Ten Days of Richard Rohr...Day 7

In Chapter 8 of Falling Upward, Rohr gives voice to my entry into the second half of my spiritual journey.

I grew through early adulthood under the mantle of a number of different Protestant denominations. It occurred to me along the way that those labels were completely unnecessary. That was my first break out of our famed boxes into which we try to stuff God, as He looks on with probable amusement, the rolling of His eyes, or worse, fury.

We try to limit the God of the Universe with "mine-is-better-than-yours" denominations, traditions, translations, all of which create a heaven and hell that operates out of what Rohr calls our amnesia, rather than our union with the Living God. We have forgotten the place from which we originated--our souls began in this very union; life on earth is growing up with authentic freedom to choose whether or not to return to that union.

I began to wrestle with this dilemma: if God is greater than all of His enemies--our sin, a bereft culture, and Satan and his legions--how come He [God] doesn't end up with all of His precious creations somewhere in an eternal timeline? Because I took God out of that box in my mind, I was prepared for Rohr's exceeding eloquence:

It is religion's job to teach us and guide us on this discovery of our True Self, but it usually makes the mistake of turning this into a worthiness contest of some sort...[when in fact, the facets of religion] are just tugboats to get you away from the shore and out into the right sea; they are the oars to get you working and engaged with the Mystery.

Now hold onto your seat. If you are still firmly entrenched in the first half of life, which is a wonderful and necessary place to move through, what follows will not make sense and may even sound treacherous. But this blog series is in its second half of Rohr's book, so onward we must go, again in his words:

If you accept a punitive notion of God, who punishes or even eternally tortures those who do not love him, then you have an absurd universe where most people on this earth end up being more loving than God! God excludes no one from union, but must allow us to exclude ourselves in order for us to maintain our freedom.

Our word for that exclusion is hell, and it must be maintained as a logical possibility. There must be the logical possibility of excluding oneself from union and to choose separation or superiority over community and love. No one is in hell unless that individual himself or herself chooses a final aloneness and separation.

Life is all about practicing for heaven. We practice by choosing union freely--ahead of time--and now. Heaven is the state of union both here and later. As now, so it will be then. No one is in heaven unless he or she wants to be, and all are in heaven as soon as they live in union...if you go to heaven alone, wrapped in your private worthiness, it is by definition not heaven. The more you exclude, the more hellish and lonely your existence always is.

And finally, in case your first-half-of-life-head has not already exploded:

The ego clearly prefers an economy of merit, where we can divide the world into winners and losers, to any economy of grace, where merit or worthiness loses all meaning. In the first case, a few of us good guys attain glory. In the second case, all the glory is to God.

What a troubling thought that religion--our churches--might be oars carrying us to a place where we get the glory instead of God, where our superiority and Right exclude the Truth that God is poised to include all on His terms and His timeline.

We are imposing a geography of heaven and hell, along with our timeline, on the fluid destination pattern that belongs only to God.

How staggering to view Him with so large an embrace. Are we to wrestle with the largeness of this view?

Yes. In fact, I would say,

Don't leave home without it.

Ten Days of Richard Rohr...Day 6

In Luke 14, Jesus says:

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple.

I met that verse years ago with the same shock I privately registered when I read that Jesus, facing his crucifixion, asked God if there was a way out. A human moment, I guess.

If that was his human moment, the verse above is one of his most divine moments.

We spend the first half of life under the express influence of our family only now to be asked to hate them? What could possibly be divine about that?

It takes language that strong to underscore the importance of the discovery yet at hand in our second half of life. Something is about to wrestle its way to the top of our consciousness, as if breaking through the water's surface after years of residing in the deep. It is our soul and its longing to direct us to a new home and family while yet on earth.

Our soul, through necessary suffering (Day 5), will commandeer the ship that is our life with a new direction, new longing, but that in truth, is not new at all. It is steering us to the home where we began before we were birthed into our nuclear family home.

The union of our souls with God at a newly conscious level is a love so great, so immeasurable, that any family we have known pales in comparison. In fact, because so many refuse to sojourn here, some of our very family will try to limit us with the confines of their critical spirit and notion that what they have in the first half of life is sufficient. That is our goodbye call.

I look around and see anger, frenzy, despair, loneliness, depression. The chase seems to be leading everywhere but to the deep, where the discovery lies. The homesickness of soul that drives all of us is not given permission to find its soulmate that is God.

Necessary suffering leads to home and the unveiling of the deep.

Unnecessary refusal to go this route leads to misery and despair.

Only one feeds our strength.

Ten Days of Richard Rohr...Day 5

I walked away from my career only seventeen years in with no clear understanding of why. Even more tragically in my heart, two of my three children walked the other way for their high school years, deciding to live with their dad. I never saw those losses coming.

Somewhere along the way I had signed up for whatever in God's design, fully wanting His total influence in my life. I didn't know that meant brokenness and lots of it.

The wilderness of the next eighteen years was...excruciating. I never thought I'd make it through the day, any day, much less the next one.

Has this been the necessary suffering that Rohr describes:

Until we are led to the limits of our game plan, and find it to be insufficient, we will not search out or find the real source, the deep well, or the constantly flowing stream (p. 67).

This very independent, strong, driven wife, mother and educator met failure at every level...and survived.

It is why I can so fully embrace the premise of Falling Upward.

Is failure required? What kind of message is that?

Rohr says:

Falling, losing, failing, transgression, and sin are the pattern, I am sorry to report. Yet they all lead toward home...so we must stumble and fall...We must actually be out of the driver's seat for a while, or we will never learn how to give up control to the Real Guide...this kind of falling is what I mean by necessary suffering (pp. 66-67).

Treachery? No...the Cross. And a most authentic embrace of it. For only in this wilderness will we reach for and expand toward the Love and Compassion that are the Power that overcomes, breaks...and heals.

What a crazy world is the Way of the Cross.

Is yours (your world) upside down yet? Have you entered your necessary suffering?

As we'll see, it leads to the sacred dance.

Ten Days of Richard Rohr...Day 4

For three days, we have considered our need for a strong container--a first half of life that has the order of self-discipline immersed in a warmth of love expressed through a mirror of positive self-worth.

Someone has demonstrated to you that you matter and he or she loves you enough to help you structure your ability to say yes and no to the world in a strengthening, not destructive-to-you way.

From your loyal soldier posture, you begin to wonder why there is such a tragic dimension to the world. If good choices can make life happen for you as you have been studiously learning, wouldn't the elimination of tragedy and suffering be manageable simply through the whole world making better choices?

That surely looks to be true.

Until we actually listen to the biblical revelation in Rohr's words:

The genius of the biblical revelation is that it refuses to deny the dark side of things, but forgives failure and integrates falling to achieve its only promised wholeness, which is much of the point of this whole book [Falling Upward]. (p. 59).

It is astonishing to us in our first half of life to realize that evil fits inside Jesus' embrace. Evil is the root out of which our capacity for sin grows. The transformational forgiveness of God only works if a transformation is required.

We are left with a dilemma. The brokenness of the world cannot be reconciled with our first-half-of-life container that has come to understand right and wrong. If that was all there was to it, wouldn't God of all people just commerce in the right?

Rohr leads us into just what we need at this point: a great turnaround, a way to reconcile that which is without apparent reconciliation in our first-half state. He says:

In the divine economy of grace, sin and failure become the base metal and raw material for the redemption experience itself. (p. 60).

God chooses our messes, not our attempts at perfection, through which to demonstrate His massive and redemptive love through grace.

How in the world does this "make sense?"

Goodbye, religion. Hello, broken world.

Stay tuned. We are just getting to the good part.

Ten Days of Richard Rohr...Day 3

With scores of examples, Richard Rohr, in Falling Upward, makes the case that there are two halves of life. The first half is where we are whittled by limits and boundaries into a "loyal soldier" of sorts, with the power of healthy self-discipline slowly baked into us.

The second half is the larger journey, where we discover our inner blueprint and learn to share it with the world. Ego is transformed quietly, yet eventfully, by the grace and mystery of God. That is for another day.

Today we lament Rohr's words that are a scathing indictment on our often failed development in the first half of life, as he imagines the prospects who come before us for hire:

If you want a job done well, on time, with accountability and no excuses, you had best hire someone who has faced a few limit situations. He or she alone has the discipline, the punctuality, the positive self-image, and the persistence to do a good job. If you want the opposite, hire someone who has been coddled, been given "I Am Special" buttons for doing nothing special, and had all his or her bills paid by others, and whose basic egocentricity has never been challenged or undercut. To be honest, this seems to describe much of the workforce and the student body of America. Many of the papers I receive in summer graduate courses at major universities are embarrassing to read in terms of both style and content, yet these same "adults" are shocked if they do not get an A. This does not bode well for the future of our country (p. 31).

He traces the problem back to parenting:

Children need a good degree of order, predictability, and coherence to grow up well, as Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, and many others have taught. Chaos and chaotic parents will rightly make children cry, withdraw, and rage--both inside and outside (p. 29).

Are you in charge of children? Certainly you are in charge of yourself. Those you lead (including yourself) need calm and limits and protection in the soldiering first part of life where our container is fashioned. There is no substitute for helping others and ourselves interact with rules and boundaries, bridling our immature responses to allow maturity to gradually take the reins.

Does someone in your circle of influence need your wisdom and guidance to understand this? Do they need you to inject their frazzle with a calm pointing toward a more self-disciplined path?

Don't leave us to ourselves if we need your tough-love coaching. The rage and indulgence of today's young is ours to correct and self-correct.

Give the gift of a healthy container to yourself and those you lead.

Ten Days of Richard Rohr...Day 2

In graduate school for educational administration, I was struck by the concept of situational leadership. School leaders assess the maturity of their followers and interact with them accordingly. An immature teacher needs more assistance and guidance from the principal; the mature teacher less.

Immaturity describes the rebellious two-year-old and the argumentative teenager, but these are stages created by God to stir us to discover our identities and our boundaries. Through young adulthood, we are absorbing every mirror of ourselves, good and bad, to fill in what Rohr calls our container.

We move through the immature-teacher-of-ourselves stage, trying to gain footing for our ego, that we might become anchored in a healthy version of our identity, or container. Hopefully we are moving through this frenzy with an ear turned to leaders who are ahead of us, whose containers are so rooted in maturity that they are showing us there is a second half (of earthly life) yet to live.

A child looks around at a small world and learns how and where he fits. As the world expands, he can stretch his view of himself without losing his uprightness.

A church's pursuit of God sometimes creates a small world of rules and regulations and shrinks to fit. When God seeks to expand its world with His agenda of love for the lawless, it cannot stretch its view of self, because its uprightness is rigid and inflexible.

The child and the church are both in need of understanding there IS a second half of existence. As both teach themselves by interacting with their world, immaturity will only phase into maturity if the container--their identity--is solid. Maturity means moving, growth, leaving what is known to follow God's call into the unknown.

In Rohr's words, To build your house well is, ironically, to be nudged beyond its doors.

Oh, the fear of maturity! But the swell of life lies there--it is the chase, the pursuit that is wired within us and within the Spirit-base of our churches.

How is your container? And that of your church?

Pray to enter the swell. Who you and your church are meant to be(come) hang in the balance.

Ten Days of Richard Rohr...Day 1

I once heard a speaker comment that the word we will use most often upon our arrival in heaven is "Aha!"

We will suddenly understand how all our trials and troubles on earth worked together for our good because we will no longer see the glass darkly.

What if a great book could accelerate our seeing...now?

Richard Rohr, in Falling Upward, takes the storyline that is, in fact, the essence of our life on this earth and connects dots we didn't even understand were ours to connect.

A master chef can take the ingredients you already have in your kitchen and create a masterpiece dish that you had no idea you could have made.

So it is with Richard Rohr. He takes the life we already have on this earth and shows us how it becomes a masterpiece life, full of the Master Himself, and signature in that we can uncover the second half of our spiritual life's journey that is the inner blueprint of our soul.

A hard-working young man I know said recently, "I work really hard day after day, accumulating this or that, and realize that it will all be gone someday. It makes me wonder what life is really about."

That young man is about to uncover the inner blueprint of his soul. He is about to step into the second half of his life though only in his twenties. He detects the yearning in his heart hardwired into him by God before a single of his days was begun.

Want to come along? Want to realize that there is a second half for your life that comes after the things we pursue, acquire and fashion into our identity during the first half of adulthood?

Richard Rohr gives this discovery a name. He calls it falling upward.

Yes, we must fall. But how beautiful to think it would be...upward.