Falling Upward: A Spirituality For The Two Halves Of Life

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Preston Sprinkle provides a resource that will encourage respectful and thoughtful conversations around the question "Does the Bible support same-sex marriage? There is the quick, constant change, particularly that shifting of fortune captured daily in Eastern culture by anyone who plays at the "I Ching;" the larger, seasonal rotation and stages of life changes (to everything, turn, turn, turn…. The protagonist thinks that the first task is their only task, but, in reality, it turns out the real task comes later.

In fact, it seems at times that Rohr is among those who say that all religions are really saying the same thing and that those who say otherwise are guilty of "either-or" thinking. I thank God for Richard Rohr’s sage-like presence in our culture: I honestly don’t know where I’d be without it. Yet, the thesis was a good (even if not a new) one, thought provoking, well-said, and well annotated. An elder would declare that the war was over and that the person was needed by the community as something more than a soldier.The Two Halves' refers to Jung's program of life, where in the first half, we build the Ego and secure a 'living'. The second half, then focuses on the contents of life, the becoming of a unique person who knows how to draw from all these structures and yet go beyond them. Rohr also pretends that Jesus never mentioned hell, although he did so more than any other person in the New Testament.

Although such structures may be of value for the integrity of the institutions themselves, and for younger teachers who are establishing their identities within it, they are of little use to those who are in the second half of life (and even less so, I suspect, for those in the last quarter of their lives, like me). Any question of your own importance or dignity has already been resolved once and for all and forever. I think part of what so many like in Rohr, and I've appreciated in his other writings is his ability to capture the imagination and heart in his word paintings.

Our main purpose has always been to survive, so we concentrate on building our identities: establishing a home, a relationship, friendships, and a community. Similarly, I wonder if the path from building the self to hearing the intimate stranger, the path from ego to spiritual spaciousness, is always linear. Much of the work of midlife is to tell the difference between those who are dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you. The worst section was when he presents a Thomas Merton poem to illustrate a point but then, not content to let Merton's words speak to the reader as they will, he deconstructs the poem as a "meditation" by explaining the "meaning" of the lines in his own much less evocative language. If you never deal with this shadow self, then you'll endure a miserable old age, always blaming others for not treating you well.

And then, of course, there are our own observations of those who are in the second half, and of those who remain forever in the first.Whatever the problem is, the process of resolving it makes the hero’s world larger and more open; as a result, the protagonist’s outlook is enlarged and opened, too. A family with liberal values can have just as consistent a structure as a family with conservative values. Until we learn to love others as ourselves, it's difficult to blame broken people who desperately try to affirm themselves when no one else will. Rohr does us all a service with this gem by applying Jungian thought and Joseph Campbell mythology to spirituality. First, there is the insight that life can be divided into two halves with the key task of the first being fashioning the "container" of one's life and that the second half is devoted to the "contents" of that container.