Falling Upwards

We are on the long train journey from Paris to Barcelona, the countryside is green and rolling but, I am sure will change and shift as we move further south. Time to read and reflect a bit before my days are dominated by the simple task of walking.

It is many, many years since I have read the brilliant book called ‘Falling Upwards’ by Richard Rohr where he explores spiritually for the second half of life. I was struck straight away by this line in the opening chapter:

“Homes are not meant to be lived in – but only to be moved out from.” It was part of a reflection on the need for us to journey, to move on in our spiritual lives and the way that the “familiar and the habitual are so falsely reassuring, and most of us make our homes there permanently.” Maybe one of the purposes of this summer of travel is to shake me physically out of the familiar and therefore to enable me to also begin to journey spiritually.

At the heart of this book is the idea that there are two projects in our lives, one, which is the focus for the first half of life, is all about the establishing of identity through work, relationships, all the things by which we create a sense of self. But the second focus in our lives, the harder project is “the task within the task”. As Richard puts it so well: “What we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing”. It is the heart of life, the thing that underpins and makes the difference and moves us from a focus that is about just getting through life, survival, to something more:

“As Bill Plotline, a wise guide, puts it, many of us learn to do our “survival dance,” but we never get to our actual “sacred dance.”.

 The title ‘Falling Upwards’ points to a core theme, that we need to go down before we can come up. This theme is, of course, at the heart of the Christian faith – death and resurrection. It is only as the seed dies in the ground that new birth comes. Yet, so often the Christian faith has bought into a ‘progress’ model, that we are moving forwards and upwards and the place of failure, of ‘falling down’ has been lost.

As I read this section I was aware of my own ‘perfectionist’ tendancy, and found this line both challenging and liberating “the demand for the perfect is the greatest enemy of the good”. To let go of the pressure to be first, to be best, to let go of the fear of falling and failure is fundamentally about trust and faith. We cannot “make” ourselves “good” and in fact “we grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right”. 

Of course we rarely choose to ‘go down’ and in the first half of life we do need some successes, affirmation to help form our sense of identity, but then we need to be open to all that we can learn from facing our mess ups, our imperfection and realise that through that we will find deeper meaning.

I was thinking of the conversation I had with my wise sabbatical supervisor as I pondered. How ‘driven’ am I to be ‘productive’ during this sabbatical? Even writing this blog can be seen as part of that desire for some sort of outcome from this time. I do not want to feel the time is ‘wasted’. Yet the message that constantly comes through is the importance of letting go, of ‘wasting’ time, of falling down.

In the English language we talk about ‘falling’ in love. There is a letting go that is part of trusting ourselves to the love of another. We also would rarely go willing to the vulnerable place that love involves, we have to fall into it. When we fall down spiritually it is similar, it is also a place of love and a place of vulnerability that we would struggle to choose.

“Great love is always a discovery, a revelation, a wonderful surprise, a falling into “something” much bigger and deeper that is literally beyond us and larger than us”.