Editor’s Note: Father Richard Rohr, OFM, is the author of more than twenty books on the spiritual life. While there are many different maps for the journey that is our life with Christ, one of the most valuable reorientations to what it means to live well, or flourish, in the kingdom of God is Jesus’ reframing of “success” throughout his ministry but particularly in the Beatitudes. Dallas Willard wrote about this extensively in The Divine Conspiracy, where he helped us understand that the kingdom of Heaven is an upside-down kingdom. In the same way, this excerpt from Fr. Richard’s Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life reminds us that what we once thought was failure might indeed by a place of transformation and life in Christ. Fr. Richard and Honesty About The Journey editor Alan Fadling, who had more in common than they expected, then continue the conversation into a deeper exploration of true and false selves.

A journey into the second half of our own lives awaits us all. Not everybody goes there, even though all of us get older, and some of us get older than others. A “further journey” is a well-kept secret, for some reason. Many people do not even know there is one. There are too few who are aware of it, tell us about it, or know that it is different from the journey of the first half of life. So why should I try to light up the path a little? Why should I presume that I have anything to say here? And why should I write to people who are still on their first journey, and happily so?

I am driven to write because after forty years as a Franciscan teacher, working in many settings, religions, countries, and institutions, I find that many, if not most, people and institutions remain stymied in the preoccupations of the first half of life. By that I mean that most people’s concerns remain those of establishing their personal (or superior) identity, creating various boundary markers for themselves, seeking security, and perhaps linking to what seem like significant people or projects. These tasks are good to some degree and even necessary. We are all trying to find what the Greek philosopher Archimedes called a “lever and a place to stand” so that we can move the world just a little bit. The world would be much worse off if we did not do this first and important task.

But, in my opinion, this first-half-of-life task is no more than finding the starting gate. It is merely the warm-up act, not the full journey. It is the raft but not the shore. If you realize that there is a further journey, you might do the warm-up act quite differently, which would better prepare you for what follows. People at any age must know about the whole arc of their life and where it is tending and leading.

We know about this further journey from the clear and inviting voices of others who have been there, from the sacred and secular texts that invite us there, from our own observations of people who have entered this new territory, and also, sadly, from those who never seem to move on. The further journey usually appears like a seductive invitation and a kind of promise or hope. We are summoned to it, not commanded to go, perhaps because each of us has to go on this path freely, with all the messy and raw material of our own unique lives. But we don’t have to do it, nor do we have to do it alone. There are guideposts, some common patterns, utterly new kinds of goals, a few warnings, and even personal guides on this further journey. . . .

All of these sources and resources give me the courage and the desire to try to map the terrain of this further journey, along with the terrain of the first journey, but most especially the needed crossover points. . . . I consider the usual crossover points to be a kind of “necessary suffering,” stumbling over stumbling stones, and lots of shadowboxing, but often just a gnawing desire for “ourselves,” for something more, or what I will call “homesickness.”

I am trusting that you will see the truth of this map, yet it is the kind of soul truth that we only know “through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12, KJVScriptures marked (KJV) are from the King James Version of the Bible and is in the public domain in most of the world.)—and through a glass brightly at the same time. Yet any glass through which we see is always made of human hands, like mine. All spiritual language is by necessity metaphor and symbol. The Light comes from elsewhere, yet it is necessarily reflected through those of us still walking on the journey ourselves. 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!”

I believe that God gives us our soul, our deepest identity, our True Self, our unique blueprint, at our own “immaculate conception.” Our unique little bit of heaven is installed by the Manufacturer within the product, at the beginning! We are given a span of years to discover it, to choose it, and to live our own destiny to the full. If we do not, our True Self will never be offered again, in our own unique form—which is perhaps why almost all religious traditions present the matter with utterly charged words like “heaven” and “hell.” Our soul’s discovery is utterly crucial, momentous, and of pressing importance for each of us and for the world. We do not “make” or “create” our souls; we just “grow” them up. We are the clumsy stewards of our own souls. We are charged to awaken, and much of the work of spirituality is learning how to stay out of the way of this rather natural growing and awakening. We need to unlearn a lot, it seems, to get back to that foundational life that is “hidden in God” (Colossians 3:3). Yes, transformation is often more about unlearning than learning, which is why the religious traditions call it “conversion” or “repentance.”

For me, no poet says this quite so perfectly as the literally inimitable Gerard Manley Hopkins in his Duns ScotusJohn Duns Scotus, commonly called Duns Scotus, was a Scottish Catholic priest and Franciscan friar, university professor, philosopher, and theologian. He is one of the four most important Christian philosopher-theologians of Western Europe in the High Middle Ages, together with Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and William of Ockham.–inspired poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.”

 

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying what I do is me: for that I came.

§

01.  A Conversation with Richard Rohr, OFM

Alan Fadling: Our theme is “Flourishing,” and when the editors met to discuss contributors, we all thought of you and especially of Falling Upward. Thank you for your willingness to join us and talk about that book. In it, I see that you highlight the dynamics of our first and our second half of life.

Richard Rohr, OFM: Well, it’s just one schema, but by keeping it that simple, it does allow people to make a crucial distinction between the container and the contents. What happens after we’ve put so many years into building our personal container, our own ego structure, our public identity, our personal identity, it becomes very hard to let go of it. We think it’s “me.” In my next book, Immortal Diamond, I talk about that as a false self: it’s not bad, it’s not evil, it’s not wrong. The problem is that it poses as the true self. And after you’ve put thirty or forty years into proving that you’re the best lawyer, doctor, housewife, whatever, you get very attached to this identity and you think it’s who you are. So when it sours, perhaps in your late forties or fifties, you see there’s more to “me” than being a chiropractor or a happily married man, or whatever your identity has been.

 

AF:     Well, I find that very helpful. So how do we see flourishing in first-half terms as compared to how we may come to see it in our second half?

RR:     That’s an excellent way to say it, Alan, because flourishing in the first half of life would largely be about external success: Is it making me money? Is it gaining me admiration? Is it providing me status and stability? And all of those are worthy goals, but even in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and values they are in the lower range. In a country like America, that is itself a first-half-of-life country, it’s very easy to stay there. You think you’re really progressing in the race of life because your office is bigger or your title is better than someone else’s. All of that is going to mean nothing at the end. So by the second half of life, you start listening to those suspicions or intuitions that “I’m more than being this or that.” I’m more than my outward identities. These identities show themselves to be inadequate—if you’re listening. Now, a lot of people are not listening, unfortunately, so they just build higher and higher towers inside a very small field. That’s the loss of the soul as Jesus might describe it. “If you gain the whole world and lose your own soul. . . .” [Matthew 16:26, NLTScripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Streams, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.]

 

AF:     Absolutely. There must be many reasons we get stuck in the first half. You’ve already mentioned how attached we become to how we’ve defined “living” so far. Why else do we get stuck?

RR:     Well, the reason that all great spiritual teachers talk about a necessary death is because the first half of life tends to be ego-led. It has to be. That’s what we mean by being egocentric. And you’re stuck because your pursuits are largely self-referential. That’s the very problem of egocentricity. You can’t see you’re egocentric. Jesus makes it so clear that there’s a self that has to die so that another self can live. Now, sometimes religion doesn’t teach you about that necessary dying. Then it’s all about holding on and maintaining the status quo. Much of that old-time religion was simply love of tradition, what our new Pope Francis calls “antiquarianism.”

When you listen to Jesus, the very first words out of his mouth are “Change.” It’s usually translated “Repent,” which isn’t a very good translation at all. He’s saying, “Change.” Metanoia—change your mind. So without much teaching in any of the mainline churches about a necessary dying to the ego or to the false self, more and more people, clergy included, remain in the first half of life, sometimes with the best of intentions. They’re nice people, but they just keep decorating their early persona, trying to do it better and better, running faster and faster inside of that limited self-image.

 

AF:     So one of the things that invites us out of that little container where we’ve lived our lives for so long is simply listening, maybe even listening to some of the hungers that linger and are not satisfied by my first-half pursuits?

RR:     That’s it. It’s a deeper listening to the deeper self. But how do you teach people to do that? I think that’s what prayer was supposed to be. We changed prayer into saying prayers, reciting prayers, performing prayers, but not this deeper listening.

 

AF:     So I find myself in my early fifties, and so at least chronologically well into my own second half. What does this invitation to listen look like?

RR:     Well, the reason I gave the book the title Falling Upward is that you’re going to fall anyway. All of your wonderful salvation projects and life projects, not all of them will fail you, but if you’re listening, most of them eventually do. So it’s largely a matter of teaching people how to listen for the obvious, not to fix it but to fall with it. If a humiliation or so-called failure comes your way, instead of immediately trying to shore up and look good again, we can listen for what this has to tell me. Could God be speaking in this loss of my job or even my marriage, or in this tragic death in the family? All of these fallings are invitations to the deeper conversations. What does this whole “false life” mean? It’s a question we don’t hear when we’re driven toward success, looking good and feeling good at all costs. We’re a climbing culture. That’s what the American is trained to do. So how do you teach creative failure in a culture of climbing? That’s what we’re up against.

 

AF:     And so “falling upward” is a creative way to think into that. In fact, the word of Jesus about his coming is so that we would have life—a full life. How you see that full life expressing itself in second-half terms?

RR:     Well, a lot of us grew up in organized religion to think that maybe Jesus was against fullness of life; that it was all about carrying your cross. There is, of course, a necessary suffering, but what you’re letting go of is what you don’t need anyway. Jesus is not telling you that he doesn’t want you to have an abundant life. Quite the contrary, God wants you to have the abundant life, which is the real life. That has much more to do with interiority. If you’re not alive inside, if you can’t be content with yourself alone, you don’t have an inner life. That’s the easiest way to say it. So, when you are flourishing you’ll feel that spring bubbling up within you, which Jesus also speaks of in John’s Gospel. There’s an inner awareness.

This time last week I was just out in your area at the Religious Education Convention in Anaheim. I didn’t go to Disneyland, but we were right across the street. I walked some of those streets and saw people so preoccupied with entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment, but when you have to entertain yourself to death to feel alive or happy, then you know you haven’t found it inside. Happiness is clearly an inside job, a place of union with yourself, union with your neighbor, union with that flower or tree right in front of you, and when those unions are present the inner life is alive.

 

AF:     It sounds like what we invest in for the first half of life eventually begins to bring diminishing returns, as though more effort has not resulted in more life. In fact, it seems the opposite. And as you describe these dynamics of the interior life, there seems to be a superabundance, that my efforts were not the whole story in the first place.

RR:     Yes, that’s why we speak of ourselves as an addictive society. You seek more and more of what has already proven not to work. That’s why you need more and more of it. If it were working, you wouldn’t need more of it. But anything you need more and more of, whether clothes, consumer objects, home remodeling, whatever, then obviously this is not enough to make you happy. You’ve finally got to ask that question: Why can’t I be happy with things as they are? Now, that doesn’t make these things bad. It’s just when any of them become addictions, then, as you said, we experience diminishing returns. They actually tend to satisfy you less and less. For example, so many people who have romantic or sexual problems will tell you that it’s the sexual chase that is so exciting. Actually doing the work of a relationship, as we both know, is work.

 

AF:     It surely is. It’s good work, but it is work. As I was reading the introduction to Falling Upward, I came across that line from Desmond Tutu when he says, “You know, we’re only the light bulbs,” Richard, “and our job is just to remain screwed in.” I love that line. What’s that looking like for you, that sort of connectedness, that remaining screwed in?

RR:     Well, you know, I just turned seventy-one yesterday.

 

AF:     Really? I turned fifty-three yesterday.

RR:     Oh! We’ve got the same birthday!

 

AF:     That’s unexpected!

RR:     Well, I’m so glad I mentioned it. I always thought it was a great birthday to have, the first day of spring.

 

AF:     Oh, I know. I love it, too.

RR:     Well, I was supposed to say that, wasn’t I? So while I’m not retired, I have stopped most traveling. Even that trip to Anaheim was a bit of an exception. So yesterday I was working on my yard, and I realize how it takes less and less to keep me screwed in. For instance, it’s not going to fancy retreats or exotic places. As I start my day here in my little hermitage behind the Franciscan house, if I start it with a quiet stint, a little spiritual reading, and a little journaling (which is what I normally do each day), I feel like I can deal with whatever issues, personalities, or problems the day presents. And more and more I now live in a kind of conscious union with God all day. It’s harder for me to even make a distinction between “This is prayer time” and “This is not prayer time.” It’s all union time, and as long as I’m enjoying that conscious union then it really does feel like my life is prayer.

 

AF:     It’s the simplicity of Jesus’ language in John 15 of just abiding and simply being at home in him. Something else I was drawn to in Falling Upward was this: “We are summoned to the further journey and not commanded to go, perhaps because each of us has to go on this path freely with all the messy and raw material of our own unique lives.” Could you say a bit more about that freedom with which we must progress in this journey?

RR:     I think it’s important that we see the Gospel as framed in terms of an invitation. That is not the way it was given to many of us. There were necessary demands before God could even love us. When God’s love is already resolved from the beginning, there’s nothing we can do to make God love us. You can see this whole spiritual walk as merely a free invitation. How soon are you going to get it that you’re walking in the garden with God, even despite the pains and sufferings of this world? That to me is the key. Spirituality must be unpackaged inside the realm of freedom. I don’t mean the cheap freedom that we often talk about in our country. I mean inner freedom. I’m being invited by a friend to taste something beautiful, to see something good. It’s all invitation. We see that in Jesus’ invitation of the early disciples. It was an invitation to a further walk that didn’t mean that those who were not chosen, like the twelve were, weren’t loved by God or used by God. It was the invitation to a further journey. An invitation implies the freedom to say no. It’s free.

 

AF:     Seeing this life as an invitation is so freeing. As we bring our conversation to a close, is there anything else you’d like to share that didn’t come up in our conversation already?

RR:     Well, as I say in the first chapter that what I call “falling upward” has to be the most counterintuitive wisdom there is. I find that all of the religions are saying it at the higher levels, but not at the lower levels. At the lower levels it’s all about climbing, performing, achieving and proving myself worthy to God and to myself. The great turnaround comes when you realize, “My gosh, when God really got a hold of me it wasn’t when I succeeded but when I failed.” Success has nothing to teach you after the age of thirty. I guess I can tell you that since you’re fifty-three. At our age, everything meaningful that you learn comes from mistakes, humiliation, failure, and falling. When you say this to most people, they nod in agreement but there’s still an ego resistance. We don’t want that to be true, darn it. We would like to climb and say, “See how wonderful I am,” you know, but it never works out. Never works that way, no. So maybe that’s the best way I can try to summarize it.