Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

by Richard Rohr

We begin to see that, as we grow older, we are being awakened to deep, simple, and mysterious things we simply could not see when we were younger.

some of us get older than others.

The first task is to build a strong “container” or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold.

respond to one another's energy

Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions and a growing honesty about our actual motives.

The loss and renewal pattern is so constant and ubiquitous that it should hardly be called a secret at all.

Normally a job, fortune, or reputation has to be lost, a death has to be suffered, a house has to be flooded, or a disease has to be endured. The pattern in fact is so clear that one has to work rather hard, or be intellectually lazy, to miss the continual lesson. This, of course, was Scott Peck's major insight in his best-selling book, The Road Less Traveled. He told me personally once that he felt most Western people were just spiritually lazy. And when we are lazy, we stay on the path we are already on, even if it is going nowhere. It is the spiritual equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics: everything winds down unless some outside force winds it back up.

Losing, failing, falling, sin, and the suffering that comes from those experiences—all of this is a necessary and even good part of the human journey.

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

The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling or changing or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo, even when it is not working. It attaches to past and present, and fears the future.

“the way of the wound.”

It is often when the ego is most deconstructed that we can hear things anew and begin some honest reconstruction, even if it is only half heard and halfhearted.

The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver.

Only when you have begun to live in the second half can you see the difference between the two. Yet the two halves are cumulative and sequential, and both are very necessary.

Higher stages always empathetically include the lower, or they are not higher stages!

success, security, and containment—“looking good” to ourselves and others—are almost the only questions.

we have to be careful, or they totally take over and become all-controlling needs, keeping us from further growth.

“Do not be afraid”;

“More suffering comes into the world by people taking offense than by people intending to give offense.”

Mature people are not either-or thinkers, but they bathe in the ocean of both-and.

“In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things, charity.” That is second-half-of-life, hard-won wisdom.

live both law and freedom at the same time.

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.

“First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God!”

There is not one clear theology of God, Jesus, or history presented, despite our attempt to pretend there is.

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.

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

Once you have faced your own hidden or denied self, there is not much to be anxious about anymore, because there is no fear of exposure—to yourself or others. The game is over—and you are free.