By: Richard Rohr
Intro:
Richard Rohr is a Franciscan friar, a sort of monk of the Catholic Church. The number of times I’ve entered a church could probably be counted on my hands—I’m unsure if I’ve even entered a Catholic one. So, you might wonder how and why I’ve come to so highly recommend this book?
A great fan of The On Being Podcast, I listened to Richard’s 2017 episode “Growing Up Men,” in which I sensed him particularly wise and oddly unbound by the blinders often imposed by organized religion. Rooted in Catholicism, yet open to the examination of the world at large, I remained open to him and ordered his book. The title, Falling Upward intrigued me, as I’m so aware one of my greatest falls—a life-threatening bout of meningoencephalitis—paradoxically became one of the most important, eye-opening events of my own life.
Falling Upward now holds the record for the most index cards I’ve gleaned from a book for my Commonplace Book. Perhaps excessively, I transcribed almost one-hundred forty passages from the book’s one-hundred sixty pages. Richard illuminates a path to and a place of wisdom well beyond the reach of our current cultural roadmap—beyond the common goal of thriving at surviving few seem to look beyond today. For this awareness alone, this book is worth the read, but Richard has woven a great many other universal tenants and gifts within.
My 10 Favorite Index Cards:
“Holding our inner blueprint, which is a good description of our soul, and returning it humbly to the world and to God by love and service is indeed of ultimate concern. Each thing and every person must act out its nature fully, at whatever cost. It is our life’s purpose, and the deepest meaning of “natural law.” We are here to give back fully and freely what was first given to us—but now writ personally—by us! It is probably the most courageous and free act we will ever perform—and it take both halves of our life to do it fully. The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half of life is actually writing it and owning it.”
“We are more struggling to survive than to thrive, more just “getting through” or trying to get to the top than finding out what is really at the top or was already at the bottom.”
“As I began to say in the Introduction, the task of the first half of life is to create a proper container for one’s life and answer the first essential questions: “What makes me significant?” “How can I support myself?” and “Who will go with me?” The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents than this container was meant to hold and deliver. As Mary Olver puts it, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” In other words, the container is not an end in itself, but exists for the sake of your deeper and fullest life, which you largely do not know about yourself! Far too many people just keep doing repair work on the container itself and never “throw their nets into the deep” (John 21:6) to bring in the huge catch that awaits them.”
“We have only to follow the thread of the hero path. Where we had thought to find and abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outwards, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”
“In the first half of life, we fight the devil and have the illusion and inflation of “winning” now and then; in the second half of life, we always lose because we are invariably fighting God. The first battles solidify the ego and create a stalwart loyal soldier; the second battles defeat the ego because God always wins. No wonder so few want to let go of their loyal soldier; no wonder so few have the faith to grow up. The ego hates losing, even to God.”
“The tragic sense of life is ironically not tragic at all, at least in the Big Picture. Living in such deep time, connected to past and future, prepares us for necessary suffering, keeps us from despair about our own failure and loss, and ironically offers us a way through it all. We are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us. The tragic sense of life is not unbelief, pessimism, fatalism, or cynicism. It is just ultimate and humiliating realism, which for some reason demands a lot of forgiveness of almost everything.”
“You learn to positively ignore and withdraw your energy from evil or stupid things rather than fight them directly. You fight things only when you are directly called and equipped to do so. We all become a well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the question after a while. You lose all inner freedom.”
“The general pattern in story and novel is that the heroes learn and grow from encountering their shadow, whereas villains never do. Invariably, the movies and novels that are most memorable show real “character development” and growing through shadow work. This inspires us all because it calls us all.”
“So our question now becomes, “How can I honor the legitimate needs of the first half of life, while creating space, vision, time, and grace for the second?” The holding of this tension is they very shape of wisdom. Only hermits and some retired people can almost totally forget the first and devote themselves totally to the second, but even they must eat, drink, and find housing and clothing! The human art form is in uniting fruitful activity with a contemplative stance—not one or the other, but always both at the same time.”
“We are so attached to our frame, game, and raft that it becomes a substitute for objective truth, because it is all we have! Inside such entrapment, most people do not see things as they ARE; they see things as THEY are. In my experience, this is most of the world, unless people have done their inner work, at least some shadow work, and thereby entered into wisdom, or nondualistic thinking.”