AARP Falling Upward

by Richard Rohr

  —JOSEPH CAMPBELL, THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES

  If you look at the world's mythologies in any of the modern collections, you will invariably see what Joseph Campbell calls the “monomyth of the hero” repeated in various forms for both men and women, but with different symbols.1 The stages of the hero's journey are a skeleton of what this book wants to say! In some ways, we are merely going to unpack this classic journey and draw out many of the implications that are even clearer today, both psychologically and spiritually. We are the beneficiaries of spiritual and informational globalization, like no one has ever been before.

  The pattern of the heroic journey is rather consistent and really matches my own research on initiation.2 Those embarking on this journey invariably go through the following stages in one form or another.

  1. They live in a world that they presently take as given and sufficient; they are often a prince or princess and, if not, sometimes even of divine origin, which of course they always know nothing about! (This amnesia is a giveaway for the core religious problem, as discovering our divine DNA is always the task.) Remember, Odysseus is the king of Ithaca, but does not “reign” there until after the second journey.

  2. They have the call or the courage to leave home for an adventure of some type—not really to solve any problem, but just to go out and beyond their present comfort zone. For example, the young Siddhartha leaves the walls of the palace, St. Francis goes on pilgrimages to the Muslim world, Queen Esther and Joan of Arc enter the world of battle to protect their peoples, Odysseus sets out for the Trojan war.

  3. On this journey or adventure, they in fact find their real problem! They are almost always “wounded” in some way and encounter a major dilemma, and the whole story largely pivots around the resolution of the trials that result. There is always a wounding; and the great epiphany is that the wound becomes the secret key, even “sacred,” a wound that changes them dramatically, which, by the way, is the precise meaning of the wounds of Jesus!

  Their world is opened up, the screen becomes much larger, and they do too. Our very word odyssey is now used to describe these kinds of discoveries and adventures. Odysseus enters the story as a man alone weeping on a beach, defeated, with no hope of ever returning home, where he would be a hero. That is his gnawing and unending wound. It is all so unfair, because he was a hero in the Trojan war.

  4. The first task, which the hero or heroine thinks is the only task, is only the vehicle and warm-up act to get him or her to the real task. He or she “falls through” what is merely his or her life situation to discover his or her Real Life, which is always a much deeper river, hidden beneath the appearances. Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events. This deeper discovery is largely what religious people mean by “finding their soul.”

  5. The hero or heroine then returns to where he or she started, and “knows the place for the first time,” as T. S. Eliot puts it; but now with a gift or “boon” for his people or her village. As the last step of Alcoholics Anonymous says, a person must pass the lessons learned on to others—or there has been no real gift at all. The hero's journey is always an experience of an excess of life, a surplus of energy, with plenty left over for others. The hero or heroine has found eros or life energy, and it is more than enough to undo thanatos, the energy of death.

  If it is authentic life energy, it is always experienced as a surplus or an abundance of life. The hero or heroine is by definition a “generative” person, to use Erik Erikson's fine term, concerned about the next generation and not just himself or herself. The hero lives in deep time and not just in his or her own small time. In fact, I would wonder if you could be a hero or heroine if you did not live in what many call deep time—that is, past, present, and future all at once.

  Interestingly enough, this classic tradition of a true “hero” is not our present understanding at all. There is little social matrix to our present use of the word. A “hero” now is largely about being bold, muscular, rich, famous, talented, or “fantastic” by himself, and often for himself, whereas the classic hero is one who “goes the distance,” whatever that takes, and then has plenty left over for others. True heroism serves the common good, or it is not really heroism at all.

  To seek one's own American Idol fame, power, salary, or talent might historically have made one famous, or even infamous—but not a hero or heroine. To be a celebrity or a mere survivor today is often confused with heroism, probably a sign of our actual regression. Merely to survive and preserve our life is a low-level instinct that we share with good little lizards, but it is not heroism in any classic sense. We were meant to thrive and not just survive. We are glad when someone survives, and that surely took some courage and effort. But what are you going to do with your now resurrected life? That is the heroic question.

  The very first sign of a potential hero's journey is that he or she must leave home, the familiar, which is something that may not always occur to someone in the first half of life. (In fact, many people have not left home by their thirties today, and most never leave the familiar at all!) If you have spent many years building your particular tower of success and self-importance—your personal “salvation project,” as Thomas Merton called it—or have successfully constructed your own superior ethnic group, religion, or “house,” you won't want to leave it. (Now that many people have second, third, and fourth houses, it makes me wonder how they can ever leave home.)

  Once you can get “out of the house,” your “castle” and comfort zone, much of the journey has a life—and death—of its own. The crucial thing is to get out and about, and into the real and bigger issues. In fact, this was the basic plotline of the founding myth that created the three monotheistic religions, with Yahweh's words to Abraham and Sarah: “Leave your country, your family, and your father's house, for the new land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1). We seem to have an amazing capacity for missing the major point—and our own necessary starting point along with it. We have rather totally turned around our very founding myth! No wonder religion is in trouble.

  I wonder whether we no longer have that real “obedience to the gods,” or sense of destiny, call, and fate that led Odysseus to leave father, wife, and son for a second journey. That is the very same obedience, by the way, that Jesus scandalously talks about in several places like Luke 14:26 (“If any one comes to me without leaving his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple”). I always wonder what so-called family values Christians do with shocking lines like that? Jesus was not a nuclear family man at all, by any common definition! What led so many saints to seek the “will of God” first and above their own? What has led so many Peace Corps workers, missionaries, and skilled people to leave their countries for difficult lands and challenges? I would assume it was often a sense of a further journey, an invitation from their soul, or even a deep obedience to God.

  Most of the calls of the disciples in the New Testament are rather clearly invitations to leave “your father and your nets” (Matthew 4:22). When he calls his first disciples, Jesus is talking about further journeys to people who are already happily settled and religiously settled! He is not talking about joining a new security system or a religious denomination or even a religious order that pays all your bills. Again, it is very surprising to me that so many Christians who read the Scriptures do not see this. Yet maybe they cannot answer a second call because they have not yet completed the first task. Unless you build your first house well, you will never leave it. To build your house well is, ironically, to be nudged beyond its doors.

  Remember, Odysseus did a lot of conquering, Abraham a lot of “possessing,” Francis a lot of partying, David and Paul a lot of killing, Magdalene a lot of loving, and all of us a lot of ascending and descending, before being ready to go onto the next stage of the journey. Many of us cannot move ahead because we have not don
e the first task, learned from the last task, or had any of our present accomplishments acknowledged by others. During my fourteen years as chaplain at the Albuquerque jail, I met so many men who remained stymied forever in a teenage psyche, because they had not been able to build their first “house” well, or at all. Nor was there anyone who believed in them. They had usually not been parented well, or had not been given the mirroring that would have secured them within the first half of their own lives.

  Yes, we are seduced and fall into the second half of our lives, but a part of that movement is precisely that we have finished the first life tasks, at least in part. We can—and will—move forward as soon as we have completed and lived the previous stage. We almost naturally float forward by the quiet movement of grace when the time is right—and the old agenda shows itself to be insufficient, or even falls apart. All that each of us can do is to live in the now that is given. We cannot rush the process; we can only carry out each stage of our lives to the best of our ability—and then we no longer need to do it anymore! But let's try to describe in greater detail how we build that first house.

  Chapter 3

  The First Half of Life

  The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young.

  —JAMES HOLLIS, FINDING MEANING IN THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE

  I cannot think of a culture in human history, before the present postmodern era, that did not value law, tradition, custom, authority, boundaries, and morality of some clear sort. These containers give us the necessary security, continuity, predictability, impulse control, and ego structure that we need, before the chaos of real life shows up. Healthily conservative people tend to grow up more naturally and more happily than those who receive only free-form, “build it yourself” worldviews, in my studied opinion.

  Here is my conviction: without law in some form, and also without butting up against that law, we cannot move forward easily and naturally. The rebellions of two-year-olds and teenagers are in our hardwiring, and we have to have something hard and half good to rebel against. We need a worthy opponent against which we test our mettle. As Rilke put it, “When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.”

  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. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while. All of this builds the strong self that can positively obey Jesus—and “die to itself.” In fact, far too many (especially women and disadvantaged people) have lived very warped and defeated lives because they tried to give up a self that was not there yet.

  This is an important paradox for most of us, and the two sides of this paradox must be made clear for the very health of individuals, families, and cultures. It is crucial for our own civilization right now. We have too many people on the extremes: some make a “sacrificial” and heroic life their whole identity, and end up making everyone else around them sacrifice so that they can be sacrificial and heroic. Others, in selfish rebellion and without any training in letting go, refuse to sacrifice anything. Basically, if you stay in the protected first half of life beyond its natural period, you become a well-disguised narcissist or an adult infant (who is also a narcissist!)—both of whom are often thought to be successful “good old boys” by the mainstream culture. No wonder that Bill Plotkin calls us a “patho-adolescent culture.”

  The first-half-of-life container, nevertheless, is constructed through impulse controls; traditions; group symbols; family loyalties; basic respect for authority; civil and church laws; and a sense of the goodness, value, and special importance of your country, ethnicity, and religion (as for example, the Jews' sense of their “chosenness”). To quote Archimedes once again, you must have both “a lever and a place to stand” before you can move the world. The educated and sophisticated Western person today has many levers, but almost no solid place on which to stand, with either very weak identities or terribly overstated identities. This tells me we are not doing the first-half-of-life task very well. How can we possibly get to the second?

  Most people are trying to build the platform of their lives all by themselves, while working all the new levers at the same time. I think of CEOs, business leaders, soldiers, or parents who have no principled or ethical sense of themselves and end up with some kind of “pick and choose” morality in the pressured moment. This pattern leaves the isolated ego in full control, and surely represents the hubris that will precede a lot of impending tragedies. This pattern is all probably predictable when we try to live life backwards and build ourselves a wonderful superstructure before we have laid any real foundations from culture, religion, or tradition. Frankly, it is much easier to begin rather conservative or traditional. I know some of us do not want to hear that.

  But I think we all need some help from “the perennial tradition” that has held up over time. We cannot each start at zero, entirely on our own. Life is far too short, and there are plenty of mistakes we do not need to make—and some that we need to make. We are parts of social and family ecosystems that are rightly structured to keep us from falling but also, more important, to show us how to fall and also how to learn from that very falling. Think of the stories of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, or Laura Ingalls Wilder, most of which circle around a dilemma, a problem, a difficulty, a failure, an evil that begs to be overcome. And always is.

  We are not helping our children by always preventing them from what might be necessary falling, because you learn how to recover from falling by falling! It is precisely by falling off the bike many times that you eventually learn what the balance feels like. The skater pushing both right and left eventually goes where he or she wants to go. People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with. Please think about that for a while.

  Law and tradition seem to be necessary in any spiritual system both to reveal and to limit our basic egocentricity, and to make at least some community, family, and marriage possible. When you watch ten-year-olds intensely defend the rules of their games, you see what a deep need this is early in life. It structures children's universe and gives them foundational meaning and safety. We cannot flourish early in life inside a totally open field. Children need a good degree of order, predictability, and coherence to grow up well, as Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, and many others have taught. Chaos and chaotic parents will rightly make children cry, withdraw, and rage—both inside and outside.

  Cesar Milan, the “dog whisperer,” says that dogs cannot be peaceful or teachable if they have no limits set to their freedom and their emotions. They are actually happier and at rest when they live within very clear limits and boundaries, with a “calm and assertive” master. My dog, Venus, is never happier and more teachable than when I am walking her, but on her leash. Could it be the same for humans at certain stages? I suspect so, although it is humiliating to admit it.

  Without laws like the Ten Commandments, our existence here on this earth would be pretty pathetic. What if you could not rely on people to tell you the truth? Or not to steal from you? What if we were not expected to respect our parents, and we all started out with cynicism and mistrust of all authority? What if the “I love you” between partners was allowed to mean nothing? What if covetousness, which Rene Girard calls “mimetic rivalry,” was encouraged to grow unstopped, as it is in capitalist countries today? Such shapelessness would be the death of any civilization or any kind of trustworthy or happy world. I wonder: Are we there already?

  Without laws, human life would be anarchy and chaos, and that chaos would multiply over the generations, like the confused languages of the Tower o
f Babel (Genesis 11:1–9). We now need basic parenting classes in junior high schools, because so many children have been poorly parented by people who themselves were poorly parented. Far too many people are verbally, physically, sexually, and psychologically abused in our society by people who have no basic relationship skills, and no inner discipline besides.

  People who have not been tutored by some “limit situations” in the first half of their life are in no position to parent children; they are usually children themselves. Limit situations, according to the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, are moments, usually accompanied by experiences of dread, responsibility, guilt, or anxiety, in which the human mind confronts its restrictions and boundaries, and allows itself to abandon the false securities of this limitedness, move beyond, one hopes in a positive way, and thus enter new realms of self-consciousness. In other words, we ironically need limit situations and boundaries to grow up. A completely open field does not do the job nearly as well or as quickly. Yahweh was creating a good limit situation for Adam and Eve when he told them not to eat the apple, fully knowing that they would.

  If you want a job done well, on time, with accountability and no excuses, you had best hire someone who has faced a few limit situations. He or she alone has the discipline, the punctuality, the positive self-image, and the persistence to do a good job. If you want the opposite, hire someone who has been coddled, been given “I Am Special” buttons for doing nothing special, and had all his or her bills paid by others, and whose basic egocentricity has never been challenged or undercut. To be honest, this seems to describe much of the workforce and the student body of America. Many of the papers I receive in summer graduate courses at major universities are embarrassing to read in terms of both style and content, yet these same “adults” are shocked if they do not get an A. This does not bode well for the future of our country.