Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

by Richard Rohr

All spiritual language is by necessity metaphor and symbol.

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!”

We do not “make” or “create” our souls; we just “grow” them up.

The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it.

If we never get to our little bit of heaven, our life does not make much sense, and we have created our own “hell.” So get ready for some new freedom, some dangerous permission, some hope from nowhere, some unexpected happiness, some stumbling stones, some radical grace, and some new and pressing responsibility for yourself and for our suffering world.

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.

Oh snap

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.

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

Jesus praised faith and trust even more than love. It takes a foundational trust to fall or to fail—and not to fall apart. Faith alone holds you while you stand waiting and hoping and trusting. Then, and only then, will deeper love happen.

People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place. They are not mere iconoclasts or rebels.

Yes!

The Dalai Lama said much the same thing: “Learn and obey the rules very well, so you will know how to break them properly.”

Our myths are stories or images that are not always true in particular but entirely true in general.

Remember, the opposite of rational is not always irrational, but it can also be transrational or bigger than the rational mind can process; things like love, death, suffering, God, and infinity are transrational experiences. Both myth and mature religion understand this.

Because the rational mind cannot process love or suffering, for example, it tends to either avoid them, deny them, or blame somebody for them, when in fact they are the greatest spiritual teachers of all, if we but allow them.

Never heard this before but in some sense ive always known it

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.

It is not faith but ego tht needs deconstructing

Often it takes outer authority to send us on the path toward our own inner authority.

One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. —CARL JUNG, THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF THE PSYCHE

You cannot do a nonstop flight to the second half of life by reading lots of books about it, including this one.

“God has no grandchildren. God only has children,” as some have said. Each generation has to make its own discoveries of Spirit for itself. If not, we just react to the previous generation, and often overreact.

Yes

The message is clear that we are largely an adolescent culture. Religions, similarly, need to make truth claims that are absolutely absolute—and we want them for just that—because they are absolute! This feels right and necessary at this early stage, despite any talk of Biblical “faith” or trust, which can only be comprehended later.

This is really insightful

Human life is about more than building boundaries, protecting identities, creating tribes, and teaching impulse control. As Jesus said, “Why do you ask, what am I to eat? What am I to wear?” And to that he says, “Is life not so much more than food? Is life not so much more than clothing?” (Luke 12:23). “What will it profit you if you gain the whole world, and lose your very soul?” (Matthew 16:26).

“More suffering comes into the world by people taking offense than by people intending to give offense.” The offended ones feel the need to offend back those who they think have offended them, creating defensiveness on the part of the presumed offenders, which often becomes a new offensive—ad infinitum. There seems to be no way out of this self-defeating and violent Ping-Pong game—except growing up spiritually. The True Self, you see, is very hard to offend!

I see this all the time

there is a symbiosis between immature groups and immature leaders, I am afraid, which is why both Plato and Jefferson said democracy was not really the best form of government. It is just the safest. A truly wise monarch would probably be the most effective at getting things done. (Don't send hate letters, please!)

Interesting. A call for a kingdom

Jesus the Jew criticizes his own religion the most, yet never leaves it! Mature people are not either-or thinkers, but they bathe in the ocean of both-and.

Some theorists say you cannot stretch more than one step above your own level of consciousness, and that is on a good day! Because of this limitation, those at deeper (or “higher”) levels beyond you invariably appear wrong, sinful, heretical, dangerous, or even worthy of elimination. How else can we explain the consistent killing of prophets; the marginalization of truly holy people as naive; the rather consistent racism, self-protectiveness, and warlike attitudes of people who think of themselves as civilized?

the first journey is always about externals, formulas, superficial emotions, flags and badges, correct rituals, Bible quotes, and special clothing, all of which largely substitute for actual spirituality (see Matthew 23:13–32). Yet they are all used and needed to create the container.

“In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things, charity.”

That is much needed advice

The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young. —JAMES HOLLIS, FINDING MEANING IN THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE

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.

Those who whine about parents and authority for too long invariably remain or become narcissists themselves.

Oh man alwys a danger of beecoming the very thing we despise

Our Western dualistic minds do not process paradoxes very well.

Without a contemplative mind, we do not know how to hold creative tensions. We are better at rushing to judgment and demanding a complete resolution to things before we have learned what they have to teach us. This is not the way of wisdom, and it is the way that people operate in the first half of life. “Primitive” and native societies

It is far easier to begin life with a conservative worldview and respect for traditions. It gives you an initial sense of “place” and is much more effective in the long run, even if it just gives you “a goad to kick against” (Acts 26:14). 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.

Phew. A possitive view of past

Paradoxically, your loyal soldier gives you so much security and validation that you may confuse his voice with the very voice of God. If this inner and critical voice has kept you safe for many years as your inner voice of authority, you may end up not being able to hear the real voice of God. (Please read that sentence again for maximum effect!)

That is perhaps why the best word for God is actually Mystery.

“Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.”

Just because something might have some dire effects does not mean it is not true or even good. Just because something pleases people does not make it true either. Life is inherently tragic, and that is the truth that only faith, but not our seeming logic, can accept.

“Well, after all is said and done, remember that church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus.” We reeled in astonishment, but the four years of history had spoken for themselves. What he meant, of course, was that 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.

So true. The more i study the more i realize this

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.

Sin and salvation are correlative terms. 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. That is how transformative divine love is. If this is not the pattern, what hope is there for 99.9 percent of the world? We eventually discover that the same passion which leads us away from God can also lead us back to God and to our true selves. That is one reason I have valued and taught the Enneagram for almost forty years now.2 Like few other spiritual tools, it illustrates this transformative truth. Once you see that your “sin” and your gift are two sides of the same coin, you can never forget it.

God seems to be about “turning” our loves around (in Greek, meta-noia), and using them toward the Great Love that is their true object. All lesser loves are training wheels, which are good in themselves, but still training wheels. Many of the healing stories in the New Testament are rather clear illustrations of this message and pattern. Jesus says this specifically of “the woman who was a sinner”: “Her sins, her many sins, must have been forgiven her, or she could not have shown such great love” (Luke 7:47). It seems that her false attempts at love became the school and stepping-stones to “such great love.” We clergy have gotten ourselves into the job of “sin management” instead of sin transformation. “If you are not perfect, then you are doing something wrong,” we have taught people. We have blamed the victim, or have had little pity for victims, while daring to worship a victim image of God. Our mistakes are something to be pitied and healed much more than hated, denied, or perfectly avoided. 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”

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 tragic sense of life, but we became expert instead at imposing tragedies on others. Forgive my anger, but we must say it.

That was well said

The only consistent pattern I can find is that all the books of the Bible seem to agree that somehow God is with us and we are not alone. God and Jesus' only job description is one of constant renewal of bad deals.

Overwhelmingly Simple isnft it?

Sooner or later, if you are on any classic “spiritual schedule,” some event, person, death, idea, or relationship will enter your life that you simply cannot deal with, using your present skill set, your acquired knowledge, or your strong willpower. Spiritually speaking, you will be, you must be, led to the edge of your own private resources. At that point you will stumble over a necessary stumbling stone, as Isaiah calls it; or to state it in our language here, you will and you must “lose” at something. This is the only way that Life-Fate-God-Grace-Mystery can get you to change, let go of your egocentric preoccupations, and go on the further and larger journey. I wish I could say this was not true, but it is darn near absolute in the spiritual literature of the world.

So true

Before the truth “sets you free,” it tends to make you miserable.

I was able to criticize organized religion from within, by its own Scriptures, saints, and sources, and not by merely cultural, unbelieving, or rational criteria.

Way to turn that into a positive.

It has also shown me that neither I nor the churches themselves really live much of the real Gospel—at least enough to actually change our present lifestyles! It is just too big a message. Refusing to split and deny reality keeps me in regular touch with my own shadow self, and much more patient with the rather evident shadow of the church. I see the exact same patterns in every other group, so my home base is as good a place to learn shadowboxing as anywhere else, and often better than most.

As has been said many times, there are finally only two subjects in all of literature and poetry: love and death. Only that which is limited and even dies grows in value and appreciation; it is the spiritual version of supply and demand.

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.

Wow

For some of you, my quoting Jesus is the only way you will trust me; for others, it gives you more reasons to mistrust me, but I have to take both risks. If I dared to present all of these ideas simply as my ideas, or because they match modern psychology or old mythology, I would be dishonest. Jesus for me always clinches the deal, and I sometimes wonder why I did not listen to him in the first place.

Love this