Falling Upward: A Spirituality For The Two Halves Of Life

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If that sounds distinctively Christian, it is. Father Rohr is very comfortable in interfaith circles, but he has a decidedly Franciscan vein in his approach to spirituality. Hebrew and Christian scriptures pop up regularly in his prose, but in fresh, deep ways. His scholarship is also very deep, quoting everyone from Church Founders to Paul Ricouer. He is challenging, but in a deeply personal, friendly way.

The two tasks are as follows. The first is where we establish our primary identity, including a career, personal values, relationships, etc. Richard Rohr, writer, activist, lecturer, Franciscan Priest, has lived long and reflected deeply upon that living. In this small, but very weighty tome, he distills his conclusions about life being lived fully, deeply, in full awareness and completeness. His words are dense, accurate and speak directly to the heart. We start with our first task which we think is the only task, but ends up just being a warm up for with the task to come. The Two Halves' refers to Jung's program of life, where in the first half, we build the Ego and secure a 'living'. There is more, however to this story, and oftentimes the unconscious pushes us into terra incognito...thrusts us into an initiation of maturity, that if heeded, brings a fuller, richer energy to the Self, or the totality of the conscious Ego and unconscious Archetypes. And this journey, the journey of the Self is nothing, if not Archetypal and transpersonal. And this is among the last ones that made me stop reading the book: he writes, "There is not one clear theology of God, Jesus, or history presented, despite our attempt to pretend there is."

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For such a strong advocate of non-dualistic, "both-and" thinking, Fr. Rohr sure relies heavily on what seems to me to be more dualistic, "either-or" distinctions between "first half" and "second half" people with their respective concerns for their "container" vs. its "contents." There is the "shadow self" and the "true self." While there is some validity in these distinctions, they can also make it too easy to pigeonhole others and put ourselves in a category apart, beyond the understanding of others and the flaws they might expose in our own way of thinking and living. Then there are statements like this: "Either God is for everybody and the divine DNA is somehow in all of the creatures, or this God is not God by any common definition, or even much of a god at all" (p. 109). Really? It's just that simple? Hmm.

Although he does some things in humility, his hubris is frustrating and laughable at times: “The only people who do not believe that the Enneagram is true are those who do not understand it or have never used it well.” So we can’t believe any faith is the end all be all, but the Enneagram is? Mr. Rohr does us all a service with this gem by applying Jungian thought and Joseph Campbell mythology to spirituality. By doing so, he has tapped into a deeper strata of the religious life and requested we all take the Hero's Quest with him. Rohr and Morrell have given us a liberating and yet totally orthodox invitation into the life of God. This book is a celebration of the Trinity, not as bad math (1+1+1=3), and not as baffling mystery to avoid, but as the divine movement of love. The Divine Dance is an example of why Rohr has had such a profound influence on so many Christians seeking to balance reason and mystery, action and contemplation, not to mention faith and real life. - Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastor, House for All Sinners and Saints, Author, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People Rohr does not offer a syrupy evasion of this crisis. But he does underline two crucial points. First, God has not abandoned you, even if you are sure that God has. ("All the books of the Bible seem to agree," notes Rohr, "that somehow God is with us and we are not alone.") Second, "We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right." That may be cold comfort during the crisis—when your house has flooded, who wants to think about spiritual growth? But later you will notice. You will wonder how you possibly could have come to where you are without that flood.But we can’t know what the right filling for our container is until we’ve had the wrong one. The container must be filled in the first task first before it can be filled in the second. The Way Down is the Way Up Diversity in reading, including reading works by those of different worldviews, is very important to me. I will not rate a book low simply because I disagree with the author. I may one day write a book with which I would today disagree!

He posits that if the first half of life is about achievement and accomplishment, as well as learning from our mistakes and falls from grace, the passage into maturity (elderhood perhaps) allows us to shed the ego needs of the constructed false self, and embrace the uniqueness of the true self -- the soul -- with all its battle scars as well as beauty. This new personal freedom with its deepening consciousness can place us at odds with the familiar, including institutions (the church perhaps), and even family. We no longer measure ourselves by titles, or public images, roles or our place in the dominant culture. Understanding the spiritual aspects of aging is as important as appreciating the systems and biological processes that age us. Richard Rohr has given us a perfect guide to what he calls the "further journey," a voyage into the mystery and beauty of healthy spiritual maturity. - Mehmet Oz, M.D., host of the 'Dr. Oz Show' His use of scare quotes is unbelievable and belittles majority understanding whenever he gets a chance. “Salvation” “heaven” and “hell” are all just made up terms that are actually connected to modern psychology. He assigns whatever meaning he wants to Jesus’s words. Then—a crisis. "Some kind of falling," Rohr says, is necessary for continued spiritual development. "Normally a job, fortune, or reputation has to be lost," writes Rohr, "a death has to be suffered, a house has to be flooded, or a disease has to be endured." The crisis can be devastating. The crisis undoes you. The flood doesn't just flood your house—it washes out your spiritual life. What you thought you knew about living the spiritual life no longer suffices for the life you are living. None of us go into our spiritual maturity completely of our own accord, or by a totally free choice. We are led by Mystery, which religious people rightly call grace.” (p. xvi)

We grow spiritually much more by getting it wrong (making mistakes) than by doing it right.” (p. xxii) (emphasis mine).