Richard Rohr - Aarp falling upward: a spirituality for the two halves of life

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Praise for Falling Upward

Richard Rohr has been a mentor to so many of us over the years, teaching us new ways to read Scripture, giving us tools to better understand ourselves, showing us new approaches to prayer and suffering, and even helping us see and practice a new kind of seeing. Now, in Falling Upward , Richard offers a simple but deeply helpful framework for seeing the whole spiritual lifeone that will help both beginners on the path as they look ahead and long-term pilgrims as they look back over their journey so far.Brian McLaren, author of A New Kind of Christianity and Naked Spirituality (brianmclaren.net)

The value of this book lies in the way Richard Rohr shares his own aging process with us in ways that help us be less afraid of seeing and accepting how we are growing older day by day. Without sugar coating the challenging aspects of growing older, Richard Rohr invites us to look closer, to sit with what is happening to us as we age. As we do so, the value and gift of aging begin to come into view. 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. The value of this book lies in the clarity with which it invites us to see the value of our own experience of aging as the way God is moving us from doing to being, from achieving to appreciating, from planning and plotting to trusting the strange process in which as we diminish, we strangely expand and grow in all sorts of ways we cannot and do not need to explain to anyone including ourselves. This freedom from the need to explain, this humble realization of what we cannot explain, is itself one of the unexpected blessings of aging this book invites to explore. It sounds too good be true, but we can begin to realize the timeless wisdom of the elders is sweetly and gently welling up in our own mind and heart.Jim Finley, retreat leader, Merton scholar, and author of The Contemplative Heart

This is Richard Rohr at his vintage best: prophetic, pastoral, practical. A book I will gratefully share with my children and grandchildren.Cynthia Bourgeault, Episcopal priest, retreat leader, and the author of Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, Mystical Hope , and The Wisdom Way of Knowing

Falling Upward is a book of liberation. It calls forth the promise within us, and frees us to follow it into wider dimensions of our spiritual authenticity. This second half of life need not wait till our middle years. It emerges whenever we are ready and able to expand beyond the structures and strictures of our chosen path, and sink or soar into the mysteries to which it pointed. Then the promise unfoldsin terms of what we discover we are and the timescapes we inhabit, as well as the gifts we can offer the world. With Richard Rohr as a guide, the spunk and spank of his language and his exhilarating insights, this mystery can become as real and immediate as your hand on the doorknob.Joanna Macy, author World as Lover, World as Self

Father Richard Rohr has gathered innumerable luminous jewels of wisdom during a lifetime of wrestling with self, soul, God, the church, the ancient sacred stories of initiation and its modern realities, and the wilder and darker dimensions of the human psyche. His new book, Falling Upward , is a great and gracious gift for all of us longing for lanterns on the perilous path to psychospiritual maturity, a path that reveals secrets of personal destiny only after falling into the swamps of failure, woundedness, and personal demons. An uncommon, true elder in these fractured times, Richard Rohr shows us the way into the rarely reached second half of life and the encounter with our soulsour authentic and unique way of participating in and joyously contributing to our miraculous world.Bill Plotkin, Ph.D., author of Soulcraft and Nature and the Human Soul

Copyright 2011 by Richard Rohr. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rohr, Richard.

Falling upward : a spirituality for the two halves of life / Richard Rohr.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-90775-7 (hardback); 978-1-118-24803-4 (ebk); 978-1-118-24802-7 (ebk); 978-1-118-24801-0 (ebk)

1. Spiritual formation. 2. Spirituality. I. Title.

BV4511.R64 2011

248.4dc22 2010049429

Excerpt from East Coker Part V in Four Quartets. Copyright 1940 by T.S. Eliot and renewed 1968 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and Faber and Faber Ltd.