Thursday after Ash Wednesday
In his wonderful book, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Richard Rohr (a Franciscan priest) writes eloquently about these two halves of life and why we must, one way or another, make our way from the first into the second.
The first half of life, he argues, consists of those years in which we work really had to become whoever we think we want to or should be. It’s when we pursue the education and training and experience and whatever else we might need to reach our goals. It’s also the time in which we apply all that preparation to achieving, climbing, performing, and rising. In other words, the first half of life (which he says is necessary and good) is when we are all about becoming the person that we think will make us happy and loved.
But, he argues, we can’t remain there. At some point, we are obliged to face the limits of the way we are in the world. Rohr puts it this way:
Sooner or later, . . . some event, person, death, idea, or relationship will enter your life that you simply cannot deal with, using your present skill set, your acquired knowledge, or your strong willpower. . . . At that point you will stumble over a necessary stumbling stone, as Isaiah calls it; or to state it in our language here, you will and you must “lose” at something.
This stumbling stone is not something anyone can anticipate and is never welcomed because it brings forth what Rohr calls a “necessary suffering.”
My own stumbling block showed up in the fall of 2006 when I was forced to face the fact that I was utterly miserable in my marriage. I could stay in it and just keep on hiding my deep sadness or I could blow it all up and be with my best friend (aka stumbling stone) who I could not lie to when he asked me how I felt about him. Stumble I did. I told him the truth—I loved him. He said he loved me too. And then the huge (and at the time) seemingly endless fall began.
Let’s just say I lost about everything I had worked so hard and so long for—my job (you can’t initiate a divorce and stay on the faculty of the small religious school where I taught), my status as a good person in the small town where I lived, the respect of the members of my church, my reputation as a good wife and mother. In short, I was at best persona non grata and at worst a complete social outcast.
My last semester at that school and in that small town was arguably the worst time of my whole life. Yes, I had found my true love and soulmate. But at such a huge cost.
Oddly, once emptied of just about everything I thought I was or valued in myself, I started to become who I really am.
I think this is the sort of thing that Jesus is talking about in the reading from Luke today. When that stumbling stone appears and we go head-over-heels right over it, we either embrace our undoing (and lose our life) so that we may enter the second half of life. Or we choose to protect the life we have worked so hard to build and miss out on the even better second half of life.
If you haven’t read Rohr’s book, I highly recommend it to you. I’ll close with a couple of quotes that capture well, I think, what Rohr and Jesus are promising us, if we will let ourselves stumble and fall.
In the second half of life, we do not have strong and final opinions about everything, every event, or most people, as much as we allow things and people to delight us, sadden us, and truly influence us. We no longer need to change or adjust other people to be happy ourselves. Ironically, we are more than ever before in a position to change people—but we do not need to—and that makes all the difference.
Strangely, all of life’s problems, dilemmas, and difficulties are now resolved not by negativity, attack, criticism, force, or logical resolution, but always by falling into a larger “brightness.” . . . This is the falling upward that we have been waiting for!
I learned this from my father St. Francis, who did not concentrate on attacking evil or others, but just spent his life falling, and falling many times into the good, the true, and the beautiful. It was the only way he knew how to fall into God.
Amen, brother.
- Susan Trollinger