AARP Falling Upward

by Richard Rohr

  To understand better, let's look at the telling word homesick. This usually connotes something sad or nostalgic, an emptiness that looks either backward or forward for satisfaction. I am going to use it in an entirely different way, because now you are ready for it. I want to propose that we are both sent and drawn by the same Force, which is precisely what Christians mean when they say the Cosmic Christ is both alpha and omega. We are both driven and called forward by a kind of deep homesickness, it seems. There is an inherent and desirous dissatisfaction that both sends and draws us forward, and it comes from our original and radical union with God. What appears to be past and future is in fact the same home, the same call, and the same God, for whom “a thousand years are like a single day” (Psalm 90:4) and a single day like a thousand years.

  In The Odyssey, the stirring of longing and dissatisfaction is symbolized by the collapse of Troy and the inability of most of the Greeks to return home. It seems they had forgotten about home, had made home in a foreign land, or were not that determined to return home (which are all excellent descriptions of the typical detours or dead ends on the spiritual journey!). Only Odysseus was trying to get home at all costs, and he is the stand-in for what we all must be. Those who do not seek their home are symbolized perhaps by the lotus eaters whom Odysseus encounters, who forgot themselves and lost their own depths and consciousness. It has been said that 90 percent of people seem to live 90 percent of their lives on cruise control, which is to be unconscious.

  The Holy Spirit is that aspect of God that works largely from within and “secretly,” at “the deepest levels of our desiring,” as so many of the mystics have said. That's why the mystical tradition could only resort to subtle metaphors like wind, fire, descending doves, and flowing water to describe the Spirit. More than anything else, the Spirit keeps us connected and safely inside an already existing flow, if we but allow it. We never “create” or earn the Spirit; we discover this inner abiding as we learn to draw upon our deepest inner life. This utterly unified field is always given, as Annie Dillard said.

  I think also of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, in which he says, “We have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.” Even Dorothy is guided forward to Oz and back to Kansas by her constant love and search for home. It is part of the reason the story has such lasting appeal. On the level of soul, I believe these sources are all correct. Home is another word for the Spirit that we are, our True Self in God. The self-same moment that we find God in ourselves, we also find ourselves inside God, and this is the full homecoming, according to Teresa of Avila. Until then we are homesick, although today most would probably just call it loneliness, isolation, longing, sadness, restlessness, or even a kind of depression.

  The common word for this inner abiding place of the Spirit, which is also a place of longing, has usually been the word soul. We have our soul already—we do not “get” it by any purification process or by joining any group or from the hands of a bishop. The end is already planted in us at the beginning, and it gnaws away at us until we get there freely and consciously. The most a bishop or sacrament can do is to “fan [this awareness] into flame” (2 Timothy 1:6), and sometimes it does. But sometimes great love and great suffering are even bigger fans for this much-needed flame.

  The good news is that there is a guide, a kind of medical advocate, an inner compass—and it resides within each of us. “Included inside the box,” as the ads always say. As the Scriptures put it, “The love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:5). In another place we are promised, “You will not be left orphaned” (John 14:18) without a mother or home. This is probably one of the many reasons the Holy Spirit was usually considered feminine.

  This Holy Spirit guiding all of us from home and toward home is also described in John's Gospel as an “advocate” (“a defense attorney,” as paraclete literally means, John 14:16), who will “teach us” and “remind us,” as if some part of us already knew but still needed an inner buzz or alarm clock to wake us up. The Holy Spirit is always entirely for us, more than we are for ourselves, it seems. She speaks in our favor against the negative voices that judge and condemn us. This gives us all such hope—now we do not have to do life all by ourselves, or even do life perfectly “right.” Our life will be “done unto us,” just as happened to Mary (Luke 1:38). Although on another level we are doing it too. Both are equally true.

  This mystery has been called the conspiracy (“co-breathing”) of God, and is still one of the most profound ways to understand what is happening between God and the soul. True spirituality is always a deep “co-operating” (Romans 8:28) between two. True spirituality is a kind of synergy in which both parties give and both parties receive to create one shared truth and joy.2

  The ancients rightly called this internal longing for wholeness “fate” or “destiny,” the “inner voice” or the “call of the gods.” It has an inevitability, authority, and finality to it, and was at the heart of almost all mythology. Almost all heroes heard an inner voice that spoke to them. In fact, their heroism was in their ability to hear that voice and to risk following it—wherever! Sadly, such inner comfort is the very thing we lack today at almost all levels. Our problem now is that we seriously doubt that there is any vital reality to the spiritual world, so we hear no life-changing voices—true even for many who go to church, temple, or mosque.

  For postmodern people, the universe is not inherently enchanted, as it was for the ancients. We have to do all the “enchanting” ourselves. This leaves us alone, confused, and doubtful. There is no meaning already in place for our discovery and enjoyment. We have to create all meaning by ourselves in such an inert and empty world, and most of us do not seem to succeed very well. This is the burden of living in our heady and lonely time, when we think it is all up to us.

  The gift of living in our time, however, is that we are more and more discovering that the sciences, particularly physics, astrophysics, anthropology, and biology, are confirming many of the deep intuitions of religion, and at a rather quick pace in recent years. The universe really is “inspirited matter,” we now know, and is not merely inert. Now we might call it instinct, evolution, nuclear fusion, DNA, hardwiring, the motherboard, healing, growth, or just springtime, but nature clearly continues to renew itself from within. God seems to have created things that continue to create and recreate themselves from the inside out. It is no longer God's one-time creation or evolution; rather, God's form of creation precisely is evolution. Finally God is allowed to be fully incarnate, which was supposed to be Christianity's big trump card from the beginning! It has taken us a long time to get here, and dualistic thinkers still cannot jump the hurdle.

  Remember Odysseus's oar that an inland wayfarer saw as a winnowing fan? His oar (or occupation) had become a tool for inner work, a means for knowing the difference between the wheat and chaff, essentials and nonessentials, which is precisely the turn toward discernment and subtlety that we come to in the second half of life. What a strange but brilliant symbol Homer offers us. No surprise that this marks the end of Odysseus's journey! Now he can go home because he has, in fact, come home to his true and full self. His sailing and oaring days of mere “outer performance” are over, and he can now rest in the simplicity and ground of his own deeper life. He is free to stop his human doing and can at last enjoy his human being.

  Because important things bear repeating in different forms, let me summarize the direction of my thought here. I am saying that

  We are created with an inner drive and necessity that sends all of us looking for our True Self, whether we know it or not. This journey is a spiral and never a straight line.

  We are created with an inner restlessness and call that urges us on to the risks and promises of a second half to our life. There is a God-size hole in all of us, waiting to be filled. God creates the very dissatisfaction that only grace and finally divine love can satisfy.

  We dare not try
to fill our souls and minds with numbing addictions, diversionary tactics, or mindless distractions. The shape of evil is much more superficiality and blindness than the usually listed “hot sins.” God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything, even and maybe especially in the deep fathoming of our fallings and failures. Sin is to stay on the surface of even holy things, like Bible, sacrament, or church.

  If we go to the depths of anything, we will begin to knock upon something substantial, “real,” and with a timeless quality to it. We will move from the starter kit of “belief” to an actual inner knowing. This is most especially true if we have ever (1) loved deeply, (2) accompanied someone through the mystery of dying, (3) or stood in genuine life-changing awe before mystery, time, or beauty.

  This “something real” is what all the world religions were pointing to when they spoke of heaven, nirvana, bliss, or enlightenment. They were not wrong at all; their only mistake was that they pushed it off into the next world. If heaven is later, it is because it is first of all now.

  These events become the pledge, guarantee, hint, and promise of an eternal something. Once you touch upon the Real, there is an inner insistence that the Real, if it is the Real, has to be forever. Call it wishful thinking, if you will, but this insistence has been a constant intuition since the beginnings of humanity. Jesus made it into a promise, as when he tells the Samaritan woman that “the spring within her will well up unto eternal life” (John 4:14). In other words, heaven/union/love now emerge from within us, much more than from a mere belief system or any belonging system, which largely remains on the outside of the self.

  And so, like Odysseus, we leave from Ithaca and we come back to Ithaca, but now it is fully home, because all is included, and nothing wasted or hated; even the dark parts are used in our favor. All is forgiven. What else could homecoming be?! A lesser-known Egyptian poet, C. P. Cavafy, expresses this understanding most beautifully, in a famous poem called “Ithaca,” which has many translations, though this is largely my own:

  Ithaca has now given you the beautiful voyage.

  Without her, you would never have taken the road,

  With the great wisdom you have gained on your voyage,

  With so much of your own experience now,

  You must finally know what Ithaca really means.

  Chapter 8

  Amnesia and the Big Picture

  God wanted to give human beings their fullness right from the beginning, but they were incapable of receiving it, because they were still little children.

  —ST. IRENAEUS (125–203 A.D.), “AGAINST HERESIES”

  It is the whole of nature, extending from the beginning to the end that constitutes the one image of God Who Is.

  —ST. GREGORY OF NYSSA (330–395 A.D.), “ON THE CREATION OF MAN”

  As many others have said in different ways, we all seem to suffer from a tragic case of mistaken identity. Life is a matter of becoming fully and consciously who we already are, but it is a self that we largely do not know. It is as though we are all suffering from a giant case of amnesia. As mentioned before, the protagonists in so many fairy tales are already nobles, royal, daughters and sons of the king or even the gods. But their identity is hidden from them, and the story line pivots around this discovery. They have to grow up to fathom their own identity. That fathoming is the very purpose of the journey.

  It is religion's job to teach us and guide us on this discovery of our True Self, but it usually makes the mistake of turning this into a worthiness contest of some sort, a private performance, or some kind of religious achievement on our part, through our belonging to the right group, practicing the right rituals, or believing the right things. These are just tugboats to get you away from the shore and out into the right sea; they are the oars to get you working and engaged with the Mystery. But never confuse these instruments with your profound “ability to share in the divine nature” itself (2 Peter 1:4). It is the common, and in this case tragic, confusion of the medium with the message, or the style with the substance.

  It was largely the fathers of the early church, and especially the Eastern Church, who never compromised on what they called theosis or “divinization,” as we see in the powerful quotes above. There are many more such astounding quotes,1 but this very memory is also a part of Western amnesia. The Gospel was just too good to be true—for a future-oriented, product-oriented, and win-lose worldview.

  Such deep knowing about our true selves is surely what John is pointing to when he says, “It is not because you do not know the truth that I am writing to you, but rather because you know it already!” (1 John 2:21). Otherwise he would not have had the self-confidence to write about spiritual things with such authority, nor would I. We are all drawing upon a Larger Source, the unified field, the shared Spirit. I am also relying upon your inner, deep-time recognition more than any linear cognition. Maybe you have noticed that by now. I hope so. The English poet Wordsworth put it so beautifully:

  Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

  The Soul that rises with us, our Life's Star

  Hath had elsewhere its setting,

  And cometh from afar:

  Not in entire forgetfulness.

  And not in utter nakedness,

  But trailing clouds of glory do we come

  From God, who is our home:

  Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

  Shades of the prison-house begin to close

  upon the growing boy,

  But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

  He sees it in his joy.2

  That bit of his larger poem should be enough to make Wordsworth an honorary doctor of the church! Mature religion is always trying to get you out of the closing prison-house of the false self. Many have said before me that spirituality is much more about unlearning than learning, because the “growing boy” is usually growing into major illusions, all of which must be undone to free him from prison and take him back to his beginnings in God. “Unless you change, and become like a little child, you will not enter the kingdom of God,” Jesus says (Matthew 18:3). And he says this in response to the egotistic and ambitious question of the apostles, who were asking him, “Who is the greatest?”

  I have sometimes wondered if we might be surprised and disappointed by what it means that our faith is “built on the faith of the apostles,” as we have so proudly sung and proclaimed. They barely ever got the point, and seem as thoroughly foolish as we are; but God still used them, because like all of us they were little children too. I indeed share in this very faith. We are all and forever beginners in the journey toward God and truth.

  “Heaven” and “Hell”

  Any discovery or recovery of our divine union has been called “heaven” by most traditions. Its loss has been called “hell.” The tragic result of our amnesia is that we cannot imagine that these terms are first of all referring to present experiences. When you do not know who you are, you push all enlightenment off into a possible future reward and punishment system, within which hardly anyone wins. Only the True Self knows that heaven is now and that its loss is hell—now. The false self makes religion into the old “evacuation plan for the next world,” as my friend Brian McLaren puts it. Amnesia has dire consequences. No wonder the Jews say “remember” so much.

  A person who has found his or her True Self has learned how to live in the big picture, as a part of deep time and all of history. This change of frame and venue is called living in “the kingdom of God” by Jesus, and it is indeed a major about-face. This necessitates, of course, that we let go of our own smaller kingdoms, which we normally do not care to do. Life is all about practicing for heaven. We practice by choosing union freely—ahead of time—and now. Heaven is the state of union both here and later. As now, so will it be then. No one is in heaven unless he or she wants to be, and all are in heaven as soon as they live in union. Everyone is in heaven when he or she has plenty of room for communion and no need for exclusion. The more ro
om you have to include, the bigger your heaven will be.

  Perhaps this is what Jesus means by there being “many rooms in my Father's house” (John 14:2). If you go to heaven alone, wrapped in your private worthiness, it is by definition not heaven. If your notion of heaven is based on exclusion of anybody else, then it is by definition not heaven. The more you exclude, the more hellish and lonely your existence always is. How could anyone enjoy the “perfect happiness” of any heaven if she knew her loved ones were not there, or were being tortured for all eternity? It would be impossible. Remember our Christian prayer, “on earth as it is heaven.” As now, so then; as here, so there. We will all get exactly what we want and ask for. You can't beat that.

  If you accept a punitive notion of God, who punishes or even eternally tortures those who do not love him, then you have an absurd universe where most people on this earth end up being more loving than God! God excludes no one from union, but must allow us to exclude ourselves in order for us to maintain our freedom. Our word for that exclusion is hell, and it must be maintained as a logical possibility. There must be the logical possibility of excluding oneself from union and to choose separation or superiority over community and love. No one is in hell unless that individual himself or herself chooses a final aloneness and separation. It is all about desire, both allowing and drawing from the deepest level of our desiring. It is interesting to me that the official church has never declared a single person to be in hell, not even Judas, Hitler, or Stalin.