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Earlier, I wrote a column about an adventure-filled trip I took to the emergency room (See: tinyurl.com/44hfcs39). At the time I wrote that piece, I thought we'd solved the questions of what was ailing me. Well, not so fast. Since then, I've experienced what feels like a cascade of related issues. As far as I'm aware I'm not standing on death's welcome mat yet, so I don't want to sound whiny. But I do continue to feel perfectly rotten, and every fresh medical report sounds grimmer than the preceding ones. It's enough to get a guy down, especially a guy unused to illness. I keep thinking, "Hey, I'm too young for this nonsense." Anyway, as a way of attempting to feed my soul and calm my frustrated mind, I've been revisiting the most illuminating religious book I've read in the past several years: Richard Rohr's "Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life." If that sounds familiar, it could be because I wrote about the same book a couple of years ago (See: tinyurl.com/3rnj8p9s). Rohr is a Franciscan priest who founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, N.M. The author of many books, he's among a handful of contemporary Christian writers who really speak to me. I've never met him, but as I said in 2023, he has helped me make sense of the transitions in my life as I ago. (An aside: he's discussed in the recent HBO crime-drama miniseries "Task," in which Mark Ruffalo plays an FBI agent who formerly was a Roman Catholic priest. I was pleasantly surprised when a couple of the characters got into a discussion of my own personal guru.) In "Falling Upward," Rohr divides our spiritual journeys into what he calls the first and second halves of life. These don't necessarily correspond with our actual age. The first half of life is universal, he says, but comparatively shallow. We're preoccupied with succeeding, proving ourselves right, protecting our careers, establishing who is or isn't part of our in-group. Mainly we're controlled by what Rohr calls the fear-based preoccupations of the lizard brain. Then, something happens to us. Unfortunately, it's usually something cataclysmic: a moral disgrace, the death of a loved one, the rebellion of a beloved child. Whatever it is, it destroys our previous ego-driven assumptions about ourselves, others and God. This is the "falling" of the book's title. But the theme of "Falling Upward" is that this fall can, in fact, touch off a personal revelation and an inner revolution. Some people find their pain paradoxically moves them into a higher spiritual awareness. Old concerns become meaningless. Better, deeper things come. Having lost what mattered so immensely before, those who fall upward are no longer afraid of losing. They don't care about defending their turf, because they no longer have a turf. Having had their sacred beliefs demolished, they don't assume they know everything -- or anything. Having been rejected, they reach out to other rejected people. Anyway, I love this book and find it talking to me again as I wrestle with this sudden decline in my health. Here are a few excerpts. Maybe one of them will speak to you: "So we must stumble and fall, I am sorry to say. And that does not mean reading about falling, as you are doing here. 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." "You need a very strong container to hold the contents and contradictions that arrive later in life. You ironically need a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego." Rohr writes about Miguel de Unamuno, a Spanish philosopher who warned his European culture it had distorted the meaning of faith by aligning it with the Western idea of "progress" rather than with the Scriptures. "Unamuno equates the notion of faith with trust in an underlying life force so strong that it even includes death. Faith also includes reason, but is a larger category than reason for Unamuno. Truth is not always about pragmatic problem solving and making things 'work,' but about reconciling contradictions. Just because something might have some dire effects does not mean it is not true or even good. ... Life is inherently tragic, and that is the truth that only faith, but not our seeming logic, can accept." "Most of nature seems to totally accept major loss, gross inefficiency, mass extinctions, and short life spans as the price of life at all. Feeling that sadness, and even its full absurdity, ironically pulls us into the general dance, the unified field, an ironic and deep gratitude for what is given. ... Grace seems to be at the foundation of everything." "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, at least a few of us good guys attain glory. In the second case, all the glory is to God." Amen, my Franciscan brother. Paul Prather is a rural pastor in Kentucky. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com
