by Richard Rohr
One more warning, if that is the right word: you will not know for sure that this message is true until you are on the “up” side. You will never imagine it to be true until you have gone through the “down” yourself and come out on the other side in larger form. You must be pressured “from on high,” by fate, circumstance, love, or God, because nothing in you wants to believe it, or wants to go through it. Falling upward is a “secret” of the soul, known not by thinking about it or proving it but only by risking it—at least once. And by allowing yourself to be led—at least once. Those who have allowed it know it is true, but only after the fact.
This is probably why Jesus praised faith and trust even more than love. It takes a foundational trust to fall or to fail—and not to fall apart. Faith alone holds you while you stand waiting and hoping and trusting. Then, and only then, will deeper love happen. It's no surprise at all that in English (and I am told in other languages as well) we speak of “falling” in love. I think it is the only way to get there. None would go freely, if we knew ahead of time what love is going to ask of us. Very human faith lays the utterly needed foundation for the ongoing discovery of love. Have no doubt, though: 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.
Jesus tells the disciples as they descend from the mountain of transfiguration, “Do not talk about these things until the Human One is risen from the dead” (by which he means until you are on the other side of loss and renewal). If you try to assert wisdom before people have themselves walked it, be prepared for much resistance, denial, push-back, and verbal debate. As the text in Mark continues, “the disciples continued to discuss among themselves what ‘rising from the dead’ might even mean” (Mark 9:9–10). You cannot imagine a new space fully until you have been taken there. I make this point strongly to help you understand why almost all spiritual teachers tell you to “believe” or “trust” or “hold on.” They are not just telling you to believe silly or irrational things. They are telling you to hold on until you can go on the further journey for yourself, and they are telling you that the whole spiritual journey is, in fact, for real—which you cannot possibly know yet.
The language of the first half of life and the language of the second half of life are almost two different vocabularies, known only to those who have been in both of them. The advantage of those on the further journey is that they can still remember and respect the first language and task. They have transcended but also included all that went before. In fact, if you cannot include and integrate the wisdom of the first half of life, I doubt if you have moved to the second. Never throw out the baby with the bathwater. People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place. They are not mere iconoclasts or rebels.
I have often thought that this is the symbolic meaning of Moses breaking the first tablets of the law, only to go back up the mountain and have them redone (Exodus 32:19–34, 35) by Yahweh. The second set of tablets emerges after a face-to-face encounter with God, which changes everything. Our first understanding of law must fail us and disappoint us. Only after breaking the first tablets of the law is Moses a real leader and prophet. Only afterwards does he see God's glory (Exodus 33:18f), and only afterwards does his face “shine” (Exodus 34:29f). It might just be the difference between the two halves of life!
The Dalai Lama said much the same thing: “Learn and obey the rules very well, so you will know how to break them properly.” Such discrimination between means and goals is almost the litmus test of whether you are moving in the right direction, and all the world religions at the mature levels will say similar things. For some reason, religious people tend to confuse the means with the actual goal. In the beginning, you tend to think that God really cares about your exact posture, the exact day of the week for public prayer, the authorship and wordings of your prayers, and other such things. Once your life has become a constant communion, you know that all the techniques, formulas, sacraments, and practices were just a dress rehearsal for the real thing—life itself—which can actually become a constant intentional prayer. Your conscious and loving existence gives glory to God.
All of this talk of the first and second half of life, of the languages of each, of falling down to go up is not new. It has been embodied for centuries in mythic tales of men and women who found themselves on the further journey. We will now take a closer look at one of the most famous.
A Founding Myth
Western rationalism no longer understands myths, and their importance, although almost all historic cultures did.2 We are the obvious exception, and have replaced these effective and healing story lines with ineffective, cruel, and disorienting narratives like communism, fascism, terrorism, mass production, and its counterpart, consumerism. In other words, we all have our de facto worldviews that determine what is important and what is not important to us. They usually have a symbolic story to hold them together, such as that of “Honest Abe” chopping wood in Kentucky and educating himself in Illinois. “Myths” like this become a standing and effective metaphor for the American worldview of self-determination, hard work, and achievement. Whether they are exact historical truth is not even important.
Such myths proceed from the deep and collective unconscious of humanity. Our myths are stories or images that are not always true in particular but entirely true in general. They are usually not historical fact, but invariably they are spiritual genius. They hold life and death, the explainable and the unexplainable together as one; they hold together the paradoxes that the rational mind cannot process by itself. As good poetry does, myths make unclear and confused emotions brilliantly clear and life changing.
Myths are true basically because they work! A sacred myth keeps a people healthy, happy, and whole—even inside their pain. They give deep meaning, and pull us into “deep time” (which encompasses all time, past and future, geological and cosmological, and not just our little time or culture). Such stories are the very food of the soul, and they are what we are trying to get back to when we start fairy tales with phrases like “Once upon a time” or “Long ago, in a faraway land.” Catholics used to say at the end of their Latin prayers, Per omnia saecula saeculorum, loosely translated as “through all the ages of ages.” Somehow deep time orients the psyche, gives ultimate perspective, realigns us, grounds us, and thus heals us. We belong to a Mystery far grander than our little selves and our little time. Great storytellers and spiritual teachers always know this.
Remember, the opposite of rational is not always irrational, but it can also be transrational or bigger than the rational mind can process; things like love, death, suffering, God, and infinity are transrational experiences. Both myth and mature religion understand this. The transrational has the capacity to keep us inside an open system and a larger horizon so that the soul, the heart, and the mind do not close down inside of small and constricted space. The merely rational mind is invariably dualistic, and divides the field of almost every moment between what it can presently understand and what it then deems “wrong” or untrue.3 Because the rational mind cannot process love or suffering, for example, it tends to either avoid them, deny them, or blame somebody for them, when in fact they are the greatest spiritual teachers of all, if we but allow them. Our loss of mythic consciousness has not served the last few centuries well, and has overseen the growth of rigid fundamentalism in all the world religions. Now we get trapped in destructive and “invisible” myths because we do not have the eyes to see how great healing myths function.
The Odyssey
The story of Odysseus is a classic transrational myth, one that many would say sets the bar and direction for all later Western storytelling. We all have our own little “odysseys,” but the word came from the name of one man, who fought, sailed, and lived a classic pattern of human, tragic, and heroic life many centuries ago.
In Homer's tale The Odyssey,
written around 700 B.C., we follow the awesome and adventurous journey of the hero Odysseus as he journeys home from the Trojan war. Rowing his boat past seductive sirens, with detours because of the one-eyed cyclops and the lotus eaters, on through the straits of Scylla and Charybdis, through the consolations and confusions of both Circe and Calypso, Odysseus tries to get back home. Through trial, guile, error, and ecstasy, chased by gods and monsters, Odysseus finally returns home to his island, Ithaca, to reunion with his beloved wife, Penelope; his old, dear father, Laertes; his longing son, Telemachus; and even his dying dog, Argos. Great and good stuff!
Accustomed as we are to our normal story line, we rightly expect a “happily ever after” ending to Odysseus's tale. And for most readers, that is all, in fact, they need, want, or remember from the story. Odysseus did return, reclaim his home, and reunite with his wife, son, and father. But there is more! In the final two chapters, after what seems like a glorious and appropriate ending, Homer announces and calls Odysseus to a new and second journey that is barely talked about, yet somehow Homer deemed it absolutely necessary to his character's life.
Instead of settling into quiet later years, Odysseus knows that he must heed the prophecy he has already received, but half forgotten, from the blind seer Teiresias and leave home once again. It is his fate, required by the gods. This new journey has no detailed description, only a few very telling images. I wonder, in 700 B.C., before we began to fully understand and speak about the second-half-of-life journey, whether Homer simply intuited that there had to be something more, as Greek literature often did.
Then came also the ghost of Theban Teiresias, with his golden sceptre in his hand.… When you get home you will take your revenge on these suitors of your wife; and after you have killed them by force or fraud in your own house, you must take a well-made oar and carry it on and on, till you come to a country where the people have never heard of the sea and do not even mix salt with their food, nor do they know anything about ships, and oars that are as the wings of a ship. I will give you this certain token which cannot escape your notice. A wayfarer will meet you and will say [your oar] must be a winnowing shovel that you have got upon your shoulder; on [hearing] this you must fix the oar in the ground and sacrifice a ram, a bull, and a boar to Neptune. Then go home and offer hecatombs [one hundred cattle] to the gods in heaven one after the other. As for yourself, death shall come to you from the sea, and your life shall ebb away very gently when you are full of years and peace of mind, and your people shall bless you. All that I have said will come true.4
Teiresias's prophecy, which Odysseus half heard earlier in the story, seems to be an omen of what will happen to all of us. Here is my summary of the key points for our purposes, which I hope you will find very telling:
1. Odysseus receives this prophecy at the point in his story when he is traveling through Hades, the kingdom of the dead and thus “at the bottom,” as it were. It is often when the ego is most deconstructed that we can hear things anew and begin some honest reconstruction, even if it is only half heard and halfhearted.
2. Teiresias is “holding a golden sceptre” when he gives Odysseus the message. I would interpret that as a symbol of the message's coming from a divine source, an authority from without and beyond, unsolicited or unsought, and maybe even unwanted by Odysseus himself. Often it takes outer authority to send us on the path toward our own inner authority.
3. After all his attempts to return there, Odysseus is fated again to leave Ithaca, which is an island, and go to the “mainland” for a further journey; he is reuniting his small “island part” with the big picture, as it were. For me, this is what makes something inherently religious: whatever reconnects (re-ligio) our parts to the Whole is an experience of God, whether we call it that or not. He is also reconnecting his outer journey to the “inland” or his interior world, which is much of the task of the second half of life. What brilliant metaphors!
4. He is to carry the oar, which was his “delivery system” as one who journeyed by ship in his first life. But a wayfarer he meets far from the ocean will see it instead as a winnowing shovel, a tool for separating grain from chaff! When he meets this wayfarer, this is the sign that he has reached the end of his further journey, and he is to plant the oar in the ground at that spot and leave it there (much as young men bury their childhood toys at a male initiation rite today) and only then can he finally return home. The first world of occupation and productivity must now find its full purpose.
5. Then he is to sacrifice to the god Neptune, who has been on his trail throughout the first journey. The language of offering sacrifice is rather universal in ancient myths. It must have been recognized that to go forward there is always something that has to be let go of, moved beyond, given up, or “forgiven” to enter the larger picture of the “gods.”
6. He is to sacrifice three specific things: a wild bull, a breeding boar, and a battering ram. I doubt whether we could come up with three more graphic images of untrained or immature male energy. (Women will want to find their own counterparts here.) You cannot walk the second journey with first journey tools. You need a whole new tool kit.
7. After this further journey, he is to return home to Ithaca, “to prepare a solemn sacrifice to all the gods who rule the broad heavens.” In human language, he is finally living inside the big and true picture; in Christian language, he is finally connected to the larger “Kingdom of God.”
8. Only after this further journey and its sacrifices can Odysseus say that he will “live happily with my people around me, until I sink under the comfortable burden of years, and death will come to me gently from the sea.” Death is largely a threat to those who have not yet lived their life. Odysseus has lived the journeys of both halves of life, and is ready to freely and finally let go.
Talk about the wisdom of the deep unconscious! God did not need to wait until we organized human spiritual intuitions into formal religions. The Spirit has been hovering over our chaos since the beginning, according to the second verse of the Bible (Genesis 1:2), and over all creation since the beginning of time (Romans 1:20). Homer was not just a “pagan” Greek, and we are not necessarily wiser because we live twenty-seven hundred years later.
Now put this powerful myth in the back of your mind as we dive into this exciting exploration of the further journey. It can operate as a sort of blueprint for what we want to say. Just remember this much consciously: the whole story is set in the matrix of seeking to find home and then to return there, and thus refining and defining what home really is. Home is both the beginning and the end. Home is not a sentimental concept at all, but an inner compass and a North Star at the same time. It is a metaphor for the soul.
And yes, my female readers, it is an old male story and reflects issues from that side of the gender divide. But it is true for you too, in ways that you will discover.
Chapter 1
The Two Halves of Life
One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.
—CARL JUNG, THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF THE PSYCHE
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 that this container was meant to hold and deliver. As Mary Oliver 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.
Problematicall
y, the first task invests so much of our blood, sweat, eggs and sperm, tears and years that we often cannot imagine there is a second task, or that anything more could be expected of us. “The old wineskins are good enough” (Luke 5:39), we say, even though according to Jesus they often cannot hold the new wine. According to him, if we do not get some new wineskins, “the wine and the wineskin will both be lost.” The second half of life can hold some new wine because by then there should be some strong wineskins, some tested ways of holding our lives together. But that normally means that the container itself has to stretch, die in its present form, or even replace itself with something better. This is the big rub, as they say, but also the very source of our midlife excitement and discovery.
Various traditions have used many metaphors to make this differentiation clear: beginners and proficients, novices and initiated, milk and meat, letter and spirit, juniors and seniors, baptized and confirmed, apprentice and master, morning and evening, “Peter when you were young…Peter when you are old” (John 21:18). Only when you have begun to live in the second half can you see the difference between the two. Yet the two halves are cumulative and sequential, and both are very necessary. You cannot do a nonstop flight to the second half of life by reading lots of books about it, including this one. Grace must and will edge you forward. “God has no grandchildren. God only has children,” as some have said. Each generation has to make its own discoveries of Spirit for itself. If not, we just react to the previous generation, and often overreact. Or we conform, and often overconform. Neither is a positive or creative way to move forward.
