Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

by Richard Rohr

Yes, transformation is often more about unlearning than learning, which is why the religious traditions call it “conversion” or “repentance.”

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.

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.

In legends and literature, sacrifice of something to achieve something else is almost the only pattern. Dr. Faust has to sell his soul to the devil to achieve power and knowledge; Sleeping Beauty must sleep for a hundred years before she can receive the prince's kiss. In Scripture, we see that the wrestling and wounding of Jacob are necessary for Jacob to become Israel (Genesis 32:26–32), and the death and resurrection of Jesus are necessary to create Christianity. The loss and renewal pattern is so constant and ubiquitous that it should hardly be called a secret at all.

This is surely the first and primary reason why many people never get to the fullness of their own lives. The supposed achievements of the first half of life have to fall apart and show themselves to be wanting in some way, or we will not move further. Why would we? 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.

Jesus loves to tell stories like those of the publican and the Pharisee (Luke 18:9–14) and the famous one about the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32), in which one character does his life totally right and is, in fact, wrong; and the other who does it totally wrong ends up God's beloved! Now deal with that!

Jesus also tells us that there are two groups who are very good at trying to deny or avoid this humiliating surprise: those who are very “rich” and those who are very “religious.” These two groups have very different plans for themselves, as they try to totally steer their own ships with well-chosen itineraries. They follow two different ways of going “up” and avoiding all “down.”

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

If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own.

What a clever place for God to hide holiness, so that only the humble and earnest will find it! A “perfect” person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than one who thinks he or she is totally above and beyond imperfection.

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.

If you try to assert wisdom before people have themselves walked it, be prepared for much resistance, denial, push-back, and verbal debate.

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

Once your life has become a constant communion, you know that all the techniques, formulas, sacraments, and practices were just a dress rehearsal for the real thing—life itself—which can actually become a constant intentional prayer. Your conscious and loving existence gives glory to God.

There is a good and needed “narcissism,” if you want to call it that. You have to first have an ego structure to then let go of it and move beyond it.

Human maturity is neither offensive nor defensive; it is finally able to accept that reality is what it is. Ken Keyes so wisely said, “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.

But just remember, 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.

If you have, in fact, deepened and grown “in wisdom, age, and grace” (Luke 2:52), you are able to be patient, inclusive, and understanding of all the previous stages. That is what I mean by my frequent use of the phrase “transcend and include.” That is the infallible sign that you are enlightened, psychologically mature, or a truly adult believer. The “adepts” in all religions are always forgiving, compassionate, and radically inclusive.

Although Jesus' first preached message is clearly “change!” (as in Mark 1:15 and Matthew 4:17), where he told his listeners to “repent,” which literally means to “change your mind,” it did not strongly influence Christian history. This resistance to change is so common, in fact, that it is almost what we expect from religious people, who tend to love the past more than the future or the present.

Pope John XXIII's motto might be heard here: “In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things, charity.”

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

They live in a world that they presently take as given and sufficient; they are often a prince or princess and, if not, sometimes even of divine origin, which of course they always know nothing about! (This amnesia is a giveaway for the core religious problem, as discovering our divine DNA is always the task.)

You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while.

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.

Many of the papers I receive in summer graduate courses at major universities are embarrassing to read in terms of both style and content, yet these same “adults” are shocked if they do not get an A. This does not bode well for the future of our country.

I know this is not the current version of what is psychologically “correct,” because we all seem to think we need nothing but unconditional love. Any law, correction, rule, or limitation is another word for conditional love.

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,” as we see in Jesus and many people who turn their wounds into sacred wounds that liberate both themselves and others.

Yet there is a strange comfort in staying within the confines of such a leader and his ideologies, even if it leads us to do evil. It frees us from the burden of thinking and from personal responsibility.

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.

Greek hubris was precisely the refusal to be humbled by what should have been humbling.

Judeo-Christianity includes the problem inside the solution and as part of the solution. The genius of the biblical revelation is that it refuses to deny the dark side of things, but forgives failure and integrates falling to achieve its only promised wholeness, which is much of the point of this whole book.

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

Much of organized religion, however, tends to be peopled by folks who have a mania for some ideal order, which is never true, so they are seldom happy or content. It makes you anal retentive after a while, to use Freud's rude phrase, because you can never be happy with life as it is, which is always filled with handicapped people, mentally unstable people, people of “other” and “false” religions, irritable people, gay people, and people of totally different customs and traditions.

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.”

Philosophers and social engineers have promised us various utopias, with no room for error, but the Jewish Scriptures, which are full of anecdotes of destiny, failure, sin, and grace, offer almost no self-evident philosophical or theological conclusions that are always true.

“God comes to you disguised as your life,”

Suffering does not solve any problem mechanically as much as it reveals the constant problem that we are to ourselves, and opens up new spaces within us for learning and loving.

Carl Jung said that so much unnecessary suffering comes into the world because people will not accept the “legitimate suffering” that comes from being human.

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

The natural world “believes” in necessary suffering as the very cycle of life: just observe the daily dying of the sun so all things on this planet can live, the total change of the seasons, the plants and trees along with it, the violent world of animal predators and prey.

Not surprisingly, many of the findings of modern psychology, anthropology, and organizational behavior give us new windows and vocabulary into Jesus' transcendent message.

So Jesus pulls no punches, saying you must “hate” your home base in some way and make choices beyond it.

Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For another union, a deeper communion —T. S. ELIOT, “EAST COKER”

For postmodern people, the universe is not inherently enchanted, as it was for the ancients. We have to do all the “enchanting” ourselves. This leaves us alone, confused, and doubtful. There is no meaning already in place for our discovery and enjoyment. We have to create all meaning by ourselves in such an inert and empty world, and most of us do not seem to succeed very well. This is the burden of living in our heady and lonely time, when we think it is all up to us.

The gift of living in our time, however, is that we are more and more discovering that the sciences, particularly physics, astrophysics, anthropology, and biology, are confirming many of the deep intuitions of religion, and at a rather quick pace in recent years.

There is a God-size hole in all of us, waiting to be filled. God creates the very dissatisfaction that only grace and finally divine love can satisfy.

We dare not try to fill our souls and minds with numbing addictions, diversionary tactics, or mindless distractions. The shape of evil is much more superficiality and blindness than the usually listed “hot sins.” God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything, even and maybe especially in the deep fathoming of our fallings and failures. Sin is to stay on the surface of even holy things, like Bible, sacrament, or church.

Life is all about practicing for heaven. We practice by choosing union freely—ahead of time—and now. Heaven is the state of union both here and later. As now, so will it be then. No one is in heaven unless he or she wants to be, and all are in heaven as soon as they live in union. Everyone is in heaven when he or she has plenty of room for communion and no need for exclusion. The more room you have to include, the bigger your heaven will be.

God excludes no one from union, but must allow us to exclude ourselves in order for us to maintain our freedom. Our word for that exclusion is hell, and it must be maintained as a logical possibility. There must be the logical possibility of excluding oneself from union and to choose separation or superiority over community and love. No one is in hell unless that individual himself or herself chooses a final aloneness and separation.

Why would Jesus' love be so unconditional while he was in this world, and suddenly become totally conditional after death? Is it the same Jesus? Or does Jesus change his policy after his resurrection?