Richard Rohr - Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life — A Companion Journal

Other Books by Richard Rohr

Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

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Copyright 2013 by Richard Rohr. All rights reserved.

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Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life: A Companion Journal. ISBN:

978-1-118-42856-6; 978-1-118-42803-0 (ebk); 978-1-118-42853-5 (ebk); 978-1-118-42854-2 (ebk)

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); 978-1-118-02368-6 (ebk); 978-1-118-02369-3 (ebk);

978-1-118-02370-9 (ebk)

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

BV4511.R64 2011

248.4 dc22

2010049429

FIRST EDITION

I can only assume that the continued and engaged response to Falling Upward, a book about the spirituality of the two halves of life, reveals that it has named something real. I now meet people who tell me they have read it three times and keep marking it up in new places. But why?

It is surely not a credit to my writing style or my wonderful opinion. Rather, I think the book reveals something with huge pastoral, practical, and therapeutic implicationsfor individuals, for education, for spiritual growth, and for understanding the development of groups and institutions through two distinct stages: building our container and finding its contents. Knowing the difference keeps us from beating our head against the wall and forever asking, Why is my life not working? It keeps us from trying to pound round pegs in square holesor calling other people's pegs wrong.

Others much wiser and broader than I will take this material to other levels of spirituality and psychology, but I think the foundational insight of two major tasks to life and growthand a necessary crossover pointwill hold. That insight is strongly validated by Scripture (law versus Spirit), cultural traditions (education and initiation theories), and now validated by our newly found courage to trust our own experience, even though we might still be afraid to do so. We needed to say it forthrightly, to name what we now realize is obvious. We must start by building our life container, but it must and will fall apart (and that is good but also the rub!), and only then do we find the real contents and depths of our own lives.

Knowing about this dynamic also helps us to partly understand the endless conservative-liberal divide in most groups and how both are preserving essential valuesthough sometimes in the wrong sequence and for too long. You can be a very healthy conservative and also a very unhealthy one, or a very healthy liberal and a very unhealthy one. Both sides need critique and both sides need validationand at the right time. Seeming liberalism in the young and immature is usually an ego and spiritual disaster; seeming conservatism in old folks is often nothing but cognitive rigidity and love of their own status quo and privilege.

Just as the great spiritual teachers have consistently taught, things are usually not what they seem; and what looks like one thing is often something else entirely. Wisdom lies in knowing the difference, and wisdom is often revealed only in time (Matthew 11:19), as Jesus says.

So more than anything else, I hope the original book, Falling Upward, and now its journal can be an exercise in spiritual discernment. This is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit that Paul briefly lists in 1 Corinthians 12:10 and is similar to the winnowing fork that is central to Odysseus's transformation, and that John the Baptist symbolically puts in the hands of Jesus (Matthew 3:12).

Much of religion has remained stuck and immature because it has not developed this gift of winnowing reality, which is what we mean by wisdom: separating essentials from nonessentials, and discerning with subtlety instead of just imposing one-size-fits-all laws. Religion, I am afraid, is notorious for this. Discernment (or awakening, as some might call it) is part of what Buddhism focuses on in its own Eight-Fold Path of wisdom: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. True rightness demands a lot more than just obeying laws and following local, recent customs, which tend to pad and affirm the mere ego self.

Paul was trying to get to the same truth when he dedicated two entire letters, Romans and Galatians, to illustrate the clear difference and necessary tension between law and grace, or tradition and Spirit. One might say that these were Paul's two most unfortunately unsuccessful letters in terms of their impact in history. They could have defined Christianity in a truly revolutionary way, but they did not have that effect. Why? Because most Christians were never allowed to know or even were told about the second half of their own lives. They read Paul's letters from a first-half-of-life perspective, with its preoccupation with the concerns of the ego, or from an institutional, clerical perspective, which is finally a waste of time on the full journey.