiosity,”

“incarnational mysticism.” Once you get it, there is no going backward,

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.

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

a “generative” person, one who is eager and able to generate life from his or her own abundance and for the benefit of following

you have to do is meet one such shining person and you know that he or she is surely the goal of humanity and the delight of God. I hope you are becoming that shining person yourself, and that this book is helping you see it, allow it, and trust it. Otherwise, this book too will be just some more words—instead of words becoming flesh. Until it becomes flesh, it cannot shine and shine brightly.

Silence and poetry start being our more natural voice and our more beautiful ear at this stage.3 Much of life starts becoming highly symbolic and “connecting,” and little things become significant metaphors for everything else. Silence is the only language spacious enough to include everything and to keep us from slipping back into dualistic judgments and divisive words.

human pain, actually much more than in joy, which is too often manufactured and passing. In one sense, pain's effects are not passing, and pain is less commonly manufactured. Thus it is a more honest doorway into lasting communion than even